Week 2: Senior Project Idea and Reading Responses

For my senior project I'll be doing a VR experience about depressive episodes: the before, during, and aftermath. The player will start in a dark room, curtains drawn and look around to see boxes, clothes on the floor, plates, cups, and either a journal or pieces of paper from a journal. As the person walks around the room and looks at certain objects they'll be prompted with thoughts about their depressive episode, along with how they're feeling and how it got to that point. When reading the journal pages they'll come to learn what happened before and during the depressive episode and their state of mind. I'll might expand more on this but so far this is my general plan. This past week I've started doing interviews for my project some over Zoom and some through Google Forms. My first group of people are my folks who have depressive disorders or experience depressive episodes. I'm asking them about their symptomology, depressive episode experiences, and things they wish others would understand about their mental illness. With this knowledge I'll be able to better represent depressive episodes to make a more general view of them, because each individual, including me, has different person experiences with it. My second group are those who do not have depressive disorders or symptoms. I'm asking these people what their knowledge is on depression, symptoms, depressive episodes, and how they feel towards people with depression. I want to take from them what they are unaware of and tailor the project so that I cover some important factors of depressive episodes that people may not realize.

I really enjoyed this interview, it's always interesting to see how other people's processes differ from mine when creating art. One of the things I like about Ganesh is how she has work spread across different mediums and how she has learnt them. Some she's known how to do for a while, like print making, others like animation she took classes to learn and it took a while to get that tool under her belt. I like that she's transparent about how when you learn a new medium it's not always something you pick up super easily, sometimes it takes different methods and a while to learn. I also laughed a bit when she was asked how she starts a project and she responded simply "how do you start a project?". I think that like her the seeds of projects come from all different places. I often find myself inspired at such random times by random things. My projects' seeds come from all over the place, one is inspired while watching Alice in Wonderland, another was inspired during a talk with my friends. Inspiration comes from all around us! Like her these seeds might come to fruition in a very short time span or they may take years to develop to the point where we are ready to work on them. For my Interactive Narrative class I developed the idea and fleshed it out in a week for a text-based game (that I'm actually very happy with how it turned out), my senior project idea is something I actually came up with 2 years ago but didn't have the time or knowledge I have now to work on it!

Reading these was kind of funny because I'm friends with a bunch of the people who wrote them but it was interesting to see their experience! I think one piece of advice that came up a lot was doing something that'll show employers what you can do and your skillset which wasn't actually something I thought of when coming up with my project. It works out well that I want to work in Unreal for a career so it can fit in with that but thinking about how I could show off to future employers wasn't what I had in mind. Another piece of advice that came up a lot was to stick to something you love because 1 you're working on it for a whole semester and 2 this is probably the last time in your life that you'll have so much freedom to do what you want. And that last point really rings true! I was talking with someone at a company I interned at the other day and they were telling me how it had been so long since they were able to work on a passion project because working a fulltime job is tiring! When they would get home they just wouldn't have the energy to use the same programs to make what they love. It's sad but like pretty accurate to what life is like under capitalism.