Ubi Sit Loci
A Virtual Reality project.
Full Treatment available in Spanish and Italian.
1. THE STORY
UNSETTLED in his conscience by acts comitted, celebrated businessman and mnemonist extraordinaire Irineo Fontana, asks his protegée and friend, Pax Martinez, to help him find a lost secret code within his own memory.
2. SYNOPSIS
THE man, Pax Martinez, lives condemned to brutal indifference. Daily life is effectively the same and nothing provides great changes to solution. Pax works his hours digging through trash of digital information for petty clinets, sometimes a coorporate agreement nourshies the wallet, or the occasional millionaire looking to disclose their younger wives’ lovers adds some personal action. And that’s all there is. Or so it seems.
Irineo Fontana is at the bending end of his life. He now lives secluded in an old monastery up in the mountains, as his impressive mnemonic capacity is almost daring to his sanity. Late in his life he had found a nieche business demand in keeping secret codes access keys for a few big clients. One last code, though, lost within the labyrinth of memory remains unattainable. A code of personal importance, a delicate matter. A memory ebedded in a shared memory with his protégée Pax Martinez.
As both men face their will and challenge their memory into agreement, they begin to realize their recollection is severed by a subrepticious trauma. The face of a woman keeps apearing. Relationship with this woman begins to materialize. As the woman becomes clearer in memory a crime seems to be brooding. Pax rushes into discolsing the details: moving into piecing together impossible time. Resolving memory as it were real life. Running in circles after details to prevent what is impossible to prevent, but in doing so prevailing in knotting himself always more into the actual motive of the crime.
Only in the unraveling of such a trauma, can the solution and subsequent liberation of both Mr. Fontana and Pax be attained, revealing in the death of the mysterious woman their own.
3. THE PROJECT
THIS film project was conceived to a new narrative perspective during 2014, and has subsequently found evolution into different formats. But it is through Virtual Reality that its circular storytelling has finally met its potential.
Working around scenes as “memory compartments” provides as form liberation from a lineal time construction to a narrative that works in a peculiar way: it is always now, it is always the present.
Loosing the frame or storytelling vignette into a 360* mise en scene, allows for a film constructed to detail in movement, theatricality and the development of a narrative scheme to seduce the audience into action rather than inducing it to do so by camera movements and precise editing transitions and cuts.
As a VR user (audience member) the action happens all around us: it entices.
Our aim is to experiment and break storytelling limits, whilst entertaining and finding new solutions in story construction and film production.
4. THE SCREENPLAY
NOW in development and writing for VR format, the screenplay will layed out spatially, as each scene represents and contains a specific memory in a specific place.
1. The forest - a dream.
2. A hotel restaurant - memory and temptation.
3. The monastery library - last encounter.
4. On a boat in the lake - death.
5. A hotel room - contact.
All scenes are tied together through transition spaces that provide sensorial elements.
A. Aerial over the mountains - breath.
B. A corridor in the hotel - depth.
C. Underwater to the surface of the lake - bubble.
Hidden within the world of Ubi. Sit. Loci. there is a code made of symbols: fragments of a moment that specifies and triggers other memories. It is a journey of a memory within a memory.
As stated above, in Ubi. Sit. Loci, everything happens at the same time, and story seems to loose the grip of the here and now to twist it into a paradox of it always being here and now.
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