What Are We Talking About, When We Talk About Time?
Type: Personal Study
Date: 10.2017- 11.2017
Team: Individual Work
Tool: Rhino, Rhinoscript, Photoshop, Illustrator
This study is a narrative interpretation of spatial form and time transition. “What’s the spatial experience when we do time traveling?” This question came to me when watching a sci-fi movie called "Predestination" and motivated my thinking towards the relationships among timelines, characters and spatial geometrics in this narrative.
The interpretation process started from analyzing, distinguishing and combining storylines, then prototyped spatial geometrics per the storyline. A final exploration was to choose the most important intersection among all storylines as a representative and explored the spatial form where all the events meet.
Storyline Analysis
1. Baby Jane was brought to orphanage by the barkeeper.
2. The Barkeeper brought John back to the time when John met Jane and they fell in love. After that, John was brought to the future by the barkeeper and Jane was abandoned.
3. Jane gave birth to the baby Jane. After two weeks, the barkeeper stole the baby.
4. Jane became John after transsexual operations.
5. John and the barkeeper met each other and had a conversation.
6. Agent John successfully defused the bomb but his face was ruined during the explosion. The barkeeper saved John by handing him the time machines.
7. The barkeeper found the Fizzle Bomber to be himself and killed him.
8. John was persuaded to be an agent.
9. John became the barkeeper.
10. The barkeeper received his final mission.
11. The barkeeper became the Fizzle Bomber.
Film Collage
Timeline Analysis
Scenario Matrix
Space Generation
The core metaphor of the film is Uroboros, a snake that bites its own tail. This line inspires me to utilize torus as the prototype of the study. The radius of the two circles in the prototype may stand as the two storylines in the film. In my study, I try to change the two radii of the torus according to the film.
To start with, I choose eleven important eventsin the film and give them values from one to eleven. Then I study the timeline of the charactors individually to see how the numbers jumps as the film goes by. After studying the film carefully, I found that there are actually two storylies in the film. The first one is about Single Mother, including Jane and John; the other one Final mission consists the stories of the barkeeper and the Fizzle Bomber.
Combined Spatial Representation
After generating the nine individual forms, focused on how to combine these spatial components as a whole to provide a more complex spatial experience under the framework of the movie. Thus, based on my own understanding, I choose the most important event in the whole story, the explosion event, as the subject and select the four individual space forms which directly connected to this event.
