Without Destinations
“You know we don’t want to return to Unthank. I asked for a town with sunlight.”
“Would Provan suit you’ ‘The inhabitants there speak a kind of English”.
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“Industrially speaking, you see, Unthank is no longer profitable, so it is going to be scrapped and swallowed. In a piecemeal way we’ve been doing that for years, but now we can take it en bloc and I don’t mind telling you were rather excited. We’re used to eating towns and villages, but this will be the first big city since Carthage and the energy gain will be enormous.”
(Alistair Gray, Lanark, 1981)
This imagery of a Scottish council swallowing cities for energy gain and that some of these cities don’t have sunlight was so vivid and so bizarre I had to follow the thread.
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I aimed to extrapolate on Grays ideas and re-frame them in a futuristic world, asking the question, what if this council never stopped and built bigger and bigger cities in untold pocket dimensions and what would this feel like for normal people? I liked the subtext Gray was alluding to, the Thatcher-esqe dissolution of cities no longer profitable combined with the unpredictable and dreich Scottish winters where we live without depending on the sun. This short animation pursues a Glaswegian narrative based on Gray’s works while aiming to subvert the typical screen-cities of Mega New York/Tokyo, bringing it home to Scotland and incorporating varying degrees of high future and bog-standard Glaswegian city planning. The film explores something sensory and dizzying, peering into a world that creates more questions than it answers. Its stand alone as a story but also act as a slice of a larger tale.
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The CGI involves building scenes in Dreams PS4 with an amalgamation architecture drawing from Scottish municipal, brutalist, and cyberpunk styles. Visuals were inspired by films like Fallen Angels (1995) and Bladerunner 2049 (2017), recreating some of the iconic shots. Drones were designed simply to be characterised by sound. Final shots were processed in Premier Pro.
The SFX, VO, and Music was was composed and designed by me and produced using Ableton 12 and Protools. A key technique was in experimenting with diegetic/non-diegetic barrier to destabilise the visuals and obfuscating known sounds, particularly the car. The general sound design aimed to be low tech and naturalistic like Dune (2021) and Drive (2011) but draws from the clinical high tech fantasy of Metal Gear Solid 4 (2008). The Dialogue, a phone call, features a dejected driver and his excitable brother. Although bewildering, performances are intended to feel authentic, importantly accommodating real Glaswegian accents. Dialogue expands the world building.
