Epoch

I have loved space since I was a child. Like many kids, I wanted to become an astronaut. I became a visual artist instead, and Epoch gave me a way to make that journey through my computer. It was a personal project and a love letter to something that had fascinated me for as long as I could remember.

My friend Chris Bjerre shares that fascination, and we made the first film together. The project gave us a place to explore images and ideas we cared about, while learning and spending time making something with one another.

Ben Lukas Boysen and Yair Elazar Glotman created the score for Epoch I. We were able to build the imagery around their music, letting it become a foundation for the journey rather than something added at the end.

The result was an eleven-minute, meditative CGI space experiment. At a time when so much work seemed to be built around thirty- or ninety-second formats, making something long and quiet felt unexpected. I have always been drawn to following what matters to a project, even when it takes me in the opposite direction from a trend. Epoch needed room to unfold.

I laid out the basic idea in Adobe Illustrator, using simple graphic forms to storyboard the journey. Chris and I agreed on the flow before moving further into the images. It gave us a straightforward way to talk about the film and establish what we were building together.

We used Cinema 4D and Octane Render, which we were both learning and exploring at the time. Chris had a wonderful grasp of the tools. There was a pleasure in discovering what we could make with them and allowing that exploration to become part of the film.

I did not feel finished with the Epoch universe. The first film took us through the solar system, and I wanted the next chapter to take us beyond it. Epoch II moves through an event horizon into another dimension, where a civilization grows. The idea of a new dawn, other planets, and other systems kept pulling me forward.

Chris was busy at the time, so I made most of the second film myself, working with the tools I knew and shooting some of the dune footage. For the fluid imagery, I worked with my friends the Joelsons on micro cinematography. These projects let me bring friends into the process, and I am grateful for the talent and curiosity they share.

Simone “AEPH” Vallecorsa led the score for Epoch II, and Yuta Endo also contributed to the score and sound design. Music remained central to the experience, helping the film carry a sense of discovery as it moved into unfamiliar space.

One of the most enjoyable challenges was making the event horizon: a black hole or wormhole that could become an entry into another kind of space. I used simple two-dimensional tools in After Effects to create the feeling of warped dimensions and space bending inside it.

There was something wonderfully ironic about the process. I was combining 3D software with 2D software, looking at a flat screen in the physical world, and trying to suggest a fourth-dimensional idea. I thought of it almost as an entry point to a tesseract. Familiar tools became a way to imagine something beyond the dimensions I could directly represent.