RELOADED

About

Co-created with secondary-school students, RELOADED explores how immersive storytelling can foster stronger emotional connections and enhance understanding of knife crime among 14- and 15-year-olds. 

The VR immersive film – RELOADED – leverages innovative creative practice workflows within an interdisciplinary landscape to maximise the creativity and efficiency of producing stories for meaningful, impactful, and attitude-changing experience. The project adopted an immersive narrative approach to co-create a VR film about knife-related violence with school students, with the use of VR seen as an effective means to trigger preventative attitudinal change.  

The possibility of scoping and co-creating prototype immersive experiences with young people is crucial to design more participatory and effective interventions able to provide a counter-narrative to the fear culture surrounding knife crime. The scoping took the form of a series of co-creation workshops with schools in Chelmsford (Essex) in the United Kingdom to collate and analyse qualitative data based on semi-structured discussions with school participants, with the aim of testing various technological solutions for the development of the immersive film. 

Evaluation results show how the creation of a strong emotional connection between people and place through an immersive narrative based on factual events leaded to a deeper awareness of the personal circumstances that lead to knife-related violence. Additionally, the film generated a better understanding of the demands and issues faced by young people in their spatial and social contexts. Our findings underscore the potential of immersive storytelling in fostering understanding among young people on complex social issues, such as knife crime.