It's no coincidence that some of the most original digital narrative work being produced today comes from students.
In particular, we've seen a flood of brilliant stuff from graduate level efforts, likely due to the free expression of academia (no pressure to turn the work directly into revenue), combined with master's level technical and conceptual skills that allow final projects to match the blueprints inside a creator's mind.
For evidence, see motion book 'Hirngespinster' by Tristan Hohne, TU + (Varathit Uthaisri)'s 'Surface' film, and Camille Scherrer's Augmented Reality work, to mention just a few. Now, add Firman Machda to that list.
Machda is an Indonesian who is/was working on his masters of art at Newport School of Media and Design (Wales)--'Empty Space' is his MA graduation project, inspired by Hong Kong photography, especially photos from Kowloon Walled City.
"It's about a man trying to escape from his reality ... a construction worker who exists in a visually cluttered and overpopulated city," says Machda. "He finds some peace in an empty space, and ends up escaping from his very reality through it."
The film combines a hallucinatory, paranoid narrative with a claustrophobic environment, resulting in a story that can be unsettling and a challenge to understand--an outcome not lost on Machda.
"The challenge for me was getting people to follow and understand the story without guidance [no dialogue or narration]. I created this film purely based on visual narrative first, the sound was added later after David Kamp agreed to help with the audio design."
That audio plays no small part though. Every tone is eery, and even the mechanical noise has a gross vocal quality to it. Combine that with the hard edged shadows that behave like an inescapable overlord, and clunky, cumbersome character movement, and every frame of this film is tense. To an urban dweller, there's a sickening sense of the inevitable outcome.
"In the end, I just tried to create a loose enough story that the audience can have its own interpretation of the film."
Machda's next project is a short film about how social media affects people's behavior.
Visit www.machda.com for more info.
