I started this project with the vague idea that I wanted to make something about voyager. Those two objects created by humanity, artificial, isolated are pushing the frontiers of our experience, reaching our civilisations senses ever outwards. I was interested in this experience from the perspective of those machines.

I was interested in the identity of Voyagers 1 and 2, they started as twins but their journeys, route, triumphs and malfunctions have left them unique. I wondered how they would experience the last flickering of the end of the universe.

From this starting point the idea became progressively more abstract and broad in scope. Experimenting with the image making processes I felt that I wasn’t representing the Voyagers’ view of the end of the universe but instead developing a visual language for how I was trying to understand the vast scales of time and space.

When I screened work in progress versions of the film I was interested in comments that discussed the difficulty of judging scales in the images, and that this added to the immersive quality of the images. It was also apparent that when projected at larger sizes the smallest amount of camera shake, deliberate movement, or sense of the images being made broke the immersion. In subsequent filming I focused on minimising this by adjusting the mixtures and processes. I was also able to shoot in high speed so that movements could be slowed down further still.

This has been one of the most enjoyable film projects that I have worked on working with a small crew who wanted to experiment with the processes of making the images for the film and this produced a very collaborative and creative atmosphere I the studio. I think this present in the visuals of the film, in the variety and range of images.

I feel that overall the soundscape was also successful, I think that some of the sounds could have been stronger but the concept and treatment of the soundscape works for the film. A number of times I felt that I had gone down the wrong path with the soundscape, but working on the project over this length of time gave me the space to backtrack and try something new. I feel that the layers of slowly developing natural sounds closely reflects the analogue processes that were used to produce the visuals.

The voiceover component of the soundtrack is the weakest element of the completed film. I believe that conceptually the voiceover now works with the limited palette of words, and the selection of words also feels correct. It took much longer to arrive in this place that it should, I was afraid that I was going to break the film. I feel that this leaves the execution of the voiceover weaker than the rest of the film, it hasn’t been through the same process of experimentation, refection and development.

I feel that I was a bit seduced by the process of making the images, in the controlled environment of the dark studio it was easy to get lost in trying just one more experiment, and arranging another day of filming. Whilst this was an important part of the process of finding this film it was also a procrastination tactic to avoid dealing with the soundscape, I was producing work therefore the project was getting done. This was also reinforced by the seductive power of positive feedback, I as pleased with the images that I was making, and comments such as ‘I have no idea how you made that’ encouraged me to continue to explore these processes. In some way lockdown stopping filming was an important step in making me move on.

The soundscape development, especially the voiceover, would have benefitted from the same kind of collaborative relationship that I had with the image-making. I need to consider the possibilities of the contribution that others could bring to the conceptual development of the sound. I needed a collaborator for the images, I couldn’t have done it on my own (not without ruining camera equipment with ink and glycerol), but I could do the sound on my own, so I didn’t look for collaborators.

Whilst there are elements to this project that I feel are not prefect I do feel that it is resolved and I am looking forward to getting it in front of audiences, the film reflects the ideas that motivated it and the journey of making.

Collaboration seems like an obvious lesson from any piece of moving image work, but it is one that I seem to need to be reminded of, the openness and humility to consider possibilities that others bring. Since the Zero project in 2018 I have been working on a longer cut of that film and have been planning further filming to develop it further, as a very personal story I had not consider the possibility of working with anyone but I should be open to that possibility.