On Show

Catherine Feraday Miller

MA 3D Animation

Catherine Feraday Miller is a game developer, animator, and educator. Her career has spanned several animation modalities, from 2D and 3D feature films to AAA Video Games. Catherine is co-founder of Rocket 5 Studios, an award-winning Toronto-based indie game development studio specializing in emergent technologies and XR. Catherine views narrative and character development through a feminist lens and is excited at the possibilities of interactive storytelling. Currently living in rural Ontario, Catherine maintains her animation and game development practices and teaches experimental animation at the Ontario College of Art & Design.

The thesis project Birb Watching is a hybrid research project and VR experience prototype. While engaging in this experience, you ‘sit’ on a bench in a virtual forest glade, surrounded by trees, shrubbery and wildflowers. Soft breezes are gently blowing the leaves and grasses. The dappled sunlight evokes a feeling of peace and well-being. The forest has your back, but you can see the gentle horizon all around you. The primary goal of the level design is to make the player feel comfortable and safe. The breeze mimics the breath, and if you look and listen, you can see and hear birbs in the distance, all around you. Using hand tracking to control the experiences, you are fully immersed. There are no barriers between you and the virtual world. When a birb lands on your outstretched hand, you can almost feel it.

Keeping it cozy! Cozy games are created to focus on intrinsic rewards (like fun, beauty, relationships) rather than the high-stress/fight/survive gameplay that we commonly associate with video games. Coziness in games can be achieved through activating a sense of the familiar – nostalgia plays a big part. Repetition, food, craft, companionship and comfort all combine to fulfill higher order needs (Maslow’s scale) like connection, esteem and self-actualization. Like mindfulness, these activities serve to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system.

In researching the kind of birbs and borbs , barbs and birbles that will inhabit this virtual space, a great deal of time was spent observing birds: in their habitat, in scientific journals and writings, stuffed in museums and in documentaries. While absorbing this information, I found the act of recording, sketching and drawing the different birds that would eventually become the 5 classes of bird-like beings was very similar to how I envisioned the game-play. Pouring over data, observing behaviour and shape languages, the very act of drawing these critters was a tactile contemplative experience.

While the shape language and colour themes explored in *Birb Watching* are whimsical and fun, they are based on themes that emerged from my interpretation of the personality and characteristics of 5 different bird species. These are the 5 classes of ‘birbs’. 1. The Birb: Chickadees are your basic buddy bird. They are first to arrive and will stick by you. 2. The Birble: Finches are also abundant and will fly anywhere chickadees do. 3. The Borb: The Mourning doves are slower, plumper and not as agile as the other birds. They flap around and move in a comical way. 4. The Barb: Slightly menacing, the Blue Jays don’t get along with everyone, but have their own unique space in this world. 5. As yet unnamed: Finally, the nuthatch is our shyest birb friend. They will avoid Barbs and fly super fast.

The look of the birbs evolved as game-play emerged. The experience is more about “bird noticing” (Jenny Odell) - looking at birds through an artist’s lens rather than serious ornithological bird watching. The most satisfying shapes were achieved through needle-felting soft sculpture, as seen in the photogrammetry capture on the right. In VR, it is important for the characters to be light enough for the game to run at 60 frames per second. Lag can lead to vection (a feeling of nausea caused by the illusion of motion in a stationary observer). The comfort of the player is critical to developing a sense of embodiment in this virtual space.

A rejection zero-sum economic structures and divisive behaviour stimulae, *Birb Watching* creates a world of soft abundance. Needle felted soft sculpture, combined with spikey metallic legs and claws, perfectly evoke how I feel about birds. They are absolutely adorable descendants of dinosaurs (theropods).

The birb forms are familiar but not real. They gain their emotional resonance through naturalistic motion and behaviour. Each birb class will move with their own unique rhythm, flight path and speed. The way they look around, eat and flutter is based on solid observation of bird movement. Drawing from my background as character animator and game developer, the animation tree for each bird will help create the illusion of life needed to build relationships with the player.

Understanding the space: feed the birds and they will come. The basic experience of *Birb Watching* is to chill and hang out with your local virtual birbs. There are 5 classes of birbs, 5 feeder types and 5 food varieties. There are 5 zones through which the birds travel to navigate their curiosity and dietary needs. There are always birds in Zone 5, the distant forest. As you sit in the center of your virtual world, you can see birds traveling closer and closer. The Birbs are the first to arrive – and where they are, other birb types feel safe to be. Over time, the player will figure out who likes whom, which birbs like which food, and understand that some feeders facilitate particular feed and birbs better than others. There are no hard rules. Everyone can experience the game in the way that they feel most comfortable. Lack of overt rules and directions encourage open-ended play and suppress the completionist instincts that disrupt the cozy experience.

Birb behaviour design – From Class 01 (Birb - based on the Chickadee) being the most friendly and easiest to see to Class 05 ( Nuthatch) – the shiest, most elusive and pickiest eater. Each birb has their own favouritess and foibles, but no one really likes the noisy, aggressive Class 04 (Barb - Blue Jay). The gentle strategy for winning a game you can’t loose is to find a way for all Classes to peacefully co-exist in a Non-Zero Sum environment.

This rotoscoped animation test was completed early on in the development of this thesis project. The digital surfacing processes that are currently being explored will support the surface vibration effect that is so appealing in 2D animation.

Project Description

A hybrid research project, Birb Watching is a VR experience can best be described as a bird watching and mindfulness simulator. In this game space, the user can explore themes of connection, the nature of embodiment in a virtual world, our relationships to technology, nature, and mental health, and seek humane responses to the socio-political pressures of living in the era of the Attention Economy and the Anthropocene. Academic research into philosophy, popular neuroscience and modern political theory has been the foundation of the decision-making process through which the game concept has been developed. While the artist has spent hundreds of hours peeping at birds, the experience follows a more playful rather than ornithological approach.

Birb Watching

Birb Watching follows the tenets of Cozy Games. Unlike traditional bird watching simulators, Birb Watching will not foster completionist instincts. It is a game that the user can win, but there is no lose state. Birb Watching is a peaceful and gentle experience, allowing for relaxation and a gradual understanding of the relationships that can develop between bird and player, bird and bird, and player and environment. In this way, the user may learn something of their own connectedness to the inhabitants of this world. The user will be grounded in the here and now - honouring the reality of this experience in this virtual biosphere, rooted in a moment and space that exists out of time and place. The game focuses on intrinsic rewards, craft, repetition of mundane tasks and observing and interacting with the environment and the AI creatures within it. Birb Watching will employ hand-tracking to manipulate the virtual world, so other than the VR headset, barriers to play will be minimal.

3D Animation

2021 2022 2023 2024

All coursesClose

Top