THE WAITING ROOM

This solo project was born from the prompt “Portals of Slowness and Care” provided at the An Exercise in Portals workshop from the Factory Media Center in Hamilton, Ontario.

While working with the prompt, I thought of spaces where the passage of time feels extended - where there seems to be extra seconds, minutes, hours, in the time spent sitting, standing, or walking.

I decided to work with two spaces that do exactly that for me: a dental office waiting room, and a funeral home. While the passage of time feels incredibly loud in these spaces, I find those extended seconds to be quite comforting.

A black and white version of this scene is available to walk through here (Mozilla Hubs)

All of the models in this scene were created using Blender. I used Geometry Nodes to create a variety of different potted plants.

The texturing process used for The Waiting Room involved projecting the model UVs onto a black and white gradient. In Unreal Engine, I used a CurveTime within its material to apply the colors, which allowed for quickly experimenting with different palettes for the scene. All of the materials in the scene are unlit, and through this texturing method of projecting the models’ UVs to a gradient creates an illusion of shading.

The fog effect was achieved by selecting a solid color and linear interpolating between the solid color and the original texture based on how close the camera is to the objects. This was done within the material itself and did not require post-processing.

This video was created using the Sequencer in Unreal Engine, and the music was made in REAPER.