#25: Reinventing film from the Backrooms of the internet

This week: Meet Kane Pixels - the best young film-maker in the world // Must reads from the sharp edge of digital creativity // Satellite imaging and new ways of seeing, Nas and more...

HELLO, WORLD!

It was only supposed to be a couple of weeks but the holiday hiatus turned into a month.

Sorry - writing this every week is a groove, and it was MUCH harder to get the groove back than I expected.

But now the groove is back, so let’s get back on it.

This week we’re looking at a (very) young filmmaker who could be the next Spielberg, Christopher Nolan or Orson Welles.

Whatever happens next, he’s made work watched hundreds of millions of times, and his work tells us a lot about the methods, skills and themes driving digital creativity.

Plus, a look at new kinds of AI-powered 3D imaging using satellite data, a round-up of the latest from the world of Creative R&D, and a little tribute to Nas on the 30th anniversary of Illmatic.

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It’s been a month since the last issue! Let’s get this show back on the road - please share today’s newsletter with your friends. Share the R&D love!

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Art! // The best young film-maker in the world

Film history is full of legend about how young directorial talent emerges.

Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of War of the Worlds, showed the imaginative terror he could unleash:

A few decades later, Steven Spielberg and a generation of Boomer movie brats were making 8mm monster movies as a way to refine their skills.

The hard question about how talent gets started has as many myths as answers.

But right now we’re watching a distinct and interesting new kind of film-making talent emerge, and his audience isn’t his family, or local film festivals. Like Welles back in the 30s, it’s a mass audience he’s leaving dumbstruck.

But whilst Welles’ fame spread instantly after War of the Worlds, and gave him the platform to go on and make Citizen Kane, it’s quite possible in our fractured times, you’ve not heard the name of the most excitingm young film-maker in the world.

Well, his name is Kane Parsons, or to use his web name, Kane Pixels, he’s 18, and he’s emerged out of some of the internet’s weirdest corners.

Kane’s film-making journey begins with a single-image posted on a 4Chan forum. 4Chan is the internet’s id, its maddest stopping point, a home for conspiracy theory, shared pornographic fantasy and a lot more and worse.

But out of shit comes diamonds, and this one photo, posted in 2019 caused a wave of spooked creativity that’s still rumbling to today.

The origins of the Backrooms

Sometimes a simple picture of unknown origins, and a few well chosen words travel a LONG way.

Where was that picture taken? Who wrote the post? Was it a reference to something before - a Creepypasta, an old YouTube video? Something? Somewhere? Reddit’s full of speculation and the feeling that somehow this touched on half-forgotten memories, whether from dreams or reality.

Out of this, the idea began to spread fast.

It intersected with two creative spaces, each of which had growing cultural momentum.

The first was Analog Horror, a sub-genre of internet film-making that uses the retro aesthetics feel of 1980s VHS horror films, of public information films, conspiracy thriller narratives, and the intentional leaving of a lot of storytelling gaps, to create short series of films which often tell of a monstrous dread at the heart of modern reality.

The genre has its ups and downs, but the Monument Mythos films by Mister Manticore are probably the highlight, a DeLillo-ish alternative universe where James Dean becomes President of the USA and mass executions start happening at national landmarks.

The second trend is #liminalspaces, a trend which exploded over 2021 and 2022, and was well described in this Atlantic article. Covid gave us an emptied world, and liminality became an internet obsession, with photos of abandoned shopping malls and waiting rooms popping up everywhere.

We all fell in love with empty spaces where something has just happened or just will because our busy world had become an empty space in Lockdown.

A liminal space (James Leynse / Corbis / Getty)

The Backrooms picture and thread on 4Chan,;Analog Horror and the #liminalspaces trend provide the context out of which Kane Pixels’ first set of films emerged.

But they can’t explain the excellence of what he’s made.

If you watch nothing else this week, hit the YouTube playlist of his Backrooms films hard. And start at the beginning.

The Backrooms films show a young film-maker “no clipping” out of reality and into an endlessly odd, eerie, liminal space. Told in the first person, they are an exploration of environment and myth told over 19 parts. What are these spaces? What happens there? We discover odd alien beings, dead bodies, robots, government agents in Hazmat suits and more along the way. But we never really solve the mystery. What are the Backrooms?

This is I think, astonishing work - scary both directly and in atmosphere, imaginative, brilliantly paced.

And Kane’s second series extended this exploration of place and its hidden meanings. The Oldest View sees the discovery of an abandoned mall beneath the earth, and a silent gliding giant that guards it.

Why does Kane matter?

His sourcing of subject matter in the internet’s weird corners is critical. We’ve seen a resurgence in Folk Horror over the last decade, with films like David Eggar’s The Witch, Ari Aster’s Midsommar and Alex Garland’s The Men inventing hidden mythologies in the malevolent countryside.

Those are all excellent films, but their mythologies are an auteurish authorial invention. The Backroom’s meme that Kane starts in is an idea that from its single source in that 4 Chan post, had been evolved by thousands of people before he got there.

It’s a genuine contemporary digital myth, and all the more potent for that.

Beyond the point of origin, there are three things that I think matter about Kane Pixels’ work - two formal aesthetic changes in digital creativity we will see more of in the years ahead and a sense of the critical skills for tomorrow’s makers.

The first person perspective of his films, adopted from games and social media video, is an approach which holds under-developed promise for narrative film-making. This version of the camera as eye is much closer to how we see the world now than the third person view adopted by film-makers in the 20th century.

Like the switch from 19th century realism to 20th century modernist stream of consciousness in the novel, the shift from 3rd person to 1st person in film-making is a chance for creative renewal and the possibility to see things differently.

My favourite film of the last 20 years, Gaspar Noe’s outstanding Enter The Void is one of very few films to make this leap.

Kane Pixels’ Backrooms shows us the creative potential for others to follow.

Second, is the importance of place and landscape over narrative in films which have been watched hundreds of millions of times online. In the history of film it’s the most artistic of film-makers, Antonioni, Angelopoulos, Malick or Weerasthekul who have made landscape their subject.

Think about the end shots of Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, where the two lovers fail to meet, and we just watch life carry on without them.

The Backrooms’ translates this deeply existential film-making into an idea loved by millions. It shows us I think the sophistication of digital audiences, less fixated with narrative momentum than Hollywood wants us to believe, and more able to explore immersive environments and the ambiguities of negative space.

The third thing which matters about Kane Pixels is the range of skills he shows us underpinning today’s creativity. He’s a VFX artist as much as a Director, and the use of Blender to make the world of The Backrooms and The Oldest View should put this 3D package top of any young creative’s must-learn list. Whilst generative AI will help accelerate our ability to craft procedurally generated 3D worlds, being able to design space to tell stories in is the common skill across gaming and the world’s of digital art, this kind of film-making and more which have grown out of it. Get learning.

So where does he go next?

There’s been lots of talk of film studio A24 making a “real” movie out of Backrooms. Much as I’d love Kane to do it, the world really doesn’t need it. Whatever he does next, he’s got these early, brilliant pieces of work, seen and loved by the digital universe. He needs a new story to tell.

Whatever it is, I for one will definitely be watching.

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Ideas! // Stories from the digital edge

• There’s a much bigger story to tell about how this year’s Venice Biennale embraced immersive and digital art - another major step along the path to the various themes I’ve touched on across this newsletter - but this piece on Pierre Hughye’s digital humans, the big star digital show of the Biennale as whole, is a good, thoughtful take.

• The story that Paul Thomas Anderson is going big budget and IMAX for his next film, a second Thomas Pynchon adaptation after the bonkers Inherent Vice (2014) tells us a lot about how cinema’s future in a streaming driven market depends on BIGGER. PTA is a genius, but like Scorcese or Altman, he’s not an easy or compromising voice for the mainstream. So in a world where the mainstream is all BIG, if and how he copes with this transition will open or close doors for others who’ve historically sat in the $40m budget bracket like the Coen Brothers where creative risks are acceptable and studios don’t go bust when it all goes wrong.

• MUST WATCH. We’ve talked before about how Christiane Paul is THE curator of digital art - and the author of its definitive book. This talk about what AI means for the future of digital curation is therefore a must see.

• This article is seven years old, but I love what Rachel Rossin does with VR painting - making the digital experience immersion in the curves, textures and feel of the paint itself.

Rachel Rossin, VR painting at its most physical

• Rabbit.AI, the AI assistant device we covered in issue 19, has sold 100k devices in Q1 of 2024. That’s a strong start for an entirely new category of device. Keep watching this.

• This piece by

  Jesse Damiani
  on what the Drake-Kendrick Lemar beef tells us about the future of creativity in an AI world is AWESOME

• Last up, another example of the digitisation and digital preservation of something that might otherwise be lost forever. We’ve seen countries, cities and more digitised over the last six months. This time it’s a Ukrainian cave network. The caves themselves will likely pertain, whatever the outcome of the war with Russia, but if Russia won and Ukrainian nationhood was lost, their meaning would be displaced. This is such interesting territory, on the cutting edge of the digital possible, and the human need to remember and bear witness.

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Technology! // New kinds of seeing

New kinds of visualisation and new ways of seeing the world is a subject we’ve turned to over and over again.

Whenever a new visualisation tech emerges it’s a reminder there’s so much that remains UNSEEN still to go.

This week, we’ve got a way to create 3d imaging from satellite data, covered in the excellent Spectrum IEEE:

A new machine learning system can create height maps of urban environments from a single synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image, potentially accelerating disaster planning and response.

Aerospace engineers at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich claim their SAR2Height framework is the first to provide complete—if not perfect—three-dimensional city maps from a single SAR satellite.

The use case they focus on is environmental disasters like earthquakes. When an earthquake happens the heights of buildings will change - if we can identify at speed which buildings in a city have changed height, disaster response, and the saving of lives will go up.

Urban height data abstracted from satellite imagery.

The social purpose of this kind of imaging is potent enough, but I’m always interested in the creative spillovers of these new kinds of imaging.

There’s three instant thoughts on this.

The first was how the images look like the next height up from the excellent Edward Burtynsky I covered in issue 20 and which is still on and highly recommended. He’s photographed from helicopters and drones using incredibly hi-res cameras developed for infrastructure companies. Satellite imagery as a new domain for creativity seems a natural next step.

The second took me back to issue 10 and AR advertising platform Darabase and the question of digital rights for property. The world seen from up here (or from a plane) is very big! How would we aggregate digital rights at city scale? How could property owners cluster together to sell or license virtual rights for use from these distant points of view?

And last but not least, there’s the simulation of history these super-distanced images allow. How does the height of our cities change over time? What does it do to the displacement of light? To nature? Sometimes it’s only when you can see from a certain point of view that a story can be told. This feels like one of those moments.

Keep watching!

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Last up, a little Nas tribute.

Regular readers will have got the idea i’m a heavy music and film geek. It’s not just music and films - books, games, art. It’s ALL good.

But music’s much more of a shared experience - very few people have read the odd books i’ve read, but it seems like half this newsletter’s readership like the same music. YOU ARE GOOD PEOPLE.

So seeing that April 19th marked the 30th anniversary of the release of Nas’ Illmatic, I had to give it a mention.

I was 15 when this - maybe still the best hip-hop album - came out, and I still remember the day I bought it. I was just starting to get hip-hop - I had, I think, the first Wu-Tang Clan album from the year before, and had definitely taped A Nation of Millions from the library’s CD copy.

But one day in 1994 I went to Richmond’s small HMV and came back with Illmatic and Jeru the Damaja’s first album and it was like lightning. A young man’s voice, just a few year’s older than me, telling the story of a life in Queensbridge New York that was a long long way from suburban West London, but made it feel so instantly real, like a world outside the window.

Nas touched a height I don’t think any rapper ever has - he was so honest, so true. As much as slice of life as The Wire. They gave Kendrick Lemar the Pulitzer, but this is a Nobel Prize record.

So good. And still so good now. It’s one of those records I feel lucky to have loved from the day it broke, and will still be listening to it i’m sure when I’m rolling down the street in a zimmer not a bimmer...

We’re going to dive into some of what’s going on in 2024’s music next week, but for this, luxuriate in some of the best there’s ever been…

Dear Born, you'll be out soon, stay strong
Out in New York the same sh*t is goin' on
The crackheads stalkin', loudmouths is talkin'
Hold, check out this story yesterday when I was walkin'…

See you next week.