Landscapes of Change | UCLA IDEAS Entertainment Studio 2021-22

LANDSCAPES OF CHANGE Entertainment Studio | Stranger Than Fiction Fall, Winter, Spring 2021-22 | UCLA AUD IDEAS Natasha Sandmeier & Nathan Su

LANDSCAPES OF CHANGE Storytelling is the greatest technology that humans have ever created.

-Jon Westenberg The world around us is constantly in flux. It always has been. Rivers carve through stone, trees fall to make way for new growth, contours of the land shift with every earthquake, and the seasons determine what grows, how and when.

And then there’s us. Humans. In 2020, the weight of human-made mass exceeded, for the first time, the world’s total biomass. We have made A LOT of stuff. An unimaginable amount – unless you possess the ability to imagine the mass of 1.1 teratonnes. It would require you to visualize the roads and viaducts, the bridges and dams, the buildings, the buses, the books and clothes the world over, that make up a small fraction of that mass. Imagine the production facilities that produce energy and products, and ultimately make the colossal ships that carry 20,000 containers in order to transport all of the essentials, like rubber duckies, 4k TV’s, toothbrushes, cars and bags of sand to a port near you. Then imagine the

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Still from Wander, a film from Stranger than Fiction: Earthrise 2021 students, Maira Yasir and Yuxin Tian

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cardboard boxes that contain those things as they are shipped from your nearest Amazon fulfilment center to your door. Even then, you likely won’t have come close to reaching the mass of 1.1 teratonnes.

The world is in flux.

We have made and changed so much over the course of the last few centuries, that catastrophic weather events are on the rise and pummelling the ground in new and often overwhelming ways. Industrial forces have transformed landscapes the world over, cutting off mountain tops, redirecting unquantifiable amounts of water, and putrefying territories with waste. Cities have exploded with growth, consuming neighboring lands to build, build, and build again, in support of an ongoing rural to urban migration.

Still from Forever, a film from Stranger Than Fiction 2020 students, Neha Oswal, Akshada Muley, and Aishwarya Rajesekar

In some challenging environments, towns and cities are no longer viable places to live, leading to forced migration and the carcasses of cities left behind.

In other parts of the world, massive multi-national groups have begun to plant trees, to redirect waters and modify agricultural policies and practices in an effort to stave off, and in many cases, repair damage done.

This brief asks you to think about and acknowledge your place and role in all of this. You are architects and you are storytellers. What is your agency and how do you best activate and implement it?

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WORLDBUILDING THE NOW The practice of worldbuilding originates from literature, and was made popular in science fiction writing in the early 60’s. The genre requires an enormous amount of context in order to fully envelop the reader in a fantastical narrative – from new geographies, different social structures, and altered relationships with technology. The combination of research and detail brings to life and legitimizes fantastical fiction. In recent decades, the concept has been embraced in film and game design as a way to describe the design and development of rich and layered worlds that often act as characters themselves – upstaging (mostly human) protagonists.

Still from Tick Tock, a film from Stranger Than Fiction: Earthrise 2021 students, Jieyi Zhang, Tianzhi Xiao and Yuxin Tian

At the core of the concept, to worldbuild is to imagine, design and describe context on two fronts: context as place and physical environment, and context as culture, embodying the social, political, and historical landmarks that define the interactions of the world. This is our point of departure and where the Entertainment Studio launches the studio brief(s). We will worldbuild within the context of today’s transforming landscapes - our world is rich with places and stories to situate ourselves within. As such, we will acknowledge the reality of the studio’s umbrella theme that truth really is Stranger Than Fiction.

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THE STUDIO

The Brief & Course Objectives The program is a year-long program of study that is structured around 3 key concepts of visual storytelling.

Concept & World The crucial start of any story and worldbuild project is the framing of a concept alongside the design of its environment. You will establish your scenario and the world within which it sits. Emphasis will be placed on developing and fleshing out storylines alongside determining the look and environment of crucial scenes and concepts to be elaborated throughout the academic year.

Tech & Innovation Projects in the Entertainment Studio rely on the research and development of technological and ecological issues of your world and story. Whether ultra-analog, or at the leading edge of high-tech, you will be asked to incorporate the science of your world into the myth and narrative of your realfiction. This interrellation between your hard research and your soft fictions, ensures one gives credence and authenticity to the other.

Production & Audience During the final quarter of the program, we will see the narrative (film, game, XR experience) fleshed out and developed in its final form, alongside a plan for delivering it to its ultimate audience. We will push for hyper-real definition and seamless compositing of digital assets into real-world scenarios. * Teams will be asked to identify and apply to at least 3 film festivals and/or competitions following completion of the program.

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Still from Innermost: a game concept from Stranger than Fiction 2020 students, Chunsu Ouyang, Tianyi Song, and Xianrui Wang. In their game players curate and terraform their own planets.

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PROJECT 1: POINT OF VIEW THE OBJECTIVE CAMERA What does it mean to worldbuild if we lack the tools to communicate that world? Point of view is a determining factor in how we create narratives, look at the worlds we are building, and communicate them to a broader audience. Likewise, when we consider the politics, environmental concerns, or cultural events that take place around us every day, too often, we are unable to engage, or lack the will and desire to connect, because the point of view, or opportunity for participation lacks access. Access takes many forms – sometimes it is a matter of breaking a huge problem into smaller and more manageable pieces, other times, it’s a matter of looking at the problem from perspectives that resonate with others.

This year, we will work on jumping between the large and small scales, and between the objective and intimate points of view. Rather than asking you to address broad planetary issues, we ask that you examine regional concerns alongside the localized factors (whether issues of politics, resource harvesting, cultural preference, or other) that led to where we are today. Our narratives will be rooted in the realities of our present, and we will use speculative fiction not to predict the future, but to understand the fears, hopes and dreams we have now.

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Still from Forever, a film from Stranger Than Fiction 2020 students, Neha Oswal, Akshada Muley, and Aishwarya Rajesekar

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TRANSFORMATION & GEOGRAPHY 5 STILLS | Sept 24 - Midterm Review Throughout the Autumn term you will set the agendas for the year to come by exploring the landscapes of change on present day Earth through creating cinematic 'docu-fictions'. The term will begin with research into each of the geographies and events listed. Working in groups, you will choose a topic and geography from the following list, and dig deep to reveal both the broad stroke contributors as well as more nuanced factors involved in these scenarios. You will research the impact on local communities as well as understand the social and geographical extent of impact.

Armed with that research, in your teams you will compose your 'docu-fictions'. These will be cinematic sequences that expose, characterize and interpret the places and conditions you have studied, and that blend between the real and the speculative.

We will start the process of designing these sequences through the creation of a storyboard of 5 still images that imply stories and their consequences within your geographies. We fill each of these scenes with anecdotal detail, with memorable objects, colors, light and textures, thereby setting the stage for something to take place. Each image carries within it the promise of an entire narrative, but for this first exercise we will use them to build a rich sense of place and atmosphere, creating environmental portraits rather than character driven stories.

HOW: Following your research, you and your team will develop a non-narrative storyboard.

From this you will design 5 highly detailed images that act as windows into the world you have studied. These images will focus on the territorial scale and should depict the consequences of landscapes in flux.

DELIVERABLES: • 5 x 8182px x 3428px (8k) at 72 dpi rendered frames from your storyboard.

• Short text + research presentation

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WHAT

WHERE

GEOENGINEERING Great Green Wall

Carbon Capture Facilities - Orca Solar Geoengineering (SCoPEx) Cloud Seeding

Sahara Desert, Southern border Hellisheidi, Iceland Kiruna, Sweden Tibetan Plateau, China

REWILDED TERRITORIES Yellowstone Wolves Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Seagrass Restoration

Yellowstone National Park, USA Chernobyl, Russia Plymouth Sound, UK

THE CLIMATE CRISIS Dying Lakes Ice Melt 2019-20 Bushfires Largest Old Growth Forest

Salton Sea & Lake Owens, USA Greenland or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Austalia Tongass National Forest, USA

SUPPLYING THE WORLD Quarries Greenhouses Breadbasket of the World Lithium Mines Surface Mining Three Gorges Dam Suez Canal Panama Canal Mountaintop Removal

Iberia, Portugal Almeria, Spain San Joaquin Valley, USA Atacama Desert, Chile Garzweiler & Hambach, Germany Yangtze River, China Egypt Panama Appalachia, USA

WASTE LANDSCAPES Bhalswa Landfill Shipbreaking Nuclear Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

Delhi, India Chittagong, Bangladesh New Mexico, USA

URBAN CRISES Makoko Dharavi Slum Skid Row Urban Development

Lagos, Nigeria Mumbai, India Los Angeles, USA Xiong'an New Area, China

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A MOVING IMAGE | From Midterm to End of Term Review From your five images, you will continue working in your teams to produce a 2 minute cinematic sequence. This project will expose you to production workflows of writing, designing, directing and producing a short film. Where the first task focused on framing and sequence, here we will introduce camera movement, dynamic lighting and a sense of time. As such, you will exploit the camera's ability to communicate geographic transformation alongside the strategic use of lighting, color, movement and sound to deliver the worlds you have built.

To create these films, we will start first with basic animatics/previsualizations. These are low detail, quickly assembled versions of the film that allow you to experiment with shot timing/duration, camera movement, transitions, editorial sequencing, and sound design before your fully detailed scenes are developed. In parallel, you will continue to develop your 3D environments and piece by piece, you will replace the low detail scenes of your previsualization with the rich and detailed worlds of your final renders.

In the spirit of working in-person and using the IDEAS facilities, we actively support the integration and compositing of realworld & digital environments. You may want to explore workflows that mix real-world photography/cinematography with virtual content, or that make use of miniature site and landscape models that you composite into your films.

HOW: 1. Research 1-2 minute non-narrative cinematic sequence 2. Analyse the camera work, editing style, lighting, color and sound for the chosen reference.

4. Build miniature of one portion of your world.

5. Edit together a pre-visualization/animatic that starts to organise pace, camera movement, sound and transitions, using sketches and test renders as placeholders.

6. Render styleframes to finalise lighting, texturing and color 7. Assemble the final film - a short, edited visual experience combined with atmospheric sound and score.

DELIVERABLES: 120 second film. 1920 x 816 px .MP4 (h.264 codec), 24 fps.

Storyboard + Previs, short written text to document the project, verbal presentation.

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Still from The Over, a film from Stranger Than Fiction: Earthrise 2021 students, Jingli Lu and Tianzhi Xiao

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PROJECT 2: POINT OF VIEW THE IMMERSIVE CAMERA

Still from the film, Best Before which tracks the protagonists efforts to extend her best before date for love, work and life.

Yusi Zhang, Yueshi Min, and Qingyang Li, Stranger Than Fiction 2020.

Winter Quarter The Winter quarter will bring us up close. As a direct counterpoint to our distanced viewing in the first quarter, we now ask you to consider the camera as a privileged and intimate guest into your world. This quarter will demand that you explore the more personal, human, and challenging aspects of the transformations & geographies that you uncovered in the previous term. After a term of looking and discovering from a distance measured in hectares or kilometers, this quarter our camera will look mere meters away. You have observed, hovered and flown around your worlds, now is the time to crash into them and explore them from within.

We will begin by translating consequences from your 'docu-fictions' into human scale speculations. In this quarter we will explore immersive experiences and virtual production methodologies. We will build virtual set extensions in Unreal Engine - physical miniatures and/or full-scale models - and we will be collapsing as much as possible the distinction between the real and digital worlds you build. Working in-person at IDEAS comes with the opportunity to use the robots to create motion controlled camera movements, to use the Black Magic camera to film at cinematic quality, and to use the VR equipment to pilot virtual cameras by moving physically in space. Using these techniques, you will produce a media experience that may be a film or an interactive installation.

HOW: 1. Research a case study of a reference experience created with virtual production 2. Develop a sketch storyboard for a 3-5 minute immersive experience 3a. Design and build set or miniature model (physically).

3b. Design and build virtual set extension (in Unreal Engine).

4. Assemble the final film or installation - a short visual experience with sound DELIVERABLES: 3-5 minute film (either a linear film or an recording of an interactive scene).

1920 x 816 px .MP4 (h.264 codec), 24 fps Verbal presentation and short written text to document the project.

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Still from The Over, a film from Stranger Than Fiction: Earthrise 2021 students, Jingli Lu and Tianzhi Xiao

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PROJECT 3: UNTITLED FORMAT V CONTENT

Spring Quarter This final project of the Entertainment studio is untitled - because you and your partner(s) are the authors and will determine the final form (and format) of your piece, and what you want to say with it. You have developed visuals and narratives of a world in flux, and experimented with the kinds of stories we tell from differing points of views. Now you are in control of the medium through which you wish to express your world. For some of you, this may mean you continue to develop the filmic work from previous quarters, for others it may mean you explore the possibility of an multi-media experience, a game, or an installation. As Marshall McLuhan famously stated, 'the medium is the message'.

Whatever format you choose, you will weave in your work from the prior 2 terms and use your media to facilitate the exchange from the objective to the subject. You will ask the viewer to experience your work and subject matter as a passive observer and as an active participant. The collision between the objective and subjective cameras, between the wholly digital and the composited, can be used to shake the observer out their role as a docile and detached viewer, into an engaged and an invested collaborator.

DELIVERABLES: Deliverables will be discussed and reviewed with each team prior to the end of Winter Quarter. Final submission proposal, along with festival submission schedule will be due on the 2nd studio meeting of Spring Quarter (March 30th 2022).

Still from The Over, a film from Stranger Than Fiction: Earthrise 2021 students, Jingli Lu and Tianzhi Xiao

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INSIGHT | ON SITE The Entertainment Studio is committed to exposing students to the diverse ways in which architects crossover into the worlds of media & entertainment.

Our location in Culver City allows us to take advantage of the proximity to a slew of vfx and media studios within blocks of the IDEAS campus alongside the huge range of designers and filmmakers across Los Angeles. We will also continue building on the international connections we made during our remote format in 2020/2021. The Insight/OnSite program is a platform to develop enhanced engagement within the discipline and community through which we will host talks and workshops by experts in the field of filmmaking, vfx artists, architecture, production design and more.

Entertainment is a field that demands conversation and engagement as a means to learn, craft and disseminate stories. The studio and your workspace are amazing creative environments to experiment within, and the realities of media production, dissemination and consumption require us all to stay at the front edge of that space with leading industry collaborators. We will engage as much as possible with guests from vfx & media companies, architecture and visualization practices and more.

Still from Wander, a film from Stranger than Fiction: Earthrise 2021 students, Maira Yasir and Yuxin Tian

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DESIGNING AUDIENCES A fundamental goal of the Entertainment Studio is to build new, unexpected kinds of architectural worlds.

The studio has a goal as well to build the audiences that will inhabit these worlds. In the hyper-mediated environment of the 21st century, architects need to look beyond their normal audience (of other architects) to embrace a larger world now living within the stories and images of our time. To be an architect today is to be an individual able to imagine as well as arrange connections – whether in the literal joints and materials of a physical object’s making, of the subtler and experiential moments of the people, spaces and events architecture has always been made from. That act of imagination, visualization, and communication lies at the center of this studio’s teaching, learning and research.

Without an audience, the stories you tell will disappear inside a cultural vacuum. The Entertainment Studio requires that students consider their audiences alongside the techniques, outlets and pipelines needed to deliver their content to ensure the work has a lifespan beyond the academic calendar of the program.

CONSIDER 1. What is your story? What are you trying to say with your images, film, experiences?

2. Who is your intended audience and how do you reach it?

3. Know your format and relevant forms of delivery / distribution.

4. Identify your media outlet(s).

5. How do you deliver your media and ensure visibility?

6. Identify 3 film festivals (minimum) or other kinds of competitions and exhibitions and submit your work upon graduation.

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Still from Ecotechnium a film from Stranger Than Fiction 2020 students, Liang Yang, Ruohan Yang and Yuexuan Zhang

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry For the Future, Orbit, 2020

ATTENDANCE

Wulf, Andrea. The Invention of Nature, Knopf, New York, 2015

University and/or Department attendance policies will be rigorously enforced. Each unexcused absence will result in the reduction of one letter grade. More than two unexcused absences will result in a failing grade.

Apkin, Stephen. The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2013 Truby, John. The Anatomy of Story: 22 steps to becoming a master storyteller. New York, Faber and Faber, 2007 Harari, Yuval N. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. [Toronto]: Signal, 2014 Mirzoeff, Nicholas. How to See the World, Pelican, 2015

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS Students are required to complete all assignments. Students are required to submit all final project materials (images, model photographs, assets, sound files, animations and videos, etc) digitally by the end of the course. Film / video formats will be outlined by the teaching team.

File naming conventions: entertainment202122_lastname_firstname_imagenumber.fileextension

PRIVACY This program uses video recording or other personal information capture for the purpose of facilitating the course and/or test environment. Pursuant to the terms of the agreement with UCLA, the data is used solely for this purpose and any vendor is prohibited from disclosing this information. UCLA also does not use the data for any other purpose. Students may not distribute recordings or other instructional materials provided as part of remote learning by faculty, teaching assistants, or invited guests.”

ACCESSIBILITY Still from Ecotechnium a film from Stranger Than Fiction 2020 students, Liang Yang, Ruohan Yang and Yuexuan Zhang

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UCLA CAE (Center for Accessible Education) RECOMMENDATION: If you are already registered with the Center for Accessible Education (CAE), please request your Letter of Accommodation on the Student Portal. If you are seeking registration with the CAE, please submit your request for accommodations via the CAE website. Please note that the CAE does not send accommodations letters to instructors--you must request that I view the letter in the online Faculty Portal. Once you have requested your accommodations via the Student Portal, please notify me immediately so I can view your letter. Students with disabilities requiring academic accommodations should submit their request for accommodations as soon as possible, as it may take up to two weeks to review the request. For more information, please visit the CAE website (www.cae.ucla.edu), visit the CAE at A255 Murphy Hall, or contact us by phone at (310) 825-1501.

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