Duck is a single screen 8.5 min, 16:9 ratio, film with stereo sound for gallery or cinema screening.
The film emerges from our collaboration with Prof. Sofia Olhede at the UCL Big Data Institute.
Duck premiered at the London Experimental Film Festival in Jan. 2019. Please contact us at crispinhughes@gmail.com if you wish to screen Duck.
Keepers and Duck were exhibited at The Bargehouse Gallery, Oxo Tower Wharf, London, in Sept. and Oct.-Nov. 2019 as part of the Foragers of the Foreshore exhibition and then The London Ultra shows.
Duck was also screened at the 2019 London Experimental Film Festival
Synopsis
Beneath Dark House Walk in central London, a plastic duck is locked in a time-lapse selfie. On the rising tide, they’re lifted by the Thames and generate visual and audio readouts as they experience the river.
Is that a fixed grin, or a Kuleshov experiment?
Meanwhile, a fixed observer watches them from above. And listens. And makes its own recordings. Frames of reference, timescales and data visualisation are juxtaposed in this composite film that plays with place, perception and point of view.
Originating from our work on tides with data scientist Prof. Sophia Olhede, this film combines the human compulsion to anthropomorphise with a random aesthetic and the plot of a picaresque novel.
‘She dreamed she was delivered of a tennis-ball, which the devil (who, to her great surprise, acted the part of a midwife) struck so forcibly with a racket that it disappeared in an instant; and she was for some time inconsolable for the lost of her offspring; when, all on a sudden, she beheld it return with equal violence, and enter the earth, beneath her feet’.
From p.1 of ‘Roderick Random’ by Tobias Smollett, pub.1748.
