Parallax: discover an alien world

Six-part series May-December 2017

37 years ago, Carl Sagan imagined an ‘Encyclopaedia Galactica’, a “vast repository of the knowledge of many worlds”. “Imagine” he pondered, “the impact on us if we could study a rich compilation of not merely one world but billions.”

Parallax is a series of video essays that wonders what this Encyclopaedia Galactica might look like. What do we learn when we step outside of our myopic, planetary view and see life from a wider perspective?

This is the most ambitious personal project I have attempted so far. I worked with actor, Jennifer Munby, to create a voice for the alien narrator that oozes timeless wisdom. The series has an original score, composed by Dale Nichols that evokes the TV series Cosmos. It takes the video essay genre and smashes it with science-fiction, using freely available video in a unique way.

I also had to up my motion graphics skills to create realistic renderings of the Milky Way galaxy and Earth itself. I used Trapcode Form and Particular to build the spacescapes. The upside-down planet is built on satellite photographs from NASA. If you look closely enough you can even see the clouds moving.