Thomas Brett
Cloak Wood
Cloak Wood
16mm Film
Produced by Madeline Woods
During my two years at RISD, I have been developing films and video games that hybridise techniques of live action and animation. This has primarily been done by reconstructing and modifying scenes from 3D scans that I make of objects, people, and places, allowing me to assemble new, imaginary spaces informed by the actual architecture and dimensions of my surroundings.
The film Cloak Wood was shot on 16mm Kodak stock. The physicality of this analogue technique confers the modified virtual space and its inhabitants with the aesthetic integrity of the actual. The virtual space, constructed from real objects and people, is thus received back into the physical realm through the process of film exposure, granting it a reality ontologically indiscernible from the accompanying live-action footage.
PASSAGE
ALLEY
FOREST
GAME
By blurring the lines between the physical and digital, Cloak Wood interrogates the notion of a real landscape versus a dreamed one. After all, both live-action and digital animation are merely representations of space, not space itself, and so both relate to architecture and landscape through an inherent virtuality and myth. I therefore consider this process-driven project a compelling procedure by which one might come to view a city. For through this film, if one begins to see the real image of a place as fiction, an audience is well positioned to perceive the place itself as fiction too. This grants the film’s narrative a unique opportunity to examine a real city as one would a mythology, allowing the work to visually explore the desires, ideologies and stories upon which the actual—and yet at one point imagined—metropolis was built.
