Optical Nervous System (20th anniversary edition)
An experiment in spherical gestalt cinema
I created this immersive exploration of visual perception in 2004 as an experiment in ultra-high-resolution timelapse filmmaking for spherical projection. This was a couple of years before I created the fulldome Wikipedia entry, so it was still a nascent medium. At the time, I was listening to a lot of Alan Watts and working with his son Mark, who permitted me to use this clip. It was shot with an early Canon digital SLR camera fitted with an 8mm Nikor fisheye lens and composited in After Effects. The soundtrack was created by Jason Holland in a tracker tool.
Optical Nervous System won the inaugural Domefest "Best of Fest" award in 2004. To mark its 20th anniversary, I've uploaded a downloadable 3600x3600 dome master to Vimeo. It's still licensed under CC BY-NC-SA after all these years, so feel free to download it and see how it holds up.
- Direction, photography, editing, compositing, and sound mixing: David McConville
- Music composition: Jason Holland (a.k.a. Pomme de Terre)
- Original lecture from "Introduction to Zen" by Alan Watts, recorded 1965 (Copyright 1973, Electronic University, used with permission from Mark Watts)
- Shot on location in Asheville, NC