The narrative begins with a plastic cup sinking into the ocean against the backdrop of the shallow sea. As it continues to sink deeper and deeper, the plastic cup travels through the layers of the ocean,
from sunlight to the trenches.
While in the sunlight zone, a discus fish is accidentally trapped inside the cup. No matter how much it struggles, it is unable to break free from the plastic.
The cup continues to sink, passing by the different kinds of marine animals living in the layers of the ocean. The fish, stuck inside the cup, takes its last breath.
The further the cup travels into the ocean, the more it loses its shine. Covered in scratches, the flesh and skin inside the cup begin to decompose, leaving just its bones behind.
On the sea bed in the trenches, the cup lays to rest, amidst bits and pieces of trash, revealing a vast ocean cemetery.
Immersive Experience
The full-dome environment fully wraps around the audience, taking advantage of the ocean’s vast, directionless space.
This first-person viewpoint draws viewers directly into the unsettling sensation of sinking deep into the abyss.
360° Full dome format 3D Animation
Running time: 2 minutes.
Production period : 2025.01 - 2025.04
Created by Yeoleum and Valeska
Software Used: Blender, After Effects
The narrative begins at the sunlit surface of the ocean and slowly descends into its deepest trenches. Viewers observe organic matter—skin and bones—gradually decomposing as nature reclaims everything.
In stark contrast, a plastic cup drifts aimlessly through the depths, resisting decay for centuries and serving as a persistent symbol of human waste in a vast underwater graveyard.
OCEAN CEMETERY
Storyline
2025. 06 Fulldome Festival Brno, Czechia, SCREENING
Work featured in Theater by Sandwich Vision, Apple Vision Pro’s immersive theater platform.
Screening
360° Video Directing Strategies
Using blurring and depth of field helped to guide the audiences’ focus to the cup most of the time.
The movement of the cup was also subtle, with a lot of gentle drifting along with the ocean currents from sinking to zooming in and zooming out, or travelling along a space.
This was made with the traditional format of a front-facing planetarium in mind. To account for the 360º format, while there is not much going on in the back, there are still some background elements that are not faded out.
Constant iteration and testing was also done in Amateras to visualise the scale of the scene.
Rendering the Focal Point
Background
A stock image turned into video or a new 3D scene with minimal movement
Purpose is to ‘light’ the scene and add to the story in which the environment is set in
Foreground
Additional layer to add richness and depth to further detail the scene
Should be in a crescent moon shape that covers the side to side of the fisheye in order to appear as flat in the dome
Could also be the other fishes swimming around to keep the scene busy, but not too distracting from the main character
Focal Point
The star of the show, the cup that is rendered as a separate layer so that depth of field can be added in post
Gaussian blur settings can be added to the other layers to keep this one in focus
Video created with MidJourney AI
VR Converter in After Effects
Mirror Ball Converter in Blender
Upon feeding a stock image into MidJourney, we created a 16:9 video where the water is animated and there is minimal but convincing camera movement.
We tried converting the video into fisheye in two different ways.
Mirror Ball Converter in Blender By importing the video into Blender as an Environment Texture, the video would play as a sequence and could be rendered in a fisheye format. However, it is limited in rotation, and would increase rendering times.
VR Converter in After Effects By importing the video into After Effects and applying the VR Converter effect from 16:9 to Fisheye, the video could be stitched together and rotated. However, this results in a seam. This could be worked around in after effects by applying a Gaussian Blur filter on a masked adjustment layer.
This 2D layering method means that most of the motion occurring in this scene are limited to zooming/panning.
Converting square to sphere format
16:9 video was converted into a fisheye format using Blender and After Effects, though this approach restricts motion to simple zooming and panning.
For dynamic motion like turning or traveling through spaces, we built a fully populated 3D scene in Blender and rendered it directly in fisheye format using Blender's panoramic camera settings.
Fisheye Rendering in 3D scene
Guided by the first-person narration, the audience initially assumes the speaker is a fish trapped inside a cup.
However, as the fish dies, the narrator's true identity—the plastic cup itself— is gradually revealed, highlighting the stark contrast between natural organic decomposition and the immortality of human waste.
Narrative Twist