Armed with a 360-degree camera, Argentinean director Eduardo Williams returns to the bold, time-and-continent-skipping world of his 2016 film The Human Surge – there is no part two yet – this time following three groups of friends from Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Peru interacting in the downtime between work and drifting.
EN
“Eduardo Williams’ film is a hypnotic feat of contemporary image-making, inviting a novel mode of spectatorship: spiral-like in form, falling endlessly forward while simultaneously circling back through repeated locations, social arrangements and phrases.”
Andréa Picard1
“The Human Surge 3 quietly blows up and rebuilds the established language of cinema in challenging but ultimately exhilarating ways. Using an 11-lens VR camera, the process of rendering 360-degree footage into two dimensions imparts a fish-eye feel of variable intensity and some occasional weird glitches of mid-image blurring and through Williams’ eyes it feels like we’re truly seeing the world anew.”
Neil Young2
“We used the Insta360 Titan, a spherical camera outfitted with eight lenses capturing 11K video. (...) During the shoot we didn’t think about framing at all. We constructed a backpack with an extension that would hold the camera above the head of the operator. I knew I wanted to have the entire 360 view available as an option, and that the framing would be decided afterward. The problem is that I wanted to be there. But to be able to use any part of the frame, it would mean that I couldn’t follow the camera, and the sound person couldn’t be there either. It was one of the bigger problems we had to solve. When we first started, in Sri Lanka, this made it very difficult. There are many scenes with me there, so we didn’t have the whole 360 space available to work with. As the film progressed I cared less and less, and we actually have some scenes where I’m there, looking at the iPad. Maybe you saw me? We framed the images after completing the montage. I finished the two-hour cut of the film on the computer, then I saw the footage in a VR headset and I recorded my movements to frame it.”
Eduardo Williams in conversation with Blake Williams3
- 1Andréa Picard, “The Human Surge 3,” Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), September 2023.
- 2Neil Young, “The Human Surge 3,” Screen Daily, September 7, 2023.
- 3Blake Williams, “The Human Surge 3,” Cinema Scope 96 (Fall 2023).
