STATIC is a 360 video that can be watched on a VR headset, mobile or desktop devices, with headphones. The viewer is taken into different evocative spaces; a lonely home, a frantic woodland, an ominous landscape of pylons, floating memories and dancing bears. Present but impotent, you watch the characters wrestling within situations that contain them both physically and emotionally. A BSL interpreter tries, and fails, to communicate the story of the central protagonist, a woman isolated and confined in her home, seeking release.

 

STATIC was developed out of a year's research with survivors of domestic abuse, but also speaks to the situation many people found themselves in during 2020. It is not without hope, but its sense of voyeurism, distorted scale and ambivalence of time poses questions of agency and complicity.

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Our interest in using 360 was to explore ways to create a more embodied encounter with this difficult subject matter, drawing upon our previous work Messy Business. Coinciding with the challenges of the pandemic and the major increase in reports of domestic abuse, STATIC is also a work about isolation, mental health, loneliness, the struggles of communication and thwarted impetus.

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STATIC won Best 360 Film at the Cannes World Film Festival, officially selected for The Fine Arts Film Festival and was an Award Winner in the Beyond the Curve International Film Festival. 

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Read about the making of STATIC: a-n BLOG