Sensory Storytellers: Virtual Production, World Building, and Collaborative Authorship in Screen Education

Abstract

This practice discovery examines how virtual production technologies can reshape screen production pedagogy through the lens of sensory storytelling: a mode of narrative emergence in which meaning arises through embodied engagement with space, light, material, and atmosphere. Drawing on the Fire & Ice (2025) workshop conducted at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS), the study investigates how real-time virtual environments function as pedagogical scaffolding for collaborative authorship. Grounded in World Building methodology, embodied cognition, and distributed creativity, the workshop invited production design, cinematography, and directing students to develop immersive environments in Unreal Engine before any narrative was determined, culminating in a one-day ICVFX shoot on the AFTRS LED volume. The study draws on student screenwork and reflective responses to identify three interrelated pedagogical conditions: embodied iteration as a mode of learning, authorship as negotiated practice, and sensory storytelling as a proto-narrative condition. The findings demonstrate that world-first virtual production pedagogy cultivates hybrid spatial literacy and collaborative capacity, offering a framework for rethinking how screen stories emerge and who gets to shape them.   

Keywords: Virtual Production, World Building, Distributed Creativity, Embodied Cognition, Sensory Storytelling, Screen Pedagogy