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Date: Tuesday, November 19th
Time: 10:00am - 4:00pm
Venue: Exhibition Hall 1


2nd Step – From Moon to Mars and Beyond

Speaker(s):

Maria Courtial is co-founder, producer and managing director of Faber Courtial, one of Germany’s leading VR and VFX studios. Having been awarded during her study, Maria graduated in Industrial Design and went on to found Faber Courtial, together with her husband Joerg, in 1998. She is taking charge of project conception, as well as, consulting with clients on all creative matters. Since 2014, Maria’s main role at Faber Courtial is as the producer for the company’s successful VR films. In this position, she coordinates and influences the whole development process: dealing with artistic, technical and administrative challenges. The creation of VR film content became more and more a matter of heart to her. Right from the beginning of each project, she is working closely together with husband and director Joerg, "shaping" new groundbreaking VR experiences. Both are fascinated of VR’s infinite possibilities and their films are quite often the result of passionate debates. This “passion” to produce “the best that’s possible” has been part of their business philosophy ever since: when starting “Faber Courtial” over 20 years ago, the objective of the two founders was to bring more emotion and fascination to the hitherto drab world of 3D animation. Soon they were assigned with the production of high-profile VFX projects for TV documentaries and exhibitions and - finally - VR films. Since then, they are constantly trying to set high standards in VR storytelling, VR production and the implementation of the latest VR techniques.

Description: “2nd Step” is a soaring VR journey through space from moon to mars and beyond. In the film, the viewer gets a very intense feeling of being in the middle of alien, undiscovered worlds far away from earth – and to visit some of the most exciting settings of current and future space missions, such as the landing spot of Apollo 11 and the mysterious “Red Planet”: Mars. The film was produced with expert advice of the European Space Agency (ESA) which provided valuable original data for the reconstructions of the settings. Thus, it shows not only profound scientific basis, but also an unprecedented richness of detail.


Awavena

Speaker(s):

Lynette Wallworth is an Emmy award winning artist/filmmaker who has consistently worked with emerging media technologies. Her immersive installations and films reflect connections between people and the natural world, and explore fragile human states of grace. Wallworth’s work has shown at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the American Museum of Natural History, New York, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Smithsonian, as well as film festivals including-Sundance Film Festival, London Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, and the Adelaide Film Festival. She has been awarded an International Fellowship from Arts Council England, a New Media Arts Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts, the inaugural Australian Film, Television and Radio School Creative Fellowship and the Joan and Kim Williams Documentary Fellowship. Her works include the interactive video Evolution of Fearlessness; the full dome feature Coral, with accompanying augmented reality work; and VR narrative Collisions, which received a 2017 Emmy award for outstanding new approaches to documentary filmmaking. In 2014, Wallworth’s feature documentary Tender won the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Award for best televised documentary. In 2016, Wallworth was awarded a UNESCO City of Film Award, the Byron Kennedy Award for Innovation and Excellence and Foreign Policy magazine named her as one of the “100 Leading Global Thinkers’ of the year.

Description: For the Amazonian Yawanawa, ‘medicine’ has the power to travel you in a vision to a place you have never been. Hushuhu, the first woman shaman of the Yawanawa uses VR like medicine to open a portal to another way of knowing. AWAVENA is a collaboration between a community and an artist, melding technology and transcendent experience so that a vision can be shared, and a story told of a people ascending from the edge of extinction. Using a technology that the Yawanawa feel enables them to share their story and visions, this immersive work presents flourescent and bioluminescent specimens in previously unseen colors from the forest world, to create a vivid, luminous vision. AWAVENA is made at the invitation of, and in intimate collaboration with, the Yawanawa people during a time of both peril and potential for people, their forest, and the connected ecosystems that drive the planet. The film aims not to provoke empathy for the Yawanawa people but is rather a gift from them, to those who will virtually visit their forest and receive this transmission — a gift that can shift our consciousness, changing the way we perceive the world and the decisions we make.


Waumananyi: the song on the wind

Speaker(s):

Volker Kuchelmeister is currently working as lead immersive designer and research fellow at the UNSW felt Experience and Empathy Lab (feel). He is an expert in presence, embodiment and place representation for immersive applications and has worked extensively in cinematography, interactive narrative, experimental imaging, spatial mapping, interactive systems, immersive visualisation and in the performing arts while exploring and exploding the boundaries of the cinematic image. http://kuchelmeister.net

Description: The project explores mental health and healing from an Aboriginal perspective. Created by the acclaimed Uti Kulintjaku, formed from the Ngangkari traditional healers and artists of the NPY Women’s Council, the collective addresses community issues of mental health from both Aboriginal and Western perspectives. Working with UNSW felt Experience and Empathy Lab (feel), the team have created a virtual reality work, sharing their healing practices through creative visualisation. Waumananyi: The Song on the Wind is an Anangu-led response to the experiences of constraint, entrapment and depression through the traditional story of The Man in the Log. The virtual reality experience asks what is it really like to be physically and mentally trapped in a space that you can’t escape from? In this case you can see through holes in the log and you can see people you love and people in your community, but you can no longer connect with them. A profound metaphor for incarceration, separation, addiction and that sense of powerlessness that many people in aboriginal communities experience.


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