time machine // database // travel guide
spacetime coordinates: 2010’s Netherlands
“and they descended upon the earth to strengthen their ranks”
Borgman is a 2013 Dutch psychological thriller drama film directed by Alex van Warmerdam.
A vagrant enters the lives of an upper-class family, turning their lives into a psychological nightmare in the process. Although never stated in the film, the behavior of Borgman resembles that of an “alp“, a nightmare demon from German folklore.
spacetime coordinates: 2000’s Ashland, Oregon
Coraline is a 2009 American 3D stop-motion dark fantasy horror film based on Neil Gaiman‘s 2002 novel of the same name. It was the first feature film produced by Laika and distributed by Focus Features. The film depicts an adventurous girl finding an idealized parallel world behind a secret door in her new home, unaware that the alternate world contains a dark and sinister secret. Written and directed by Henry Selick, the film was made with Gaiman’s approval and co-operation.
Coraline was staged in a 140,000-square-foot (13,000 m2) warehouse in Hillsboro, Oregon. The stage was divided into 50 lots, which played host to nearly 150 sets. Among the sets were three miniature Victorian mansions, a 42-foot (12.8 m) apple orchard, and a model of Ashland, Oregon, including tiny details such as banners for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. More than 28 animators worked at a time on rehearsing or shooting scenes, producing 90–100 seconds of finished animation each week. To add the stereoscopy for the 3D release, the animators shot each frame from two slightly apart camera positions.
Every object on screen was made for the film. The crew used three 3D printing systems from Objet in the development and production of the film. Thousands of high-quality 3D models, ranging from facial expressions to doorknobs, were printed in 3D using the Polyjet matrix systems, which enable the fast transformation of CAD (computer-aided design) drawings into high-quality 3D models. The puppets had separate parts for the upper and lower parts of the head that could be exchanged for different facial expressions. The characters of Coraline could potentially exhibit over 208,000 facial expressions. Computer artists composited separately-shot elements together, or added elements of their own which had to look handcrafted instead of computer-generated – for instance, the flames were done with traditional animation and painted digitally, and the fog was dry ice.
At its peak, the film involved the efforts of 450 people, including from 30 to 35 animators and digital designers in the Digital Design Group (DDG) directed by Dan Casey and more than 250 technicians and designers. One crew member, Althea Crome, was hired specifically to knit miniature sweaters and other clothing for the puppet characters, sometimes using knitting needles as thin as human hair. The clothes would also simulate wear using paint and a file. Several students from The Art Institute of Portland were also involved in making the film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coraline_(film)
Metallica: Through the Never is a 2013 American thriller concert film (directed by Nimród Antal) featuring the American heavy metal band Metallica. Its title is derived from the song “Through the Never” off the band’s self-titled 1991 album. It follows a young roadie, Trip’s (Dane DeHaan) surreal misadventures intercut with concert footage shot in Vancouver and Edmonton in August 2012. It uses a unique premise of no dialogue or narration in the film’s entirety with the exception of Trip’s supervisor and the band.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2172935/
_____________the leather bag belonged to Cliff Burton on the Master of Puppets tour.
spacetime coordinates: 2000’s New York
Cloverfield is a 2008 American found footage science fiction monster horror film directed by Matt Reeves, produced by J. J. Abrams and Bryan Burk, and written by Drew Goddard. The film, which is presented as found footage shot with a home camcorder, follows six young New York City residents fleeing from a gigantic monster and various other smaller creatures that attack the city while they are having a farewell party.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1060277/
spacetime coordinates: 2010’s Louisiana
10 Cloverfield Lane is a 2016 American science fiction horror film directed by Dan Trachtenberg, produced by J. J. Abrams and Lindsey Weber and written by Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken and Damien Chazelle. The film stars John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and John Gallagher Jr. It is the second installment in the Cloverfield franchise. The film was developed from a script titled The Cellar, but under production by Bad Robot, it was turned into a spiritual successor of the 2008 film Cloverfield. The film follows a young woman who, after a car crash, wakes up in an underground bunker with two men who insist that an event has left the surface of Earth uninhabitable. The film is presented in a third-person narrative, in contrast to its predecessor’s found-footage style.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1179933/
spacetime coordinates: 2028 Cloverfield Station
The Cloverfield Paradox is a 2018 American science fiction horror film directed by Julius Onah, written by Oren Uziel and Doug Jung, and produced by J. J. Abrams‘s Bad Robot Productions. It is the third installment in the Cloverfield franchise. The film stars Daniel Brühl, Elizabeth Debicki, Aksel Hennie, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Chris O’Dowd, John Ortiz, David Oyelowo, and Zhang Ziyi, and follows an international group of astronauts aboard a space station who, after using a particle accelerator to try to solve Earth’s energy crisis, must find a way home after accidentally traveling to an alternate dimension.
The film was based on God Particle, a spec script from Oren Uziel which had the main plot of the space station crew but unconnected to Cloverfield. The script was acquired by Paramount Pictures and Bad Robot in 2012. It had been initially planned as part of Paramount’s low-budget InSurge distribution label, but following the folding of that label, its production was expanded as a Paramount-distributed film. Only during production did Abrams decide to link the film to Cloverfield, adapting Uziel’s screenplay and adding scenes to establish this connection, following the same approach used by 10 Cloverfield Lane from its original script, The Cellar. Abrams saw the ability to use the particle accelerator accident as a means for future events to cause changes in the past, establishing a way to narratively link the Cloverfield franchise together.
spacetime coordinates: 1930s South Korea / Japan
The Handmaiden (Hangul: 아가씨; RR: Agassi; lit. ”Lady”) is a 2016 South Korean erotic psychological thriller film directed by Park Chan-wook and starring Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo and Cho Jin-woong. It is inspired from the novel Fingersmith by Welsh writer Sarah Waters, with the setting changed from Victorian era Britain to Korea under Japanese colonial rule.
spacetime coordinates: Bay City, year 2384 // “The Protectorate”
Altered Carbon is an American science fiction television series created by Laeta Kalogridis and based on the 2002 novel of the same title by English author Richard K. Morgan.
In the future, a person’s memories have been decanted into “cortical stacks”, storage devices of alien design which have been reverse engineered, duplicated en masse, and surgically inserted into the vertebrae at the back of the neck. Physical bodies are called “sleeves,” disposable vessels that can accept any “stack”. Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman), a political operative with mercenary skills, wakes up 250 years after his sleeve is terminated, and he is given the choice to either spend the rest of time in prison for his crimes, or to help solve the murder of one of the wealthiest men in the settled worlds (James Purefoy).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2261227/
“When everyone lies, telling the truth isn’t just rebellion.
It’s an act of revolution. So think carefully when you speak it,
because the truth is a weapon.”
TimeSpace Warps 