Since the launch three weeks ago, our film Nearness has been seen almost 100,000 times, and favourited by over 500 people. Thanks for all the feedback and commentary!
Creativity contacted us for a “Behind the Work” feature where Jack Schulze goes deeper into the film:
“RFID is a complex and fairly abstract technology to grasp. We have to be careful in how we communicate with it. There are many leaps of imagination and understanding required to grasp it and hold a useful model of how it works and what is happening, let alone see how it maps usefully and elegantly into the world around us. The familiarity of the chain reaction form, means the audience quickly grasps that the normal kinetic transfer of force in the sequence is replaced by invisible forces that work very closely together. Like invisible digital breaths between objects. Because the form was familiar, our hope was the concept of nearness without touching would be clearly understood.”
Shots Magazine asked us to write about new design futures with rfid chips. Here we went a bit further into our film production process in general:
“There has been constant refinement of the production techniques not only to convey designed objects and their surroundings evocatively, but also the invisible layers of interchange and interaction that are increasingly both digital and physical. It turns out that contemporary cinematic techniques such as motion tracking, match moving and the integration of video with 3D motion graphics are ideal tools for visualising, prototyping and communicating about ubiquitous technology.”
And—in a twist that I find particularly satisfying—the UK newspaper Metro wrote about the film, calling it a ‘fun glimpse at a future where you control machines by waving your mobile at them, and everything goes ‘beep’ as you walk by.’
Since Metro is distributed mainly on public transport, it’s lovely to think of their 1.3 million readers all clutching their Oyster cards while reading about the film.
Related things:
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- Responses to ‘Nearness’ The broad response to the short film Nearness has been tremendous. In the two days since it was launched it has received over 55,000 views and has been covered all over the internet. It......
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- Responses to ‘Immaterials’ In the two weeks since we launched our film Immaterials we’ve seen it spread across the internet, going much further than we anticipated for such an esoteric exploration! So far it’s been covered by......