For my current project, I travelled into virtual worlds and used built photo modes to document open world games. I used NVidea software to capture high resolution screenshots of my first person view in games such as Grand Theft Auto 5, The Far Cry Series and Star Wars BattleFront. No two games are the same, each offer different aspects that can help me capture what it's like to be a pawn in such a large open world. Virtual Reality Photography was completely new to me at the start of this project, but I have been played video games since I can remember. With my knowledge of the games and my years of Photography practice, I found it easy to combine the two to create work that tells a narrative of a new world. Within my work, I made smaller narrative that are unique to the game, they tell stories from the in game players perspective, like they are a real person with thoughts and emotions.
For me, this was a project I never thought I would create, I’ve always had ideas of taking photos in games, but could never think of the right application to apply it. While being in total lockdown, I couldn’t leave my house to take images the conventional way, so I decided to make them in video games. VRP is quite popular within the gaming community, with some players landing jobs at big companies like EA, Microsoft and Sony. I felt optimistic when planning the game, location and narrative behind each image. I created images in as many games as I could, some worked well, and some didn’t; I found the best images came from Grand Theft Auto, Far Cry, and Covsrd’s open world games. I started creating small narratives of images, writing about the person I played as like they were writing about their experience in 1st person, these worked well by themselves but I wanted to create more. I took my images into InDesign to see how they would work as a sequence (this process took the longest) however I found that the only factor that links the images is the way I created them. Nothing in frame flows into the next, thus I decided to make this project a gallery exhibition, rather than a physical zine / book. To create an exhibitions under the conditions of COVID-19, I had to create a virtual one, I used the software KUNSTMATRIX to plan the layout of the room, where internal walls were, the colour and hight of them and the outside view, this alone took multiple attempts and changes. From there, I was ready to “hang” my images on the fake walls. I could decide the dimensions, thickness, position, transparency, gloss / matt texture and the tittle of each piece I wanted to present. In total I created 3 small galleries of each narrative, and one large gallery show casing the best of the project, each with their own character and unique feel.