Mother Liquor

"Mother liquor" is the solution left behind when a crystal has come out of it.

Fifteen shots, ninety-nine seconds, one room six and a half metres by four. Nobody is in it. On the bench a flask of supersaturated solution is being dosed drop by drop and cooled, and the film travels inward and never goes back: room, bench, flask, meniscus. At 0:58 the camera goes down through the surface of the liquid and does not come out. The last three shots are inside the crystal the room existed to grow, and the room is a smear of teal light on a facet, small and out of focus, going dark.

Three things invert on the way. Scale — 62 degrees on a whole lab at 1.55 m eye height down to 6 degrees on three millimetres of meniscus, then out the far side into a volume with no human scale in it at all. Light — two overhead 4100 K fluorescent tubes that die on camera at shot 5 and are never relit; then a fume-hood strip and a bunsen; then nothing direct at all, every photon having been through glass and liquid first. Subject — it opens on a place where nothing has happened and closes on the thing that place was for, with the chemist never in it.

No sun, no sky, no weather. Everything is practicals, transmission and refraction.

What it is made of

• Screen-space refraction at volume. Around ninety pieces of borosilicate composited premultiplied against a stated coverage, so a rack of glassware stands in front of itself without the nearest piece painting over the rest.
• Absorption by path length. The liquid's colour is a chord integral through an analytic truncated cone, not a tint — pale at the rim, saturated through the middle — and the whole cascade from clear through amber to violet is one number.
• A crystal that grows on camera, with real dispersion: red, green and blue read the scene behind at three different indices of refraction, and where the three disagree is the fringe.
• Cold vapour at tabletop scale, pouring over a bench lip and lying down on the floor with a volumetric shaft cut through it.
• Area lights as practicals with ballast behaviour and a scripted death.
• A fixed 1/24 s film clock, advanced once per rendered frame by one component, so the film is identical at 60 fps and at 9 fps.
• A score cued entirely off film time — room tone built from the room's own axial modes, two ballast hums beating against each other, and a second, low-passed recording of the room that crossfades in on the exact frame the camera crosses the meniscus.

Enter play and the film runs from the top.