Week 12: Project Progress Documentation

After planning and organising our project last week, we felt as if our previous work wasn’t representative enough of our topic, Future Cinema. As a group, we kept returning to the immersive room idea – a way to immerse audience engaging multiple senses (sight, smell, touch).

With the access to a 360-degree camera, we decided to present 360 footage encapsulated in Google goggle’s in a room that tries to place the audience in the real location. We resided on choosing a rainforest for our location, as there are multiple parks and bush walks surrounding Wollongong that we could gain access.

Moreover, our choice to steer away from our previous idea (click here) was because we wanted to focus more on the notion that the observation of reality will become more direct in future cinema (Scott 2014). Furthermore, future cinema will be more intimate, the camera can now be literally considered as the very eye of the filmmaker (Scott 2014).

Research on this idea led our group to the work of Jeffery Shaw, in particular ‘Legible City’, This work enables the visitor to ride a stationary bicycle through a simulated representation of a city constituted by a computer-generated 3D letters that form works and sentences along the street. We also stumbled upon  the work of David Haines and Joyce Hinterding. Haines and Hinterding developed an art installation, ‘Earthstar’ which promised you would, see, hear and smell the sun. The two artists created two different smells, one smelling similar to a bushfire and the other, ozone, similar to the air after a rainstorm (Anders 2008).

Image of Jeffery Shaw’s work, ‘Legible City’

 

Anders, C J Smell My Sun, io9, blog post, 31st October 2008, viewed 19th June 2016, <http://io9.gizmodo.com/5072866/smell-my-sun&gt;. 

Scott M, 1st January 2014, Film manifestos and global cinema cultures: a critical anthology, University of California Press, California.