(Interactive VR Experience)

Swing is a narrative, Virtual Reality film combining 2D, 3D and 2.5D animation techniques. The story unfolds in overlapping acts that depict the internal and external struggles of a frustrated girl who is attempting and failing to swing on a playground swing. As she struggles with the swing, she imagines the demise of the children swinging successfully around her, and anger builds until she ends up taking it out on herself. When she finally hits rock bottom, she looks up to where she had been. A new perspective is found.

Director Biography – Mari Jaye Blanchard
Mari Jaye is an independent animator and filmmaker. After receiving her MFA in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania, and working for over a decade as a commercial muralist, she traded her brushes for a digital drawing tablet. Along with several of her own shorts, which have screened internationally including festivals in Annecy, Melbourne, Paris, and Berlin, she has produced animations for Sesame Workshop, MTV, Comedy Central and the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). She is an NYFA Fellow, an Asian American Arts Alliance Urban Artist Initiative (UAI) Fellow, and a co-founder of the NYC animation collective Family Camp.

While she continues her own independent work, Mari Jaye gets daily inspiration from her students and colleagues at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) where she is an Assistant Professor in the College of Art and Design’s School of Film and Animation.