Villusion

Miguel Ortiz-Teed, Yogesh Ravichandar

Mark Shepherd

ARC 605
Fall 2020

MArch

The first issue was the audio interference that someone might experience while another person is trying to talk and another user is accidentally un-muted and making extraneous noise such as chewing. In the first scene Ortiz-Teed continuously crunches on Lays potato chips completely cutting off Ravichandar, while adding a layer of humor into the scene. Another goal of the project was to blur the hard lines of being in separate locations. After getting frustrated with Ortiz-Teed’s chewing, Ravichandar magically levitates one of Ortiz-Teed’s chips from the bag, up and out of the frame, into his own hand on his screen in India. When this fails to stop Ortiz-Teed’s chewing, Ravichandar steals the entire bag, annoying Ortiz-Teed to the point he decides to take action. By jumping through a coffee mug, Ortiz-Teed starts to teleport to Ravichandar’s room. Seeing that his friend is on his way to seek revenge, Ravichandar jumps into his own coffee mug, teleporting to Ortiz-Teed’s room. By setting photos of each other’s room as their background image, they create an illusion that they have passed each other like ships in the night and arrived in the other person’s space. The two then teleport again into what appears to be the same space spread across two different screens. In the final scene, Ortiz-Teed passes the bag of chips from his screen across to Ravichandar’s screen. Finally, the two exchange looks before Ravichandar snaps Ortiz-Teed out of the frame completely.

In all, it is a fun short that creatively interprets the everywhere and nowhere, together but apart, present yet detached qualities of interaction in the video-conference universe.