Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Text Storyboard

This video looks at the exploration of a futuristic city and tries to make evident the idea that cities will one day be highly automated, so much so that humans will be subservient to machines and the built environment. The video shows a more or less sterile environment run by machines and hover-cars, a place where human presence is insignificant. The small urban environment is located on an island platform floating in the depths of space where vehicular transport is not limited to the constraints set by gravity. The city consists of a variety of building types, from traditional rectilinear forms to bizarre curvilinear forms. Connections from one city to the next are by way of a vertical transport duct located on the outskirts of the city. Elements borrowed from the previous assignments relating to "fence" include drama, levity, transparency, release, shift, trace, merge, perforate, imprint, and clarity. Another guiding theme is that of automation.

The video begins with the introduction of a slow rhythmic soundtrack. The opening scene takes the viewer through the inner workings of the future city, inside a workshop completely run by machines. The robots are in the process of building a hover-car before it is released into the city. The old brick workshop gives the impression that something old had once been here, but had been overrun and inhabited by robots. Once the hover-car is released, the audience will get their first view of the deep space futuristic city with hover-cars flying through the air and not a human in sight. The viewer will then be taken on a journey through the city on the back of the recently built hover-car. The video is relatively slow paced so as to give an air of newness and intrigue. Land shots as well as "bird's eye" shots give an overall sense of the city in its context. It is a city in isolation from humans and other life form.

A "fly-through" section of the video takes the viewer on an experiential trip down so called "alley-ways", between levitating roadways, and around the tall landmark buildings in the city's centre. A core theme behind the video is the idea of transparency. This idea encapsulates a series of other themes like "tracing, merging, and perforation".

The backing soundtrack, Carla Bruni's "l'excessive" is used to provide a sense of rhythm both in the transitions between scenes and in the content of the scenes.

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