Co-Creation Project & Innovation in Documentary Media
January 2024 - May 2024
Contributing Artist and Teaching Assistant
Du
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Avatar_AR is a digital documentary piece utilizing co-creation methodologies and a design-justice lens to create short web-first documentary stories made collaboratively with people in recovery from addiction, working to mitigate stigma on individual, institutional, and societal levels.
During this project I worked with Anna Henson, Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts, and Dr. Dennis McChargue, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln to create vignettes of anonymous retellings of individuals who had struggled with addiction. We did this through a course taught at the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts where we co-created with a group of students and former-adicts who had volunteered to be a part of this project. We lectured on Cinema Verite, the potential for digital avatars to protect sensitive stories while educating audiences, and the various pipelines we would be using throughout the course. I also acted as a contributing artist, working on the avatar design and creation and the motion capture pipelines for the piece.
AVATAR_AR developed an original approach to documentary ethics and representation: using Epic Games MetaHuman avatars, built and rendered in Unreal Engine, to protect interview subjects’ anonymity while preserving the emotional truth of their stories. Rather than obscuring or abstracting the subject, this method brought subjects directly into the creation of their own avatar — working alongside filmmakers to shape how they appeared on screen. The result is a form of non-mimetic documentary in which reconstruction is guided not by factual likeness but by the personal, subjective experience of the interviewee themselves.
Avatar_AR is a digital documentary piece utilizing co-creation methodologies and a design-justice lens to create short web-first documentary stories made collaboratively with people in recovery from addiction, working to mitigate stigma on individual, institutional, and societal levels.
During this project I worked with Anna Henson, Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts, and Dr. Dennis McChargue, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln to create vignettes of anonymous retellings of individuals who had struggled with addiction. We did this through a course taught at the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts where we co-created with a group of students and former-adicts who had volunteered to be a part of this project. We lectured on Cinema Verite, the potential for digital avatars to protect sensitive stories while educating audiences, and the various pipelines we would be using throughout the course. I also acted as a contributing artist, working on the avatar design and creation and the motion capture pipelines for the piece.
AVATAR_AR developed an original approach to documentary ethics and representation: using Epic Games MetaHuman avatars, built and rendered in Unreal Engine, to protect interview subjects’ anonymity while preserving the emotional truth of their stories. Rather than obscuring or abstracting the subject, this method brought subjects directly into the creation of their own avatar — working alongside filmmakers to shape how they appeared on screen. The result is a form of non-mimetic documentary in which reconstruction is guided not by factual likeness but by the personal, subjective experience of the interviewee themselves.