Video game

Dear Clara,

Faith Colello

Wallingford, CT

Advisor: Zhenzhen Qi

Artist Bio

My passion for storytelling began over a decade ago, when I first started dipping my toes into the water of creativity through digital music production. The instant I made my first song in Garageband on my mom’s Mac was the moment I knew I wanted to tell stories forever. Now, I’ve grown into my skin creating music in multiple genres across acoustic, lo-fi, and EDM genres under the names Leap of Faith and Nightfall District. Since then, I’ve coupled my skills in audio with game development. With a love for creative coding, high quality cinematics, and level/environment design, I feel deeply accomplished when I create worlds and experiences that look, feel, and sound like me. My biggest influences have come from both games and films, including The Spider-Man series, Viewfinder, Superliminal, Red Dead Redemption 2, Black Mirror, The Woman in the Yard, and a few of the Marvel movies (Dr. Strange, you’re so cool). My biggest goal is to create experiences and mechanics that have truly never been done before and find new ways to expand narrative storylines. I hope to leave a lasting impression on those who play my games and live through my stories.

Artist Statement

I create art to escape this world and create past the mental and physical limitations of humans. While I do love mysterious, dystopic, and darker narratives as seen in Black Mirror and the incredibly unique perspective shift of The Woman in the Yard, I also want to create exhilarating art with powerful cinematics. I want to explore themes that don’t make sense on the surface but provide outstanding narrative explanations that drive the story.

For Dear Clara, I felt it necessary to create this story in VR. As someone who has been witnessing my mother’s neurological decline and struggles with grief, I created this experience as an outlet for what I’ve been seeing and living through. VR was such an important medium – I want players to see themselves in a whole new body, experiencing everything in front of their eyes and isolated from the real world. Exploring themes of PTSD, grief, and dementia, I hope players find themselves frustrated and confused with the experience but also with a better understanding of these issues, and what it’s like to slowly lose control of yourself.