Love Yourselves
This is a project which launches by Claudia since her first year of degree. This project has been working for 3 years and introduced with 3 different delivery methods.
WOMEN are being prejudiced by their appearance
90%
people of the world
hold bias against women
64%
of people
Appearance catch their first sight when they meet a person
58%
of women
Body shape is the first thing they notice while meeting a person with obesity issue
Appearance
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The project Love Yourselves is about people often being prejudice against women with their appearance. This issue has been suffering women for centuries. As a woman, Claudia have the first-hand experience and she truly understand how it feels while undergoing this issue.
According to research, alarming amounts of sexism and discrimination against women occur frequently at work, in the community, and media online. This problem is seriously affecting women’s self objectification, mental and physical health.
Personality & Life Experience
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We are beautiful
No matter what skin colour, body shape, height or appearance we are having, we are all beautiful.
This work was inspired from a post from Instagram, which is a picture of a mother showing the stretch mark on her body after giving birth.
Although she's struggling from her "imperfect body", but Claudia still think that she's really brave and beautiful. Rather than judging how her body looks, Claudia realise that the public should show more respect to women. Everyone is born to be different, but they don't deserve any appearance discrimination
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After a year, Claudia decided to enhance her work with a 3D game . . .
Claudia found that an enjoyable 3D game would be helpful for her to raise the public's awareness about the judgement against women's appearance. Through the game, the audience could experience as a victim who's suffering this serious issue. She hopes that people could stop judging and show empathy towards the victims who has involved in this issue after the game experience.
In the Unity game that I've created, the player will walk around the bar and have conversation with the people she meets. While talking with others, people only say something bad about her appearance. On the other hand, there's a mirror somewhere in the bar, when she get closed with it, the mirror will tell some positive words to encourage her!
The place setting of this game is a bar. There're a few people chilling here but when the player tries to interact with them, they only give bad comments about the player's appearance. Although the main character looks perfect through the reflection of the mirror but she still receive a lot of judgement of how she looks.
"Deffo Not Art" exhibition was held on the 8th and 9th of Dec 2021. It's an exhibition for all 2nd year Digital Media students from Coventry University to show their interactive activism project.
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VR EXPERIENCE
In the end of 2022, Claudia decided to continue enhancing her idea by producing an immersive and thoughtful story for the users. As an improvement of her last project, this VR experience allows the users to have an immersive experience through the headset. Claudia wishes this project could encourage women to embrace their flaws and raise people’s awareness about this problem.
The story of this VR experience is about a girl, the main character who feels very insecure with the birthmark on her face. She always thinks that people are judging and not welcoming her due to how she looks. However, this kind of case doesn’t happen all the time. She is overwhelmed by the love and kindness given by people around her. On the other hand, another girl who she admired is suffering in harassment unexpectedly.
This story is formed to alert the users, especially women that this common problem shouldn’t be ignored by people and action must be taken if they find something isn’t going on the right path.
Why VR?
VR creates several artificial senses, including hearing, seeing and feeling. The use of VR technology is widespread for different applications. For instance, video games, education, media, design etc. Its popularity has grown significantly in the past few years and it’s very common in the public. People have known this technology well and willing to try because they enjoy the experience.
I believe that VR provides a more interesting experience to audiences, and it could stay in their mind longer than other infographics. Consumers are also given the impression that they are experiencing genuine places, real sounds, and real sights.
360-view
The text doesn't shown up well in the 360 video but it looks fine through the VR and screen-based view.
Screen-based view
The Process of Building
In the beginning, I’m not familiar in uploading Mixamo’s animation to Unity, but thanks to Miss Buket providing me a useful tutorial to solve all my questions. It has taught about the usage of Unity such as animator controller tool, keyframe animator and timeline. While arranging the animation with Unity timeline, I’ve met a lot of trouble and technical issues. For example, the character has disappeared or moved away from the initial position after hitting play. Luckily, it’s not hard to solve it after seeking help from my lecturers. I would just need to create an empty parent for the object and add a rigid body component but untick the gravity.
I've never used the software Blender before but I'm forced to use it to adjust the hands posture. The assets that I installed online are in Blender file and it could only be edited in Blender. There're 2 kinds of rigged hands in the VR film, which are teenage girl's hands and adult woman's hands.
The picture on the left shows the teenage girl's hands which appear in the park scene. It's made to ensure that its in a holding love letter posture.
These hands are shown in the office scene, and they have been edited in 2 postures: resting pose and stopping pose. The players could find the difference of the main character's emotion by looking their own hands.
Moreover, switching scenes in Unity required a C# script to function as the picture shown. This code is given by one of our lecturers, Mr Ashley Brown and the tutorials that given by him are all very helpful for my current project.As I wanted to create a fade in effect in every intro of my scene and a fade out transition before switching every scene, I used a tutorial about making UI to look good to achieve my requirement. The reason why I insert all the effect one by one is because Unity doesn’t have this effect in their software so that I need to create all of them on my own.
Creating a VR film is somehow similar with a usual 3D game experience, but the exporting steps and format are different. I’m very glad to have Mr Jaimz to help me export my project. In the beginning, Android Studio (AS), which is an external software that we downloaded cannot be opened and the VR project couldn’t export successfully. After several testing, I found that the AS has been installed in a wrong version, and it works well after reinstalling it. Other than that, the canvas with text and subtitles aren’t showing properly on the Oculus headset but it looks fine in the game view. I tried a few methods to resolve it and I found that ??? overlay would not work on Oculus so I need to change it to the specific OVR camera and also adjust the canvas distance from the camera.
How I feel...
I'm glad to have such a great opportunity to do what I want before I graduate. Although it's a tough task, I still make it till the end! I can proudly say that I'm a game developer, filmmaker and also a digital media designer! I realised that my working progress is not following the timeline that I previously made, and this reminded me that I should work harder and pay more attention on my time and plans management. My supervisor, Miss Buket had been worrying about my work during the development progress, but I'm grateful to have her all the time. She has trained me on creating something that I didn't think I can complete and gave me a lot of helpful suggestion to enhance my project to another level.