Vitor Cervi Design & Animation Info
Carcass is a self-initiated project born out of different topics of my interest coming together almost by coincidence.
In 2021, I moved to North-East London, and being a street photography enthusiast, I started capturing images of my new neighbourhood. The area is home to countless MOTs and car repair workshops, and I quickly found myself obsessively looking for broken vehicles, exposed engines, and spare parts to capture with my camera.
It was around that same time when I first came across a 3D-scanning app on my phone, and it seemed like a no-brainer to use it on my newly-found favourite subject.
Another tech phenomenon that was becoming the then-new thing was NFTs and the conversation around the Metaverse. As a visual artist working with digital tools, I was naturally drawn towards it. However, like many others, as I read more about it, I was left with a strange impression.
The possibility of creating surreal worlds one can experience with a degree of reality is surely amazing, but the idea of inhabiting a universe where everything is neat, pre-made, and branded felt extremely unattractive to me.
As I've always been drawn towards collage, digitizing human waste and refused objects seemed to be a way to almost counteract the tech trend. With so many important issues around our lifestyles lacking the space they need in the public debate, polluting the Metaverse is a type of protest. And what better way to do that than to use the product that is the ultimate symbol of individualist capitalism: the car?
Piecing together the models I captured, I created a 3D patchwork of an automobile. A useless object that is the result of waste transformed into a digital asset. It lives in a glitchy environment surrounded by futuristic interpretations of car stickers, designed by my friend Rūta Paškevičiūtė.
The final part of the project was to create a sound extension of the visuals, and I was fortunate enough to have the composers from Father offer to collaborate with me.
Each one of them came up with their own musical and sound design responses to the graphics, individually, without knowing what the others had made. As a result, they ended up with six ideas in total. Those were edited so the material from different sources was pieced together in a similar way to the car parts being assembled in the film.
