As You Remember (2016)
As You Remember is a 2D 360-degree video proof of concept completed in Spring 2016 as part of a graduate course titled Experiments in Immersive Design convened by special effects artist and USC interactive media instructor Eric Hanson. It was designed to showcase the fundamentals of 360-degree video creation as well as explore some of the themes that could be understood as inherent to the 360-degree medium.
The project interrogates to what extent pre-rendered 360-degree video can mimic the faculties of memory. At the center of the narrative is a loss. As a fundamentally spatial form of cinematics, pre-rendered panoramic virtual reality simulates how certain spaces trigger memories of the past and can re-stage them in sometimes unwelcome ways. The project features the ghostly figure of a woman who fades in and out of corporeality as the viewer-user experiences the crumbling and recombination of their surroundings. A VR headset is featured in the foreground, providing brief access to different memory traces associated with the space. As the experience progresses, segments of the environment temporally shift and the reality of the space “crumbles”, suggestive of both the act of forgetting and that of loss. The degradation of the image/s is matched by the degradation of the apartment itself, which becomes more and more derelict, mimicking the effects of grief and the precarity or insufficiency of the archive.
As You Remember was shot in my studio apartment in Koreatown, Los Angeles. It was created by capturing and meshing three separate panoramas: the first represents a clean and orderly space; the second is in slightly worse condition; and the last is in a state of disrepair. To achieve the effect of “pealing” or crumbling images, I keyframed in and out between the three panoramas. I shot and hand-stitched the panos in PTGUI, allowing me to manipulate individual “cells”. I also shot the video on a DSLR, cropped it and inserted the moving images into the corresponding pano cells. I played with coloration and saturation to achieve the effect of hazy recall. Ultimately this project served as a proof of concept for my next VR production, MASSACHUSETTS, which was meant to build on these themes and the idea of mounting video on “cards” to be inserted into 360-degree spaces.