Katrina
Katrina is a virtual reality experience designed by Jenni Hutson and Andrew Taylor based on interviews with Keaton McNamara about her experience fleeing Hurricane Katrina as a child. Shown above is a video trailer for the experience, which includes footage from a participant wearing a VR headset. Katrina received a Festival Incentive Grant from the Northwestern Radio/TV/Film program in 2019.
My role in Katrina was as sound and experience designer. I conducted interviews with Keaton, edited the audio for the experience, and designed the virtual reality world in Unity.
Katrina puts narrative journalism in an interactive virtual reality world created in Unity to share the true story of a nine-year-old survivor of Hurricane Katrina over ten years later. Katrina combines a first-hand oral narrative, news footage from 2005, and a desolate and emotive virtual reality landscape to immerse the player in the world that so many experienced upon returning to New Orleans:
“There’s almost not words to describe how empty everything was for such a long time. Not necessarily physically, but that everything and everyone had been a little bit emptied by the experience.”
From Katrina: “I was kind of at an age where I understood everything that was going on, but I didn’t understand why everything like that had to happen to me. I didn’t really get that that’s just what happens in the world.”
Listen to the full audio of the experience:
