Moment One

Moment One is a feature length near-science-fiction drama, unfolding in one long night, between a sunset and a sunrise, in a single location on a roof in downtown Montreal. What starts as a party with a little experiment turns into a trip into the digital shadow world we have been building around ourselves for years.

This movie is designed from the ground up as an elegant, contained film. Everything happens in one location, no big VFX are required, no greenscreens. The digital projections of our characters generated by the film’s avatar software will simply be played by real actors, cast for resemblance, or actual twins. The “projections” will glow with soft, slightly unrealistic lighting,  because that is how they will appear in our characters’ mediated perceptions.

This future is not going to look as futuristic as we think; under everyone’s personal projections, or “skins” as they are called in the film, the actual physical buildings are unchanged, decaying, hardly updated since 2000.  Our world is only prettied up and maintained virtually, in our aforementioned internal projections. Since the whole film happens on a rooftop, all of the other buildings in the skyline are distant enough that we won’t need to modernise them.  The rooftop in question also has most beautiful sunrises and sunsets in Montreal.

When not out on the roof enjoying the panorama, this film is an intimate, personal journey accompanying Celeste and her friends though the surprises mined from their personal digital histories. The camera will stay close to them, sharing their conversations, catching the subtlest of emotions as they discover themselves through their projections. We’ll float around the party, like a spirit checking in on the living, flowing from one relationship to the next, dancing with the subtle music that envelopes these moments.

The music itself forms part of the digital fabric our characters are in: although diagetically motivated by a DJ present in the film, it seamlessly turns into the movie’s enveloping soundtrack, interwoven with a surround-sound threading of different conversations from various corners of the room. On the other hand, when we find ourselves in intimate scenes, all the extraneous sounds, as per the characters’ subjectively modulated hearing, get filtered away and we’re just in the moment. Sometimes we may occasionally focus on just one voice as they travel deep inwards, with the camera tangentially illustrating their conversational questions with slow motion extreme closeups of a hand reaching to touch an arm, a dropped glass with a slowly spreading pool of drink, or a dancer with their eyes closed.

This film is at the threshold between our physical, organic world and the digital, electronic one we have been investing ourselves into. It’s about the beautiful shared fabric we are building, no matter what the medium. It’s about where we are going next.