Annie is a unique immersive story because it uses the power of this tool to switch between the first and third points of view. The story is primarily told to the third person view point of Annie, lesbian girl who is being bullied in middle school. When the bullying worsens, the user is transported into the first person point of view to give a first hand accounting of the twitter cyberbullying Annie (now YOU) and lets the participant encounter the raw emotion created while standing up for her (YOUR) self! One day a twitter page is made by an anonymous user and when Annie and her sister investigate the page further, they realize the girl running the page has been bullying Annie the whole time. She confronts Sarah, her bully and the argument ensues. When the user switches into first person and slaps the bully, Annie blames an “uncontrollable alter ego” as the reason she hit Sarah. Annie and her family decide it is best for their family to move to a much more inclusive city where Annie can flourish and be who she truly is.
Experience Summary
A participant puts on a VR headset and they are transported to Annie’s house and school, where they are able to observe Annie’s life as a third party viewer and later hold and interact with objects as Annie, which leads them to discover that emotions taking over can make you be somebody you’re not, however; standing up for yourself is good. The experience ends and the participant experiences an empowerment, along with empathy for Annie and her struggles due to her sexuality.
POV Switching
In my immersive story I decided to use the unique power of VR to switch the point of view between the first and third person. I believe I was able to make this transition effectively using VR because of the immersive actions that the story gives the user to narrate the character’s life.
Stages and Scenes
My story has five stages with five scenes.
Stage One:
This scene is used to capture the relationship that Annie has with her family. The family gets along exceptionally well and Annie feels so much love from home.
Stage Two:
This stage is used to capture a scene of Annie’s emotional reaction to the bullying at school.
Scene Three:
Scene three is where the user changes to Annie’s POV. View appears in a black 360 space where he/she is standing on a pride flag and there are copies of Annie’s paintings surrounding them with sad music playing.
Stage Four:
Scene four has a fight between you and Sarah,*user slaps the main bully!*
Stage Five:
Stage five is where Annie feels empowered enough to convince her parents to move where she will be much happier and feel as though she belongs.
Below are Audio files that I recorded from two voice actors:
Tiltbrush Art
Mixamo is the program that I used to animate Annie running away from school.
I brought the Mixamo character into Unity and used the Animator to set up two layers: one layer controls the running animation and the other layer controls her moving to the right.
One of the issues I ran into here is that I could not get both animations to play at the same time but I realized in order to do this I had to create two layers in the animator.
I used Unity’s animation system to move my player from in front of the school away from the camera and behind the cars and buses. I did this by setting key frames at her original position before recording, then I scrubbed forward four seconds and changed her position.
Tiltbrush scene storyboard of Annie running away from bully and her boyfriend.