Fay – Carving Memories

Maria Herholdt Engermann & Rita Martinos / Fabian Driehorst / Denmark & Germany

Fay is narrative following a young girls journey, who is mourning the loss of her father and is struggling to understand her emotions within the grieving process.Through the lens of a VR headset, the audience will be placed in her family home, to experience through her eyes her thoughts, emotions and memories of her late
father. The experience is interactive and the audience have to unlock different rooms, repair broken wooden toys with golden paint, and listen to multiple snippets of authentic
grieving experiences – stories from real people who have lost, all with an intention to shed
light on the broad topic of grief and cope mechanisms.

The viewer is introduced to Fay as a pre-teen and as an adult, mainly through a voice-over
conversation with herself reflecting on her own experience. The whole concept and story
structure revolves within her home, where the viewer is introduced to her family and three
main locations: a wooden workshop, a living room, and a backyard. The Workshop should act as a “safe space”, being a warm space filled with beautiful wooden art pieces, and it’s where Fay connects with her father through his hobby as a woodworker. In this room the user will be guided to interact and be involved in Fay’s healing process, by carving woodworks and repairing broken pieces and sometimes listening to other real grieving
experiences in order to understand the variety of different grieving processes. The Living Room is another main location, and here the room should takes on several moods. When Fay is at her worst, the room flips upside down, with glasses shattered all over and floating all around the now dark-and-heavy space. Everything the audience touches breaks. The Backyard, the third place is a beautiful green space, gives an energy of surreal happiness. One scene involves a dream-like family gathering, until Fay’s father begins to glitch, along with the rest of the garden and the scene then transforms into a somber funeral.

At the end of the experience, the audience should find themselves back in the wooden workshop with the door to the Backyard open. Now vastly larger, filled with greenery as well as wooden artworks all around, that the user is
encouraged to pick up and explore. The chosen artistic wooden piece would then play out a
recording of a real grieving experience and healing process.

Fay is an innovative project that deals with a subject that affects most people
at some point in their own lives and/or in the lives of their loved ones’: experiencing loss.
Our overall goal is to reach a young audience, creating a safe space within the confines of a
headset, for them to gain a better familiarity and relatability with grief.