lilpocketboy

“Hey Chloe, wanna watch Spirits Within again?”

My first 3D short made in two month at MOPA ( Supinfocom Arles ).

Soft Crash

Short film by Alan Warburton is a Surrealist 3D graphics rendering related to finance and power which, given the recent events in the UK, seems relevant:

The concept was inspired by an unusual card game I played in 2004: at the point where one player should have won, the few remaining cards kept circulating endlessly in limited permutations. Unexpectedly, the game had reached a deadlock where no player could win. It was only after many rounds of play that we realised something was wrong: one card was missing from the deck.

This missing part had created the conditions for a kind of structural stability. No player could win, yet no player could lose so long as they continued circulating the cards. The free market of the game had become a cartel, an system of limited liability and risk based on collusion: an oligopoly whose stability curiously depended on a fundamental absence at the centre of the game.

Soft Crash takes this game model and speculates on how it might be mapped to the financial collapse of 2008 and the subsequent public bank bailouts, austerity economics and recent trend towards nationalist isolationism. It’s a visual rendering of a neoliberalist endgame, where wealth and power are trapped in a closed system for the 1%.

Are we the missing card?