Alexander Kim and Kenny Leong, both passionate about film, have produced a music video for their university image arts project that is not only cool in a unique technological sense but also brings awareness to a weighty social problem they both survived.
In high school they endured daily bullying. Each lost a friend to suicide as a result of bullying and isolation.
Alex’s friend shot himself in Grade 11.
“I understand his situation. I was able to take it and I stood up. It was really great for me because I had a friend who would help me through it. My friend who committed suicide didn’t have that. And that’s why we made the installation,” said Alex, a student in his fourth year at Ryerson University’s Image Arts program.
The “installation” is a 360-degree immersive film environment, entitled “Surrounded,” that encircles the viewers with four video screens and tells the story of a Grade 10 student who is bullied at school.
The effect aims to let people experience directly how it feels to be bullied.
“There are bullies and bystanders—the people who walk around. They notice it but they don’t do anything. They start surrounding you and walking around you. We filmed it so that it seems like you are in the middle of it, and you are being surrounded by all these bullies and they’re all throwing things, saying mean things to you, and pushing you.”
Combined with music lyrics entitled “Dead End,” the 10-minute production presents an interactive way of using film and song to draw the audience into the character’s lived experience and to compel change.
Through their project, Alex and Kenny hope to let victims of bullying know that there are people who do care. Moreover, “it’s to help people understand the effects of bullying and how much you can do to prevent it.”
New Media Transcending Boundaries
“Surrounded” is one of 14 projects featured in META, Ryerson’s Fourth Year New Media Exhibition to be held April 16 to 18 in Toronto in the historic Burroughes Building. The exhibition will showcase the best of the artworks by the graduating students from Ryerson’s School of Image Arts who specialize in new media.
The new media program, very broad in scope, offers students ample opportunity to explore multimedia ideas and techniques to produce inventive art.
It emphasizes interactivity and audience participation to allow people to create individual aesthetic experiences, engaging different senses and using their own powers of observation and imagination.
Through works such as sculptures, puzzles, maps, games, and film, the projects in the exhibition include themes from geography, history, and culture to science, the environment, and more.
The technique of POV, which stands for “point of view,” is “a huge part of our project,” said Alex. In POV, the camera shows what the character sees, like in the movies “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield.”
