Team
Alina Liu, Nancy Li
Project Prompt
Re-interpret a classic fairy or folk tale or well-known story in this format:
An interactive or reactive video installation created in Unity.
Original Story & Key Element
1. death
“将军百战死，壮士十年归。”
Generals die in a hundred battles. Stout soldiers return after ten years.
2. lie
“阿爷无大儿，木兰无长兄，愿为市鞍马，从此替爷征。”
Father has no grown-up son. Mulan has no elder brother. I want to buy a saddle and horse, and serve in the army in Father's place.
3. back home
“木兰不用尚书郎，愿借明驼千里足，送儿还故乡。”
Mulan has no use for a minister's post. I wish to ride a swift mount to take me back to my home.
4. rabbit
“雄兔脚扑朔，雌兔眼迷离；两兔傍地走，安能辨我是雄雌！”
"The he-hare's feet go hop and skip, the she-hare's eyes are muddled and fuddled. Two hares running side by side close to the ground. How can they tell if I am he or she?"
Synopsis 01
In Mulan’s deepest dream every night, the only thing she truly hoped was to go back to her hometown and reunite with her family members again. However, she didn’t see that day coming. She was killed in the final battle, before the hard-won victory. As a warrior who made a great contribution, Mulan was awarded the highest honor by the Emperor. The official account posted a memorial video to commemorate the death of Mulan, to announce the honors she won, and also reveal Mulan's secret.
Only after that, her comrades, the royal family, and the whole society knew that Mulan was a female. This news immediately caused a media storm. Some people requested the Emperor to take back Mulan’s award since Mulan lied to everyone. They also insisted that this award should not be given to a female.
However, the Emperor forwarded the video, to show his attitude to not taking the award back. Mulan’s father, her comrades also commented under the video, to show their support.
In this story, each of the characters will have their own social account. The story begins with a memorial video posted by the official account of the kingdom. After the video was posted, all three characters reposted the video and showed their different attitudes towards it. However, what they said was not their actual thoughts. When viewers go into their personal accounts and see their previous posts, they will know more stories under the surface.
Topic Changing
After talking to Gabe, Nancy and I decided to change our format from social media platform to Unity. We agreed that the experience that audiences could get through an interactive journey, like a puzzling game represents our story better. The players will be guided to explore different spaces, which symbolized different time periods in Mulan's life. By observing the environment and objects, players can help to find Mulan's memory back.
Synopsis 02
Everything starts here…
Because of Mulan‘s bravery and her great achievements in the war, she won the emperor‘s highest award. She has two choices now, one is to return to the life of a normal girl, to marry someone, to become a wife, a mother. The other is to be a female general. She is hesitating between these two choices, so she dives into her unconsciousness and listens to the truest voice in her heart.
In this story, Mulan will see her own life story from a third person's view. From when she decided to take her father's place in the conscription army, to her came back from the war and got the emperor's highest honor. By going through these memories, Mulan realized she had already made the decision deep in her heart.
Moodboard & Visual Inspiration
We wanted to bring the whole story to a modern life setting to match our topic better and make it feel more accessible. In order to do that, the visual of our project is surrealism, dream-like, with symbolized objects to merge all elements, including conscription, battle, loom (elements that feel ancient time) to this modern background story.
Narrative Line
This is a loop journey. Every time Mulan successfully collects all memories clips from one room, she will be sent back to the start room. After complete her journey in all three rooms, Mulan then goes through the fourth door to go back to the real world.
Process
01 scene building
We started with building room scenes. Nancy did the transfer room since she is more familiar with scriptwriting and interactive actions in Unity. And I was responsible for finding assets and building the layout for the bedroom and the funeral room. In this stage, we also planned the triggerable objects in each room for our storyline.
02 visual design
At this point, we realized the aesthetic design of each room was still isolated. When moving from one room to another, we often felt like they didn't belong to the same game, especially the battlefield room. In order to solve this problem, we decided to put all room models together, applied the same lighting, and theme color to make them more integrated. Nancy also came up with the idea to turn off all the lightings so the scene would be more dreamy. This also gave us an opportunity to apply neo color self-luminous material to our triggerable objects.
03 Final Scene Setting
04 video editing
After the Unity model was done, Nancy acted as the first person player and recorded about 30 clips of video for the final editing (we stopped sending the Unity package back and forth since we had lots of problems as the package got bigger and bigger and maybe also the different version of the program we have). By using Adobe Premier, I edited the clips together, added all the effects, sounds, and captions. This allowed us to have better control of the interactive triggers and helped us avoid some technical problems we couldn't achieve in Unity, for example, the caption, and the conscription image appearing.
