The story opens with a shipwreck where we, along with two unconscious characters, sink underwater with the pieces of the ship. As we sink, a man desperately swims down to rescue the unconscious woman and girl. He is able to reach them but loses his grip on the woman, who we assume is his wife and the girl’s mother, and then he brings the girl to the surface.
Cut to – The girl is now a teenager who is interested in boys and interested in the deep sea, but her overprotective father won’t let her go diving or let her flirt with boys. There are some lighter moments here, as the father discourages the suitor from pursuing his daughter.
This is a third person narrative, which is kind of rare for VR experiences, but it means that the characters talk to each other and the rest of the narrative is shown through images, instead of what is more conventional in VR – first person storytelling where the character narrates everything that happens from their point of view.
Anyway, her father goes on a dive but things go wrong. His safety harness breaks and this girl has no real choice other than passively let her father die underwater or go down and try to save him.
As she explores the deep sea, she finds her sense of wonder. She marvels at the beauties in this deep sea, even though it is a source of tragedy for her. As she goes deeper, she encounters a sea dragon. The dragon does narrate some type of poetry and then swallows her up.
Spoilers: Inside the belly of the “whale”, she has a vision of her house and her past. She sees her father abusing her mother and that causes her mother to take her and leave the house – which ends in the shipwreck we saw at the beginning.
All this is very sad as she realizes that her father drove her mother away, and now she has lost both her father and mother.
She then decides to escape from the belly of the serpent and gets her ship out of there, eventually making her way back up to the surface, in time to see the sun set.
I don’t love projects that try to be deep by being relentlessly sad. I sometimes feel that sadness is a shallow emotion but it is a contagious emotion. It is so simple to make people sad so when artists do this, it doesn’t really impress me. And was the entire point of this story to pass sadness along to the viewer. What greater message is there? What is the point of this story? I think it is to make me sad, and that really isn’t that interesting to me.
There are some other strange things, like these people are supposed to be human but they are miniature, like inches tall. I think the creators chose this size so that when you’re in their house, you can see the entire house by looking around, instead of being in one room and moving to another (which is difficult to do in 360 degree video). But it’s really weird to see these people smaller than the fish around them. The perspective seems wrong.
If this kind of sad story is your thing, you might enjoy this project. I always think it is cool to be underwater in a 3-D or 360 degree environment because it feels like flying but in a different way. You get to float along with the character, and I love the weightlessness of that. So there are some interesting things here, but overall, this was not one of my favorite VR experiences.
Technical Specs:
3-D Animation
360 Degrees – can look all around
3 Degrees of Freedom – you can look around but you cannot walk / move around
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