Dr Strange Symbiosis

Creating short films at SciFilmIt Hackatons has always been a great pleasure. It involves challenging project management (get a film done with limited resources, a random team, in only one long week-end) and a lot of creativity in how to bring a highly diverse team, that has never worked together before, towards a common goal.

With the two scientists and two artists in the team, we decided early on the scientific subject to build the video around. But all ideas of story plots demanded extensive filming, with different locations and props we did not necessarily have access to, and which would have taken too much time to plan and realize.

That's when we decided to condense everything in an extremely minimalistic setup, and concentrate time and effort on two main aspects:

Communication: Optimizing a short, concise statement and story that encourages the viewer to seek out more information on the topic
Emotions: The actors underwent a short, intensive training in acting and facial expressions in order to emphasize the message as emotionally as possible

Less is more proved to be the successful concept in this case, and achieved a good second place at the public vote when the six films from the Hackaton where screened publicly in Pully (27th of February 2020).

I am grateful for all the logistics, artistic and scientific support from the organizing committee during the Hackaton. It was an incredible experience, and hopefully I'll be part again in the future.