Written and directed by Rolf De Heer Produced by Domenico Procacci and Rolf De Heer Co producer Giuseppe Pedersoli Line producer Sharon Jackson Director of photography Tony Clark Sound designer Peter D. Smith Editor Tania Nehme Composer Graham Tardif Motion control system by Digital Arts Producer for Digital Arts Sean Caddy Digital and software design Jeremy Webber Digital arts electronics Patrick Walsh
The film really did start with a vision, that come to me one night like a bolt of lightning. I’d seen some of the extraordinary motion control and timelapse footage shot by Digital Arts, and was impressed by how it forced me to rexamine the way i looked at the universe, at the physical world. I’d been wondering loosely how you’d go about putting actors into those pictures, how you’d synthesise more mainstream drama with amazing images. During post production of “Bad Boy Bubby” it came to me, in one prolonged and intense insight… what the story should be, how the drama fitted with the nature of the images, who the characters were, how to get the real time characters physically into timelapse background, what the budget should be, how long it would take to shoot, just about everything to do with the film the way we have shot it. Much of that insight was accurate but the learning curve has been steeper than any of us had expected. Once you learn the basics of motion control, the limitations are only those imposed by your immagination. We’ re finding that we’re inventing certain aspects of cinema, but we’re also finding that we’re doing things clearly never been done before. There are times when there’s a new cinema language at work.The challenge has become threefold… one is the technical challenge, to work out how to do certain things, to work out how to best utilise the extraordinary motion control system at our disposal to create pictures that are as wonderful as we know is possible. another challenge is to make the drame work is symbiosis with the images, not just to make it work, but to have it and the characters so strong that they’re complemented by the images, not overshadowed by them. The third challenge is to do all this in such a way as to entrance an audience, to capture them with both visual and intellectual ideas, to move them, to entartain them.We seem have found our with it. I don’t recognise what we have on the screen in anything i’ve ever seen, but i’m beginning to be captured by it. as we add the sound, the music and the cohesion to it, ‘i’m also beginning to be moved by it, in many different ways. I hope audiences are moved by it as well.The stars at night, the galaxy circling overhead in all its majesty. There is movement out there, a shape twinkling in the stars, a shape of a woman tumbling through space.She lands, not certain where she is, and finds, nearby, a man camping alone. She demands to know where she is, and when she finds out that she is on Earth, she rages, against the man, against the Earth. the man must help her leave, she says. She invades the man’s life, dragging him into other time spaces to convince him that she is who she says she is, a woman from Epsilon, from another star system.The man and the woman have opposing views about the Earth: to her it is the worst place in the Universe; to him it is home, and beatiful. they stands at opposite extremes…But life on Earth is more complicated that a single viewpoint will allow. Despite their differences, the man and the woman travel togheter, and learn more about each other’s ways of seeing. And they fall, as this man and this woman inevitably must, in love.For Epsilon is a love story… not entirely a conventional love story, but a story about love nevertheless. It is a romance with planet Earth.