Remembering a future
Academic Work 2021
4B Design Studio: Omar Ferwati, Anne Bordeleau| Skills used: Unreal Engine, Premiere Pro, 3DS Max, Agisoft, After Effects|Collaboration With: Patrick Stephen
“Remembering a Future” is a speculative design process, investigating how virtual space can host and represent the experience of a memorial to lost futures. The outcome is a virtual space created from user input describing the physical site and their memories. The information is synthesized to create an accessible, immersive experience of the people’s collective past, present, and futures. The site chosen is Odaka Town, a small Japanese town in the Fukushima prefecture. It is located only 16 km away from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant: the site of one of the most devastating nuclear disasters. The stories from the inhabitants reflect on the consequences and losses from the catastrophe – and the lasting effects on the present day. The stories also reflect the hope for reclamation and rehabilitation of the life in the town – a resilience against letting the futures of their once home become forgotten and dissolve. We came to know the stories from Odaka, particularly from Tomoko, through the documentary "The Invisible Season" directed by Jake Price, and was an official selection at the 52nd New York Film Festival in 2014.
“The Invisible Season is at turns grand in scope and quietly intimate and poetic. Filmed as if it was living being, Fukushima’s landscape becomes a character this film. Shot in a cinematically meditative style, it’s explored in all of its post-meltdown complexity: At times the landscape appears brutalized and wounded. In other moments, it transcends the destruction the world knows it for, revealing Fukushima not only as a place of disaster to be abandoned and forgotten, but as a place of vast natural and cultural beauty. The Invisible Season serves as a wakeup call. With more than 70 nuclear power plants located along Earth’s coasts they are all susceptible to rising sea levels and stronger storms due to the climate emergency. Fukushima is all of our backyards. The Invisible Season focuses on three people whose lives were irrevocably transformed by the disaster.”
We enter the story told by Tomoko Kobayashi, captured in The Invisible Seasons, where one understands the past, present, and hope in her home town of Odaka. Her story can be viewed here.
“Tomoko Kobayashi lived in Odaka about 15km from the stricken power plant. Her blood line in the town goes back 300 years and she is the 3rd generation to operate a small family run hotel there. When the hydrogen explosions erupted at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Odaka fell within the 20km exclusion zone. Overnight the town of 13,000 people was hollowed out. Tomoko feared that her long connection to the town would be forever cut. Living in a temporary shelter, she yearned for home, however fate was kinder to her than those who fled other towns. Because the wind did not carry the worst of the radiation to Odaka, it was able to reopen after the disaster. When it did, Tomoko was the one of the first people to reenter. Over many years she planted thousands of seeds striving to bring her town back to health.”
“Remembering a Future” offers a dream like state of a real-world place, that is not populated by people, but with gateways into other people’s perspectives. Like hearing Tomokos story and sentiments, one is emotionally transported into her point of view in which one can realize the future she sees of Odaka from before the disaster. To enter one memory is to not only be transported to that isolated moment, but to enter the perspective in a visually immersive space. In that perspective, one can recognize not only what that present was, but what the future was in that moment for not just one, but many. That is how you remember a future.
This project was created and conceived using Unreal Engine 4, to be able to produce a "trailer" or "prototype" of our core sentiments. The process involved a gathering of information from the town which we were very far away from, reconceiving it using the story from Tomoko Kobayashi and translated through this medium of virtual reality.
We present to you a curated video of “Remembering a Future”, showcasing footage of the project at its final stage in which a participant is exploring the fully saturated virtual space and the experience it holds.
Media and Process:
1. Rhino and 3DSMax
Environment 3D modelling and photo matching
2. 3DSMax
Photo mapping to texturize buildings
3. 3DSMax
Rendering out ‘photos’ for creation of the point cloud
4. Agisoft
Creation of the point clouds using rendered photos of model elements
5. Unreal Engine 4
Virtual space in which the individual point clouds and other elements were assembled
6. Unreal Engine 4
Composing different scenes and recording footage
8. Premiere Pro
Composing the video sequence and sound
7. After Effects
Additional colour effects and VFX of video scenes
Environment 3D modelling and photo matching
2. 3DSMax
Photo mapping to texturize buildings
3. 3DSMax
Rendering out ‘photos’ for creation of the point cloud
4. Agisoft
Creation of the point clouds using rendered photos of model elements
5. Unreal Engine 4
Virtual space in which the individual point clouds and other elements were assembled
6. Unreal Engine 4
Composing different scenes and recording footage
8. Premiere Pro
Composing the video sequence and sound
7. After Effects
Additional colour effects and VFX of video scenes