Nested Cinema Co-creation: Advancing female inclusion through immersive experience innovation and storytelling.

Sayer, Jayne; Prokopic, Pavel

Abstract

This presentation focuses on the latest stage of the long-term practice-as-research project entitled Nested Cinema, which establishes co-creative practice with female film and media students at the University of Salford. This stage of the research addresses the under-representation of female creatives in technical careers and educational pathways by exploring female engagement and mindsets within creative technical environments, allowing the participants to realise their creative vision, leadership potential and collaborative skills. Applying approaches such as co-creation of a learning community with the inclusion of identity and noticing (Hod, Dvir, Tueg, 2023), and considering further ideas on how to challenge fixed mindsets (Dweck, 2008; Nottingham & Larsson, 2019), this stage of the project aims to build confidence and technological engagement in aspiring female professionals through creative experiences within the cutting-edge PaR and technological context of Nested Cinema.

Nested Cinema combines spatial, virtual and screen modes of content presentation, orchestrating media and IoT technologies through an innovative mode of experience called nesting. Nesting embeds and integrates spatial, virtual, screen and sonic layers of viewer experience for an enhanced sense of immersion while staying true to the aesthetic, dramatic and storytelling powers of cinema. In this way, Nested Cinema lessens the boundaries between the physical and the virtual, between the real and the imaginary, while contributing to an existing research context within expanded cinema (Balsom, 2013), immersive experiences (Ng, 2021), cinematic VR (Szita et.al., 2018) but also theoretical contexts on spatiality (Knight-Hill, 2020), embodiment (Sobchack, 1992) and emergent narrative (Walsh, 2011).

In this presentation, we explain, contextualise and demonstrate the Nested Cinema concept, using extensive audio-visual documentation that includes a 360 VR experience demonstration. Subsequently, we elaborate on the educational co-creative approaches to working with female creatives in a workshop setting, sharing audio-visual and VR examples of the new work they have created for the Nested Cinema platform, while giving insight into their personal and professional growth.


Entering Nested Cinema: https://vimeo.com/859813805
Nested Cinema 360 documentation sample: https://vimeo.com/847922614

• Presentation Conference Type: Presentation / Talk
• Conference Name: Visual Media Lab Conference (VMLC) 2025
• Start Date: Apr 10, 2025
• End Date: Jul 13, 2025
• Acceptance Date: Feb 20, 2025
• Publication Date: Apr 12, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jul 4, 2025
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed