When
the Virtual Becomes Real is an animation short that is based
around the issue of cyber-bullying. The narrative and the style of the
animation have been chosen to question the psychological effects that
cyber-bullying can have on an individual and how cyber-bullies can be overcome.
The style of animation will be stop motion photography but with animation over
the top to blend the real world with the virtual on-line world together.
When
the Virtual Becomes Real starts off with Rosie Shepherd, a
sixteen year old school girl walking home from school. She reads a news story
on her phone which talks about how popular the social network site Your Book is
and how any teenagers without it risk becoming outcasts. Therefore once she
gets home she goes into the study and decides to sign up to Your Book. Once she
has created her profile she goes through adding all of the people she knows
from school.
The next morning when she is
woken by her alarm clock she sees that a few of the people have already started
accepting her friend requests. Feeling happy and popular she gets ready and
leaves for school. As soon as she arrives home again that afternoon she logs
straight onto Your Book to check out her profile. She sees someone has written
on her profile about how they love that she has finally got Your Book, it is
some girl who she doesn’t know too well but this doesn’t stop her feeling
excited. As the evening progresses her phone updates her as people start to
like that comment. Slowly people start leaving other comments to dig at Rosie.
Over the next few days anything she does or says on Your Book starts to receive
more and more negative reactions.
As the nasty comments build
Rosie gets more and more upset, she gets receives a lot of nasty responses to a
photo she has uploaded of her and her cat. The comments even say how the cat is
Rosie’s only friend. Rosie herself suddenly becomes animated herself. All the
abuse is too much and too real for her, what had just been something virtual
before is completely real and the comments have become imbedded within her
mind. We see a sequence which shows the comments floating around in her mind,
never going away.
Rosie is then shown
struggling to sleep and then struggling to get ready for school as she becomes depressed.
She can’t take it anymore, finally one afternoon after receiving more cyber
abuse on her profile she closes the laptop and pushes it away. She sits in bed
upset hugging a teddy for comfort. She is looking out at the window when she
sees a vision in her head. The vision is of her taking a load of pills in order
to end all her pain and suffering, escaping this nasty world. Suicide is an
option that many victims to take, but not Rosie. She then closes the blind
banishing those thoughts; she will not let the bullies defeat her. Instead she
opens the laptop back up and instead goes through blocking every single person
who has cause her pain over Your Book. The cyber-bullies can no longer access
her, the platform which they relied on for their abuse has been removed.
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