Written by Qianhui 2022 Cohort
This weekend, as a volunteer for V-Unframed, I was in charge of assisting people with VR devices and showing them the animated film On the Morning You Wake.
This artwork is a virtual reality documentary that immerses the audience in the direct experience of Hawaii citizens to convey the fundamental injustice. I had heard about this real-life event in 2018 on the news but had never felt it so strongly before I put on the VR headset. Compared to traditional documentaries, On the Morning You Wake uses a more artistic approach, simulating the moment of a nuclear explosion and the world collapsing. For example, in a peaceful scene, people and the environment suddenly turn into electronic fragments the next second and gradually disappear.
The multi-view screen switching speeds up the pace of the movie. In beautiful and calm Hawaii, a girl in a library suddenly receives warning messages from her friends. Next second, the perspective changes to a desperate father running with his child on his back. Faced with nuclear weapons, we can simultaneously experience the helplessness and desperation of people with different identities in different scenes. 360-degree VR scenes give the audience a feeling of having nowhere to run.
I found the equipment for making On the Morning You Wake in another exhibition area. It contains a full range of camera equipment that can capture the action from all perspectives. The details of the actors’ movements were captured by the equipment to create the characters in the animated movie. Unfortunately, I missed the performance of the motion capture demonstration.
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