Sophie Maria Vickers is a London based animator and mixed reality artist. She graduated from The Manchester School of Art with a first-class honours degree in Illustration with Animation. She continued her practice at the Royal College of Art, directing a virtual reality film which utilised both 2D and 3D animation within an immersive space. Over the last year she has enjoyed working primarily in 3D animation having directed a short animated film called Aeons Ark. She enjoys building other worldly places and exploring themes such as technology, religion and the future.
Sophie Maria Vickers
I am driven to create other-worldly spaces filled with fantastical creatures and enchantment. Overall, I aim to create a sense of wonder through my worlds. Currently I am exploring topics such as artificial intelligence, technology and religion. Since my practice is so centred around building spaces, utilising immersion and 3D was a natural progression.
Having primarily worked with traditional 2D mediums prior to discovering immersive technology, my work has developed significantly since delving into the world of 3D. I decided to continue on to postgraduate study as I felt I had begun to explore new and exciting ways of working with mixed reality animation. Throughout my time at the Royal College of Art I have continued experimenting with augmented reality, virtual reality and 360° video.
My first year film Do you Want to go to Tesco? (2021) was a virtual reality film exploring my relationship with my bedroom and reality throughout the pandemic.
For my graduation film Aeons Ark (2022) I decided to tackle creating my first fully 3D animated film. It has been an amazing experience to develop my skills both as a director and an animator over the last year. I am excited to continue building more new worlds in the future.
It was important for me that the world itself takes centre stage of the film. I wanted to create a highly tangible world which does not relate to a known time and place and therefore does not relate to a specific religion.
The humans in my film are very childlike, gormless creatures and throughout the process of making them I have thought of them as not really human.
The inspiration to have an artificially intelligent God in my film came from seeing a child interact with an Alexa. It is interesting the ways that technology and religion may intersect in the future.
The final scene in my film will be a contrast to the traditional calamitous depictions of flood we have seen throughout the world. I will instead be creating a sequence where the human bodies disintegrate and return back into the water peacfully.