What Does Reality Mean to You?

What does Reality Mean to You? is a short piece that I created as a precursor to my thesis. In this piece, I use various styles of graphics in 2 dimensions and 3 dimensions to showcase answers to the survey question “What Does Reality Mean to You?” For this animation, I collected 25 anonymous participants’ written responses to a six-question survey I created and distributed online. I wrote about it in my planning stages in a prior post: Project II Proposal - What Does Reality Mean to You? For this piece, I focused on the answer to the question “What does reality mean to you? Define the word “reality” – what it means to you in simple terms” and encouraged survey takers to respond with an explanation that is as short or as long as they would like. I devised a short script from the responses to this question and created images to accompany it, as well as got help from several ACCADians for voice acting. This is a Wordle I created to depict the most frequently used words in the essay responses:

When I create my thesis film, I would like to include more opinions about reality, reality as it pertains to current films and changing expectations and general perceptions of reality. This is important because graphics have improved so much nowadays that films can create alternative forms of believable reality, and enhanced realities or "hyperrealities," possibly changing viewers perceptions on what reality means and what technologies can do for us. I decided to use a modeling style that was simple, low-poly, and geometric, which is similar to the modeling style in a video I liked on Vimeo called “Let’s Talk About Soil.” This modeling style allowed me to create simple forms and to keep the project achievable given our time frame of half of a semester to complete the work. As a takeaway, I would like the viewer to know that reality is a subject with no agreed-upon definition by philosophers and social theorists. The only thing that is agreed-upon is that reality is perceived. This video was meant to assert that every person perceives reality differently. I really enjoyed working on this project. Thanks to all my voice actors and survey participants! It would have not been possible without the amazing ideas of the survey-takers and my colleagues at ACCAD, who despite their disdain for hearing their own voices, sound lovely!