Some background on 'Our Fractal Brains'

I very much enjoyed the film 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' by Ben Stiller. The unconventional imagination of both the lead character as well as the director resonated with me. One of the scenes that stuck was the scene where Mitty first starts to travel, to Greenland. Everywhere through the shots we see words that form sentences. I wanted to do something like that, and that's how the idea of this short film emerged. When I discovered Patrick O'hearn's Reaching Land trough Google Play Music's recommendations, It clicked. That was the score to use for this idea.
So I set out to write something like a poem, that kind of did that thing, and started digging through the vast Fractal Soil to unearth those little gems.

The 'message' of the video could easily be misinterpreted I think. So I'd like to clarify a little. I don't actually think the brain is a fractal, or that it is endless, or infinite. I'm not a spiritual person in that sense, that thinks we're all connected or something vague like that. I do think that the brain has some fractal properties, and the way it develops in embryonic development is not unlike the emergence of shapes and forms in the fractal software. 

I'm more interested in the fact that we seem to attribute 'meaning' to things, as most of us don't realize it is only in us, where that meaning resides.

Graphic design is definitely not my strongest side (understatement) but I tried to play around with fonts and styles, having learned a little from my time with Carbon Media. Machmoving occurred mostly in After Effects, although I did the glass / crystal scene in 3dsMAX. That was by the way also the first time I used Transparency in MB3D. Something postponed for that long because of its ridiculous long render times, as well as its need for triple anti-aliasing, in stead of double, as I use to.
The response has been amazing to this video, and as I write this, it has just been picked by Vimeo as a Staff Pick, of which I am immensely proud.

Baraka

About 23 years after its release, I recently saw the film Baraka, and was extremely impressed by what it managed to achieve. Because it was shot on 70mm IMAX film, it doesn't look dated even for a moment. Its recent sequel, Samsara is almost equally impressive, but it's Baraka that has caught my interest here.

For me, the piece achieves the setting of an emotional curve with only images and music like none other. It delivers an extremely intense climax by postponing it; a single moment that hit me like a religious experience. Since I'm an atheist, this isn't something I have on a regular basis.
The movie slowly builds with imagery from nature and culture, intensifying near the end by showing charred corpses in a funeral ritual on the river Ganges - serene, but heavy. After this scene, we see a man handling a beam that is about to hit a huge bell. The quality of the images is such that the texture can almost be felt. We want the beam to hit the bell, we want to be satisfied by the atonal strike tone - but the moment is cut. Instead, we see Masai, in Trance. 
A particular shot of an eclipse has been shown before in the film; it's a perfect example of internal symbolism. An image with otherwise no meaning can start to carry meaning inside the context of the piece.
The spiritual climax delivers when the director cuts to the iconic eclipse again - together with the sound of the immense bell. 

I am convinced that this cinematic language must work well in VR. The Virtual Reality goggles have been called temples before, and indeed - it's the architecture that creates presence. The same principles that places of worship have used all over the world for millennia can make VR into something transcendental.

I would really enjoy creating something like the emotional curve from Baraka, including its fantastic soundtrack, in combination with VR. I'm obviously thinking about fractals, but real footage (if shot properly) could be even more amazing.

Baraka on IMDB:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103767/