Tropicana

I wrote and directed this project in my second year of studying animation with a group of exceedingly talented classmates.

Together we embarked on a task that faculty did not believe we could finish in time, we proved them wrong by planning out our days to the letter. I insisted on working in this way as my previous project had suffered under looser conditions. I really wanted to see what we could achieve by giving every member of my team the time and space to fulfill their creative potential as I had sought them up for exactly this reason. The result gives me much satisfaction given the two and a half month allotted time.

The topic of virtual reality is one that I have been exploring since my days at game-IT college in 2014, I have been following the progression of software and hardware ever since then and had been aching to make a project centered around it ever since I started studying animation. I was fortunate to be working for a professional virtual reality production at the time of this project and had access to the wonderful resource of Daniel Ernst, who could give me advice and steer me around some pitfalls. Writing the project did prove very taxing as I had never written for an interactive scene before.

This project had to be centered around a physical location in our town of Rotterdam. For this, I had been waiting to use the “Tropicana” for a while, an abandoned swimming pool turned circular economy centre.

This result of our labour was a 10 minutes long virtual reality game experience, complete with four animated and voiced characters, gameplay, fully rendered scenes and effects and it all runs on the Meta Quest 2!