Gedankenschwere
Gedankenschwere (eng. Weighed Down with Thoughts) is a mobile storytelling concept of a digital dramatic play in five acts, enabling the user to look literally behind the scenes of the physical phenomena of gravitation in a exciting and compelling way. The play is about the protagonist being in free fall and trying to reconstruct his memory of the journey up to the mountain’s peak. Following each act of the fictional play an experimental setup explains one physical aspect of gravitation, which is secretly linked to the story.
Supervisor: Prof. Stefan Bufler — University of Applied Sciences Augsburg 2016 — Graduation Project B.A.
loops
Concept
Process
To bring out the arising inner conflict of the character, it was the only element which was animated by using the stop motion technique. In contrast to the perfect, smooth keyframe animations of the digital elements, the rather rough running analog stop motion technique is supposed to give the charakter a mutable personality in its motion and finally make it stand out through its more organic nature.
In order to create a depht of field, most of the objects were modeled and animated in Cinema 4d. To have maximum controll of the object’s timing and motion there were no dynamics used, except for the dropping letters in the intro.
For the final animated simulation all elements were then assembled in Adobe After Effects CC 2015. The purpose was primarily to get a better feeling of the layout in motion, sounds and the transitions as well as the overall timing of the single animations.
Curved Plot
The plot of the story is infinite repeatable. This results from different aspects: Gravity is an infinite force, there is theoretically no gravity-free space in the whole universe. Furthermore the curved plot is alluding to the warp in space-time caused by gravity. It is as well referring to the persistant compressing effects of gravity to nature and all organisms on earth. The general idea for the plot was inspired by the greek myth of King Sisyphos, who was made to endlessly roll a huge boulder up a steep hill for his trickery on Zeus. Besides the entire plot being repeatable, every chapter is made of seamless loopable animations, so that every chapter is an autonomous infinite repeating universe on its own.
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