dark parts

experimental short film, 2020

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Video

Context

Here is the practical version of the inspiration for this piece:

This film was inspired by architectural visualization (archviz for short), which I encountered a lot in the process of learning to use Blender. Archviz is a field in its own right, but many of the renders I saw pictured perfect homes, completely uncluttered, as if no one lived there (of course, no one did, nor could they). I felt some weird desire to destroy these homes, or at least to position them in a more likely situation than inhuman cleanliness. Having a dream-like walk through one felt like the easiest way to destroy the intended use or appearance of the home, without actually ripping the model of the house to shreds.

Here is the art-forward version:

This piece is inspired by perfect, impossible homes, that exist only between magazine covers and the visions of architects. Homes before the people are in them, before the newspaper pile on the sofa, before the rotting grapefruit in the back of the fridge, before the overflowing laundry basket beside the bed. Homes when they are just ideas, places that seem to smudge all their textures away when you dream about them, illuminated by axioms you are so certain of until you wake up. Homes that make you feel less like yourself. Homes when you’re not sure how to change. Homes that are just houses, raw buildings in someone else’s plan for no one’s future.

And here is the interesting coincidence:

This piece was not originally a pandemic piece. I rendered and assembled everything over a three-week period in February 2020, when the coronavirus was still an occasional headline about forced quarantines in China. I was entirely inspired by the behavior of dreams and the way physical spaces work (or don't work) in dreams, and not in the slightest assuming that we would very imminently be trapped in our homes.

But the similarities are pretty relevant! Art predicting life is not unheard of, but I've never had something hit the nail on the head with such accuracy.

Press

Stills