A collaborative VR animation confronting the lack of racial and social justice awareness in the British education curriculum — built from an RSA-brief audio transcript by Jeffery Boakye.
The RSA's "Bridging Session" brief asked designers to turn a real audio transcript into a short VR animation for a public and policymaker audience. Our team chose "Interrogate the Truth," a discussion by Jeffery Boakye on dismantling racism in British education — arguing that meaningful reform has to start with the curriculum itself, not just policy conversation at the top.
We used a "Reduce and Reframe" exercise to distil the transcript's dense argument into a single, memorable brief the whole team could design against, rather than working from 20 minutes of nuanced discussion directly.
Before designing anything, we studied Dear Angelica (Oculus Story Studio, 2017), an award-winning VR short film, applying its five-stage design-thinking process — empathy, ideation, prototyping, implementation, user testing — as a structure for our own project. We looked closely at its hand-drawn art style, non-linear flashback storytelling and spatial sound design, and its "made in VR for VR" production philosophy, which became the core production approach we adopted ourselves.
We shortlisted and evaluated four VR animation tools — Quill, MasterpieceVR, Tvori and OpenBrush — weighing accessibility, cost, and how well each supported the "made in VR for VR" hand-drawn approach. OpenBrush won on ready Quest access and free expressive sketching, even though it meant giving up features like model import/export that its paid competitors offered.
We used the Lightning Decision Jam method — a structured, vote-based exercise — to move from a wide spread of individual ideas to one shared concept the whole team stood behind, rather than letting the loudest idea win by default.
The concept we landed on: the curriculum is a place stuck in time. An isolated island — the education system — sits frozen in monochrome while the rest of the world moves on in colour. Children who visit the island turn black-and-white themselves, unable to change what they don't question. Only by "interrogating the truth" can they return to colour.
Each team member was assigned specific scenes to generate in OpenBrush, working from the shared storyboard, before we combined and refined the animation together. My focus was translating the more abstract, metaphorical scenes — the isolated island, the monochrome transformation — into hand-drawn 3D visuals that stayed legible without leaning on obvious, literal imagery.
To reach a public audience beyond headset owners, we exported the experience as a 360° film for YouTube and Facebook — which surfaced real technical constraints. Our original 2D-image-based skybox caused visible seams in 3D space, so we built and compared a second version using a proper 3D-generated skybox, trading a small amount of the original hand-drawn charm for a technically cleaner 360° result.
Early viewers told us plainly that the abstract "balls as students" metaphor didn't land — several couldn't tell the balls represented children at all until the final classroom scene. Rather than defend the original concept, we replaced the balls with more human-like characters and added on-screen text to reinforce the narration, based directly on that feedback. It's a small example of a larger habit: treating a strong concept as a hypothesis to test, not a decision to protect.
This project is the clearest evidence in my portfolio of structured collaborative design under real constraints — dividing scene ownership across a team, applying a professional case study as a design framework rather than just inspiration, and choosing tools based on genuine trade-off analysis rather than familiarity. It also taught me to treat metaphor and abstraction as choices that need user testing like any other design decision, not artistic license that sits above critique.
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