Ashbloom

There is a garden at the bottom of a volcanic crater — five stone terraces, a sunken pool, a run of narrow water channels cut through the basalt. Somebody built it, and then a mountain buried it under thirty centimetres of grey ash.

The film opens in the last hour before dawn. Nothing in the crater is alive, the only light is a low moon, and the ash is still falling. Then it rains.

What happens

The ash goes. Rain crosses the bowl as a readable curtain and every surface behind it darkens and takes a sheen. The ash sluices off the terraces, runs down the channels as grey slurry, and the stone underneath turns out to be black, not grey. The basin the ash had cracked flat fills back up into a pool.

The garden comes back. Moss takes the wet stone. Ferns unroll. One small jade light opens in a crevice in a retaining wall — the first living thing in the film — and then twenty more open along the same course, in a wave that travels away from the camera.

The crater lights itself. By the middle of the night the moon has faded to almost nothing and the only thing illuminating the geometry is the plants. Three species, banded by terrace: jade, deep cyan, and a rose that opens last. Spores lift, moths come in over the rim, and the pool at the centre is lit from underneath. Nothing else in frame is producing light.

Then it loses. The sun comes over the crater wall as a hard line travelling down it, and the glow gutters out just ahead of the advancing sunline. What is left is an ordinary green garden, wet and steaming.

The last shot is the exact camera set-up of the first one: ninety-two metres up on the north rim, same lens, locked off. Where there was a grey bowl there is a green one.

What to look for

• The light source inverts twice. Moon, then the flowers themselves, then the sun. Watch the wide at roughly 1:55 — every lit surface in that frame is lit by a plant.
• Thousands of plants, one draw call per species. Each individual carries its own age, species and bloom phase, so the blooms open in travelling waves rather than all together, and the population is still growing while you watch it.
• Water you can see through. The sheet pouring over a terrace lip, the filling basin and the pool all refract the scene behind them — the stone slides and warps through the falling water, and the pool holds the whole crater upside down.
• The wetness is a property of the world, not a texture. When the rain front crosses, the albedo of every surface in the crater drops and every surface gains a grazing sheen, at the same moment, everywhere.
• One wind. A gust travels across the garden rather than each plant swaying on its own clock — easiest to see in the shot pushing through the fronds, and again in the last held wide.
• Backlit leaves. Light passes through the fern fronds and the petals instead of stopping at them.
• Twenty-five composed set-ups on a fixed film clock — lenses from a fourteen-degree macro six centimetres off an ash ripple to a twenty-four-degree wide ninety-two metres up, with the focus racked per shot, a 180-degree shutter, film grain and lens dirt throughout.

The sound

Five orchestral cues crossfaded across two decks — a hollow drone for the ash, low strings for the rain, glass bells for the bloom, choir at the crest, solo piano for the dawn — with the crater's own sound underneath it: wind, ash, rain, water in the channels, the pool filling, moths. All of it is mixed by the same clock that cuts the picture, so the mix pulls in on a macro and opens out on a wide.

Stills

Ten frames from the film are in /source/design/shots.