Augury

An immersive spherical HD panoramic film. Augury presents a quiet contemplation of an environment once shaped through the labour and industry of the world’s busiest docks, yet now defined by its near-silent, melancholic beauty.

The project is part of a series of sketches exploring transitional points on the river, examining the contradictions between the last vestiges of legacy industry and the inexorable progression of investment housing. The film was made using an 8-metre mast that was rigged to a small 3.4-metre rigid inflatable boat. The spherical camera filmed continuously and the masked area on the floor obscures the means of production. The small boat with the camera is actually moving quite fast (18-24 knots) in a figure-of-eight pattern between the anchored barges. The movement is experienced counterintuitively, as the horizon remains locked despite the boat and camera's changing orientation. This gives the illusion of movement to the static vessels around it. The river at this point is actually quite rough, and the original footage shows the enormous percussion of a small boat being thrown by the waves and the wash of the environment. Several hundred key frames are used to artificially stabilise the horizon and create the sense of relative calm within a hostile environment.

Materials:

Single Channel UHD Spherical Video