EMAR 331/332: World Building, Narrative Design and Design Visualization
3 credits | MW 9–11:50 a.m. | Web Conferencing | Professor Ash Eliza Smith
This studio course is open to all majors at UNL and will be in collaboration with Alex McDowell (Minority Report, Fight Club), the director of USC World Building Institute and 5D Global Studio within the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. We will also collaborate with a world building studio at the Austral University in Buenos Aires.
*email Ash Smith (ash.e.s@unl.edu) for details and enrollment codes
This Spring 2021 World Building course will ask the students to imagine, ideate and develop a distant future and fictional world called Junk, that is inhabited by a population surviving on the detritus of their history.
They will consider economic trade, hierarchal governance, decaying infrastructure, cultural layers, and limited resources as the basis of the construction of the world. They will interrogate the core ecologies to build a knowledge-base that defines the unique rules of this world. They will develop narrative environments that will provoke characters within the world to tell their stories, and connect the dots between the characters or their areas of influence.
World building is by definition collaborative and engages a holistic world space, so the students should be prepared to build an interconnected world at multiple scales that will evolve based on on their engagement and interaction.
The class will focus on the interdisciplinary opportunities to convey the world and its narratives. The class is media- and platform-agnostic and there will be an expectation that the students will consider the ways in which they convey the stories they generates as a primary outcome of the class.