Highlights of the London College of Communications Postgraduate Show 2024: Screen

With the rows of scripts, it was hard not to fall into the fictional worlds of MA Screenwriting’s work. Carly Maslowski’s Two of Cups (2024) draws us into a Victorian-era queer romance between a governess and a resurrected ancient warrior woman, while Benjamin Sutherland’s Cockpits (2024) narrates a French driver’s ambitions to be the first woman to win the Grand Prix in a riveting 1930s political motor racing drama.

The screenings of MA Documentary Film were also difficult to give a miss. Lola Lee (Bochen Li)’s A Taste of Belonging (2024) is an intimately shot heartwarming film following South Korean immigrant and food writer Su Scott’s self-discovery of reconnecting with her heritage through food.

The camera shows Su making traditional Korean dishes, slicing tofu and tossing chopped spring onion into a boiling pot of spicy stew as she shares her wishes to pass down this cultural knowledge through food with her mixed-race daughter.

Erika Lau’s Inertia (2024) , displayed as a three-channel installation of box TVs, recounted the devastating aftermath of a flood caused by Storm Babet, an intense cyclone and windstorm that affected the UK in October 2023. Following a British family, the film narrates a story of survival and resilience as the family shares the physical and emotional toil the flood caused, coming to terms with what they have lost, and their perseverance in rebuilding their home.

Feeling touched by the work I saw, I made my way up the steps to the Upper Gallery space. Greeted by installations of screens of bright animated graphics, props and glossy prints, I found myself drawn to a dark isolated room, where I found Yang-hsi Hsiao ’s work, The Old Enemy (2024) from MA Virtual Reality.

I observed Yang-hsi assist a visitor with a VR headset and set up her immersive experimental film. The film combines screeching high-pitched frequencies with glitched-out monochromatic human figures in an eerie film, telling a tale of cyclical violence and its influence on our bodies and minds.

Yang-hsi eagerly shared with me the background behind her project which is based on her grandfather’s close friend who disappeared as mysteriously as he entered their village decades ago. This friend had never left their village for 20 years, but on the one day he did, he was killed by a car the moment he stepped into a taxi. They never knew his name or where he came from but learned from the Taiwanese police that her grandfather’s friend had a history of multiple counts of murder, and likely held a high social rank in the rural village he came from. The police suspected that his death was a result of revenge. Yang-hsi explained to me in Mandarin, “I had always been very interested in his story, that is, how could he have been such a chaotic person—so easily angered and so violent before—yet after entering our village, he seemed to cut off some kind of violent cycle and became a person who could live well there and get along with others?”

Yang-hsi shared that she wanted to use the immersive qualities of VR to express the various forms that violence takes and how it affects us. She elaborated in Mandarin, “I think that there are many different forms of violence. For example, it is not necessarily the kind of violence that hurts you physically. It could also be like noise—it does not really touch you, but the misery it causes remains in your body, and may even affect your life.” She also plans to develop her VR experimental film further. This thoughtful work will be something I look forward to following.

Next, I ventured further into the college and encountered the work of MA Music Production in the Atrium. The hallway was decorated with posters of local music events, a call-out from a budding music label gathering emerging musicians and talent and installations showcasing music projects.

I was drawn to Yi Yang’s A Bottle of Water (2024) , a mixed-media installation of moving image, photography, textiles and music, depicting the emotional journeys of East Asian lesbians in navigating intimate relationships in a world complicated by cultural and societal expectations. The video’s dreamy soundtrack paired with its shoegazey visuals expressed a soft yearning that left me with a wistful feeling.

Eager to catch more interactive projects before closing time, I made my way down the steps into the Well Gallery where a flash of hot pink caught my eye. Vinyl pixel letters on the wall announce the name of this work, Olreverie (2024), by fellow Post-Grad Community Ambassador, Jana Abou Nasr of MA Virtual Reality.

In this project, Jana designed a multisensory experience that allows users to simultaneously exist in virtual and physical reality. Olreverie is an XR synesthetic design that simulates the phenomenon of synesthesia, where the experience of one sense involuntarily triggers a secondary sense. For example, tasting words or associating numbers with colours.

Jana shared that she wanted to take a marketing perspective and chose the brand Lush as a case study. She explained, “This brand Lush (has) a product called Deep Sleep, where the person or the user is going to go from sense-to-sense interpretation. So, the smell of the product is translated into visuals and audio in the first part of my project, which is in projection mapping, and then the person gets to enter their own dreamscape through virtual reality using the Meta Quest 3…the person gets to relax themselves, interact with different things around them, like bubbles, butterflies, and extracting oil from different plants. It's a very relaxing experience. It is meant to take you into a dreamscape until you wake up at the end of this experience.”

As part of the experience, users also touch salt crystals while using the Air pods Max to hear the sounds of crystallisation happening around them in spatial audio. Importantly, she wanted to create this immersive experience to demonstrate to brands how they can stand out by resonating with consumers through memorable experiences.

Ending my tour walking through the quieter areas of LCC, I saw the vibrant displays and pop-ups by MA Film and MA Games Design. Unfortunately, as I was visiting on the last day I missed the screenings and demonstrations for their work. Nonetheless, I could easily imagine how the previous crowds of visitors enjoyed these theatrical photo ops and interactive elements around the space. I took a mental note to visit the UAL Showcase online platform to catch the projects that I missed.

As a graduating student myself, I left LCC with a bittersweet feeling. After months of hard work, experimenting, succeeding and failing within the safe confines of UAL, we return to society again armed with new knowledge, connections and ideas. I felt inspired by the stories that my fellow graduates felt were important to tell and how they used their talents to design creative solutions and storytelling techniques. From the showcase, it was clear to me that these LCC graduates were ready to make their mark as professionals and grow into leaders of their own.

Related links

• UAL Post-Grad Community
• Post-Grad Community Ambassadors
• UAL Showcase online platform - LCC

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