VR / Immersive Non-Fiction / Sound Interactive Installation (2018)

Silence Breaker : One Survivor’s Story is an immersive, interactive audiovisual experience based on a true story of one survivor of domestic abuse. The story has 4 sections, and each section is narrated in 4 visual, virtual spaces of the survivor’s house, which was built based on the place where domestic abuse was actually happened. Audio of each section of story will be played through installed fabric speaker by touching woman’s silhouette in order. The voice is a real voice of this survivor, and it was recorded directly. Sound contains ordinary domestic noise in order to give realistic sense. Audience can experience this story though multiple senses, and follow how the survivor has been suffered and finally received freedom.

Please notice that since this is a 100% true story, it may contain intense and uncomfortable elements.

Objective

Through this project, I would like to call for a change to the society on the issues of domestic abuse against women and children. Not only revealing cruelty and prevalence of DA (domestic abuse), I am aiming to provoke certain actions from audience. There are two types of target audience: One is survivors who are experiencing DA currently or were experiencing in the past / their childhood, and the other one is general citizens, especially decision-makers of corporations / organizations and policy-makers. For survivors of DA, I intend to encourage and empower them to disclose their experience so that they would receive appropriate support. For decision-makers and policy-makers, I aim to enlighten them the reality and prevalence of DA so that they will be able to proactively create / provide adequate measurements on DA.

3D Space & Sound Design

4 different rooms were built in Unity 3D, as in red and upside-down house. All details including structure, interior, and furniture disposition were followed the actual house of the survivor. With careful lighting effect and restrained camera movement, the protagonist character was created as vague and unidentified figure. Sounds were also carefully produced. Original voice of story was nearly 30 minutes, but edited into about 11 minutes. Room tone was recorded in my house, and it turned out to be an uncomfortable and dangerous tone due to the industrial and electrical atmosphere surrounded my house. 13 different domestic sounds were also recorded, and they were located in this virtual space. According to the camera’s movement, audience can experience these different sounds in 3D spatial way.