Getting back on Track

Experience through Exhibition

With a better understanding of what we wanted to do, we started to look into the realisation of our storytelling-driven concept. We felt that an exhibition could be a more experience-related way to raise awareness which lead us to discuss the layout and relationship of the screens inside an exhibition room.

We discussed about using a linear or symphonic style of visualisation. Did we need only one screen where one linear story runs runs through all individual stories? Or were several screen needed, one for each international that was telling their story parallel or in correlation to each other?

We decided to go for a symphonic setup for the stories as we wanted to portray the internationals as individuals who were nevertheless a part of a community that shared one voice - that of feeling isolated by the locals. From afar their stories would be heard as a chant, an inaudible chatter, which would force the viewers into taking their time to focus on an individual and to listen to their story. For that we tried out different room setups with some styrofoam blocks as screens.

We didn't quite feel convinced by any of the room setups where the viewer was lead from one story to the next in a very strict linear - nearly military - way, occurring in the layouts shown in the bottom middle picture. A video wall, seen on the bottom right, would not allow the viewer to hear, understand or focus on any of the individuals.
The top middle picture, however, was the setup we liked the most - it reminded us of a crowd, a forest of individuals, where viewers can wonder through the room and discover the story by their own accord.

Storyboard

Once we had settled on the layout of the exhibition we returned to pen and paper to draw out a storyboard of how the audience would experience our exhibits. We tried to give a sense of how sounds and visuals would come together in this room and how people would walk form screen to screen. For this we also illustrated a top-down view of the room to give a bit more of a overview.