Filmic Fascia: Aliens Cryolab

Filmic Fascia is the first of three interconnected practice artefacts developed through Project Esper, a programme of Research through Creative Practice investigating the respatialisation of cinema through emerging workflows in computer vision and generative AI. Originating in experiments with Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and Gaussian Splatting for virtual production and digital twin creation, the project sought to understand what happens when cinematic images are treated not as representations, but as spatial data. By feeding shots and sequences from existing films into volumetric reconstruction systems, the practice explores how authored cinematic worlds can be reconstituted as explorable environments.

The work introduces the concept of the Filmic Fascia: the visible skin of the cinematic world presented to the camera and subsequently reconstructed through computational vision. As Gaussian Splat models aggregate information from shots, scenes and camera movements, they reveal the surfaces of the cinematic environment while simultaneously exposing their incompleteness. The reconstructed space is composed of traces, fragments and partial perspectives accumulated through production and editing processes. What appears as a coherent world within the film becomes a stratified spatial archive when treated as training data.

Rather than positioning these workflows as tools for technical reconstruction, Filmic Fascia employs Critical Making as a mode of inquiry. The practice uses accessible, off-the-shelf technologies to surface new theoretical questions concerning the ontology of cinematic space, the materiality of the image, and the changing role of the camera within virtual production. Through iterative experimentation, the project reframes the camera as a spatial scanner, revealing how cinematic worlds are assembled through selective acts of capture and concealment.

The resulting artefact operates simultaneously as a speculative reconstruction and a critical probe. By rendering visible the surfaces that cinema offers to the camera, Filmic Fascia establishes a new conceptual vocabulary for understanding the cinematic image as spatial evidence and opens new research agendas concerning authorship, representation and the future of respatialised media.