Dave Fischer Weblog

When I'm making really abstract movies, the idea that I work "algorithmically" seems somewhat reasonable - there are obvious mathematical shapes on screen, or geometric patterns of manipulation of photographs, etc. But what does it mean on the rare occasion when I make something with dialogue, scenes, etc?

Obviously if there's any image processing, that's straightforward. But what about editing?

Space Carney is a good example. This is a one-hour post-apocalyptic movie I shot in 2010/2011.

The movie is split into four different types of scene:

River footage - a long trip down the river.
Still photo sequence - photos fading into each other.
Video clip - the Space Carney walking, or doing something.
Broadcast - the Space Carney staring into a camera and talking.

The sequence of scenes follows this pattern:

RSRBRVRBR (repeat)

That is: every other scene is river footage. The other scenes alternate between a broadcast, or alternating still photos / video clip. Each scene is exactly 4000 frames. (So the "pacing" of the movie is: sin(frame*pi/4000).) Very easy to express algorithmically.

A few other notes:

The scene in which the Space Carney walks up to a projection of himself was done with an extra video camera & a rear-projected screen, not with computer processing. I refered to that as "the Zardoz scene" during shooting, because it was inspired by that kind of classic 70s sci-fi psychedelia.

The river sequence, in effect the whole movie, was directly inspired by the river flood scene near the beginning of the brilliant Polish sci-fi epic: "On The Silver Globe". (I destroyed one camera on the first attempt at the river footage. Luckily it was a cheap camcorder.)

Carney Editing