Cartier - Toru

OVERVIEW 

CASEY director Carlo Van de Roer collaborated with fellow New Zealander Taika Waititi on 'Toru, a three-channel video installation, inspired by the significance of Tokotoru, or Trinity, in Maori culture. 

The videos were produced by CASEY for Cartier’s Trinity ring collection. They weave together themes of the Maori triplet of earth, sea, and sky, referencing mythology including the myth of Tane, the Maori god of the forest, who retrieves three baskets of knowledge: the basket of light, the basket of darkness, and the basket of pursuit. 

THE FILM-MAKING 

Each film operates as a different recollection or interpretation of the same performance. 

A new filmmaking approach called Plate Light enables the filmmakers to capture the same moment with different lighting conditions as separate pieces of footage. This results in three versions of the same film, presenting a record of the past as photographically accurate, yet fluid like memory and authorable like myth. 

PlateLight was developed by Satellite-Lab, an R&D studio co-founded by Carlo Van de Roer and Stuart Rutherford at the New Museum to develop new in-camera based film-making technology. 

THE FILM-MAKING 

The work was created in Los Angeles not far from where artists Robert Irwin and James Turrel experimented with the experience and perception of space through light. The set is designed to present a changeable representation of space and materiality through new lighting technology, drawing inspiration from the embrace of art and technology in the Light and Space movement of Southern California. 

THE FILM-MAKING 

In a physical space, the films are presented on three screens as a triptych. Online the work is presented as interactive, enabling the viewer to control the lighting. 

TECHNOLOGY 

The film-making technology used to create three films of the same exact performance is a new approach patented by the team at Satellite Lab. Creating a visual language which embraces both photographic accuracy and plasticity, it enables the film-makers (and in the case of the interactive film, the viewer) to control lighting in the film after it has been captured. As an in-camera approach, this is created without the need for Al or CGI, achieving the relighting flexibility Al is currently striving to provide, while maintaining the integrity of a real performance and real lighting, opening new possibilities for film-making.