No Passengers: Episode 3

From the outset, the foundational mantra for this project was ‘Radical Imagination’, which gave us free rein in the expression of some truly mind-bending concepts. The challenge being to capture Nelly’s passion for hard science, whilst presenting it in an accessible and highly visual way. We kicked-off the collaboration with a deep-dive workshop with Nelly herself, to get to the nub of what inspires and informs her work. We also looked at her past experiments and design language, so all of these trademarks could then be woven into the fabric of the narrative. Meanwhile, we devised a series of consequences, to provide a tangible daisy chain of relationships across the entire multiverse of her ideas. In total, we created three distinct scenes, with a number of different sublevels, including an encounter with a giant squid, exploding marshmallows, a pair of Schrodinger’s cats – and a dizzying journey through the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector.

Approaches to VP are becoming ever more modular, nimble – and affordable, so the flexible set-up at MARS Volume allowed us to take full advantage of free-standing LED panels for the purposes of tailoring in-camera lighting and dynamic reflections, to simulate high-speed travel – without the need for a turntable or rolling road. The flexibility of these ‘wild walls’ allowed us not only to dictate precisely where we wanted to position the effects – without the risk of kit and crew creeping into frame, but also art direct the scene on the fly, which resulted in a number of happy accidents that provided additional coverage for the edit.