Hasta La Ideas

Design studio ATYP has created this striking studio project – a short film that messes with your sense of perception…

According to ATYP co-founder, Chris Angelkov, the piece was born out of a conceptual investigation into “the idea of matter vs mind”. “Which touches on themes involving the world and how we interpret it,” he continues. “What is real and what is perceived, the relationship between science and philosophy etc. It’s quite a far out starting point for a film that looks the way it does, but we focused down on a more tangible execution involving the relationship between reality and perception: how something as pure as a physics involving Newton’s three laws of motion can be altered by perception, infiltrating and affecting the course of events.”

To create it, the team at ATYP used the dynamics engine inside Maxons Cinema 4D to drive all the animation and events that happen within the film. “The chain of events that unfold are one constant simulation that we are observing, primarily from a single camera locked in proximity to the ‘atoms’,” Angelkov continues. “The simulation happens from top to bottom in our 3D software as objects fall to the ground, so we rotated the camera head through 90 degrees to make the atom appear to be travelling sideways. Yes there are a few occasions where we break out from this locked position but for the majority we chose to record this from a surreal, and physically impossible, viewpoint.

“This is because we wanted to experience the film from the atom’s point of view, in order to see what it experiences as it is invaded by the surrounding landscapes. It’s more claustrophobic and this adds a unexpected element to the film. Kind of like when you’re diving with a mask on and keep thinking that the next thing that comes into view might be a shark. It keeps one on one’s toes, and we liked that element of trapping you into the viewing experience.

“So… we dropped our ‘atom’ and set it off on a constant path, and to a certain extent, the film really made itself. There was quite a bit of chasing going on, as wind speeds and impact forces threw the spheres this way and that as we worked out where to position obstacles within the simulation. But after some careful and tedious arrangement we were able to hit go and the whole dynamic simulation was left to its own devices from that initial launch. We of course ‘painted’ and textured the environments as we imagined, but we used tessellated textures to cement the idea of synthesis and mathematic models. But their origins are organic and lie in microscopic photography of areas far too small for the human eye to read.” Mind-boggling, right?

Credits:
Design and direction: ATYP
Audio composition: Benji Merrison