MY WORK         ABOUT ME        CONTACT       BLOG
RTÉ / Enda Walsh

Touch

 
SHORT FILM
PHOTOGRAMMETRY 
BLENDER

A new short film, written by Enda Walsh and commissioned by RTÉ as part of their Illuminations art project in 2020. Featuring the voice of Rosaleen Linehan and the music of Irene Buckley.


The central visual theme in the text is this corridor of a care home. Enda and I liked the idea of this corridor breaking down to reveal an abstract corridor of memories and experiences that we journey through with the narrator. Visually, the images initially follow the text - "fields uncovered with walks", "a city is moved into and Dublin we call it", but then linger on the fondest memories as we move towards the woman's present.

The main technique I used to make the images is called photogrammetry. It is a magical digital process that can reconstruct three-dimensional space from a set of photographs. It is generally used to make high-fidelity, near photo-realistic models, I used it to produce very low-fidelity models. At a certain point, the images produced are a sort of abstract 3D pointillism, barely recognisable as real-world scenes, yet they are entirely extracted from photographs I took of woodlands, beaches and streets in Dublin, Wexford and Wicklow. To me, the results map nicely to the way we form and store memories, and how they eventually degrade, sometimes more than we'd like.

The visuals for Touch were made entirely with free and open-source software - Blender, Meshroom and FFmpeg.


JACK PHELAN - VIDEO ARTIST, DESIGNER, DIRECTOR        WICKLOW, IRELAND.