Attraction

2020

A short film about humans and the light

The short film “Attraction” explores the influence of the sun on the life of humans in the city. It is based on the poem “ode to the sun” by David Barker. The poem with its repetitive style radiates an obsessive notion to me which I tried to recreate in my video. The footage of moths being drawn to light is intercut with footage of Hong Kong by night and day to emphasize the similarities between their and our behavior. The number of moths around the lightbulb increases with the number of people on the streets and the editing gets more fast paced to reflect this concentration of life under the sunlight. The image of the sun that gets increasingly brighter and closer leads to an overwhelming climax of overexposed footage of crowds of people that gather under the sun light - the culmination of the accumulation of people and their lives within the city. The distortion of sounds underlines this effect. This part is in reference to the second verse of the poem which concludes with the grim collection of words such as “good god gone” and inspired me to end my film in a dark and somewhat disturbing finale that ends abruptly just as the poem does. Therefore, the video concludes with the image of moths flocking around the sun, like humans do on earth. It is an exaggeration of this attraction to the sun that all (or most) life has.

The footage of the moths and the sun have been created digitally by me in the program Blender with compositing done in Davinci Resolve and sound editing in FL Studio. The footage of Hong Kong has been shot during daytime and nighttime on my phone. The sound of the sun is based on low frequency recordings of eruptions on the sun from NASA.

This short film tells a story of the sun and humanity. Therefore, it does not have a clear protagonist and linear plot. It rather attempts to visualize observations from daily life in the form of film.