In the beginning, there was the… World
The world-building VR Metaverse workshop (Kaboom Animation Festival | Imagine Film Festival)
Have you ever dreamed about calling an entire world into existence? To conjure plants, creatures, infrastructures and ecosystems in a god-like gesture with your own hands? With the emergence of Virtual Reality and metaverse environments, this desire does not need to remain constrained to imagination alone. Between four organizations heavily invested in the speculative power of the stories – Kaboom Animation Festival, Imagine Film Festival, WeMakeVR (Avinash Changa), M31 (Robin Coops) – we are putting together a unique hands-on VR worldbuilding workshop which will help your wildest ideas grow into planets.
With the aid of the XR developers, acclaimed makers, philosophers, scientists, and worldbuilders, over 3 weekends between September and December 2022, you will get a chance to learn necessary skills, collaborate, design and realize the worldbuilding projects, which will have a guaranteed presence at Imagine (Autumn 2022) and Kaboom (Spring 2023) festivals. We seek to employ VR-native tools of the NEOS Metaverse in the prolific practice of speculative world-building, which originates in fantastic fiction. Harnessing the power of our imagination we want to rethink our current conditions of living on earth, through a creative practice of building coherent fantastic worlds. To maximize the impact of the workshop, we align our efforts with the production cycle of one of the most interesting VR works that are currently in development in the Netherlands – The Saga of Sage by Avinash Changa, and Robin Coops. Together, we want to deliver a state-of-the-art learning experience, which connects socially relevant reflection, concern with the professionalisation of the makers, and the increasing prolific ecosystem of the Metaverse. Among other things we will focus on:
- Exploring the principles of worldbuilding
- Mastering the creative tools of NEOS
- Presence design
- Practices of co-creation
- Creating hybrid XR experiences
Building on the previous editions, which attracted such acclaimed tutors as Sngmoo Lee (Scarecrow VR, Red Eyes, Rain Fruits), Kiira Benzig (Finding Pandora X, Loveseat), Deirdre Lyons (Welcome to Respite, The Under Present: Tempest, Gumball Dreams), Fabito Rychter & Amir Admoni (Lavrynthos, Gravity VR), Daniël Ernst (The Great Orator, The Shoebox Diorama), Joe Hunting (We Met in Virtual Reality), Michel Reilhac (Venice VR) and others, we guarantee a hands-on creative and networking experience, which aims to help us grow as a creative community. Don’t miss out on the opportunity as it will not present itself again any time soon.
