Time
Contents:
Pencil Drawings, Pixel Art, Animation, VR Video
Time is the only force we cannot control as humans. It is constant, it simply moves forward on it's own and leaves us with memories of the past. Time will change everything, for better or for worse.
This beach is deeply personal to me, as I used to play here when I was just a young kid. It was a quiet and peaceful place where anyone could just watch the waves, play in the sand, or look out into the distance to see the planes taking off and landing by the airport.
It's also the place where my grandmother's ashes were spread when I was just one year old, and two decades later, my father's ashes as well.
Over time, this beach has been riddled with pollution, turning a place of fun and relaxation into a place filled with trash, scattered religious items, birds feeding off whatever is left, and muddy sand everywhere.
To illustrate this progression, I started out with exaggerated pencil drawings that captured the pollution aspect of time. It starts out from swimming in the water, to not even wanting to step foot on the beach. The lines in the water represent the amount of pollution, distorting more and more as it becomes increasingly unbearable.
While I was wrapping up the drawings, I had been playing Sea of Stars, a beautiful video game with stunning pixel art, and it inspired me to try serious pixel art for the very first time. And that's exactly what I did; I reimagined the project by incorporating the sun and the moon to further connect with time. The perspectives are now matching, just to make the differences in pollution more drastic.
Now that the pixel assets were complete, animating them felt like the natural next step. I shifted my focus away from the pollution aspect and directed it towards making the sun and moon even more connected. This led me to refine the tiniest details, such as the flickering lights of the buildings and how the blowing wind impacts everything.
Somewhere in the process, I accidentally discovered a setting on my laptop that plays videos in VR. That completely changed the project yet again; now I could take a still frame from the animation and place the viewer directly inside of it, letting them experience the beach while frozen in time.
In a sense, this was both a literal and figurative representation of time. What began as simple drawings about pollution quickly transformed into pixel art, then animation, and again into VR content. Sometimes, you simply don't know where an idea will take you until time takes over.
