Festifal live can feel truely timeless - but what if it actually was?
Max Zeeb
6. Semester, 2020
3D Scene
Animation & Game
“When message of societies end reaches the visitors of the Reflexion Festival they decide to simply stay there. Years later the new conditions have formed an autonomous and unique society, that is both rough and colourful, very different and yet through and through human.”
The Objective of this Project was to build a small game scene with a Character in it, as an excerpt of a hypothetical larger game. My main goal for the project was to use the opportunity of this very “special” semester to gain new insights from fields I had not had the possibility to look into in the previous semesters and to acquire and deepen knowledge in areas, and fields that I was interested in but had not found the opportunity to explore in depth yet.
The Idea behind Reflxlons game world is based around similar concepts: the challenge of absolute freedom, how overwhelming and disorienting it can be if you are not used to it, and then on the same time the potential of humans to fill free time with creativity, create art out of nothing, influence and shape your surroundings simply because you can.
Life on a Festival Campsite looked like the ideal setting as Framework for those Ideas.
The Isolation from the rest of the world makes it easy to leave the usual social and behaviour patterns behind and allows for a fresh start, while simultaneously building deep connectivity between all festival visitors.
This creates a basic feel of safety, which together with the absence of any obligations or higher purposes allows a total shift of the values to that usually direct our actions:
Long term security needs loose influence while more direct short term needs move more into the focus. Without these overarching goals that usually direct a major part of our everyday life, there is suddenly a lot of free time that needs to be filled, leading to a complete restructuring of the daily routine and the internal value catalogue that directs our actions.
During a Festival that effect is only a timely limited exceptional state so this major psychological impact might not seem that apparent, some might not even notice it, but what if it stayed like that? What if it was