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The film: Illogically Is · this document as Markdown

The Apparatus · a companion short to Illogically Is · 4:57.8

Photosensitivity and content warning. One white frame and three full-field cuts to black; no strobe. The sound carries screams, crying, sirens and recorded voices in distress, and one whispered sentence at the end.

“.” is the film’s last character given a wall. Illogically Is ends on the period of HAEC VERBA MENTIUNTUR; this is that period, painted at eye height on hyper-real plaster, and a camera that starts on it and pulls back until the wall is past any human scale. The voices of the film surface in the plaster as it recedes, and thicken until the wall is more text than wall. The dot never leaves. At 4:52.8 the picture is taken away; what returns, after two seconds of dark, is the first frame again.

The film, in numbers

Form

one shot, one motion, one interruption

Duration

7140 frames at 24000/1001 = 297.798 s (4:57.8)

Picture

1920x1080, Blender/Cycles path tracing, 32 samples adaptive with denoising, AgX; 7019 frames rendered in 9.9 h on one laptop GPU

Clock

the first frame is the dot at macro; the song's end section enters at frame 3073 (2:08.2); the interruption is frame 7019 (4:52.8); then one white frame, 48 frames of black, 48 frames of the first frame again, 24 of black

Determinism

the picture is one script with a fixed seed and no keyframes: the same numbers make the same film

The picture

The wall

a plane of plaster displaced for real - perlin peaks, a voronoi bead, a trowel undulation, a micro tooth as bump - lit by a single point light that leaves the room as the room does.

The dot

an 18 mm disc of black semi-gloss paint at eye height, 0.25 mm thick, with a meniscus at a wobbling rim, half-filling the stipple beneath it.

The pull-out

45 mm to 110 m along one axis, 35 mm to 14 mm of lens, a slow tilt to 18 degrees; the floor's 2.4 m slabs are the only fixed-size thing in the room - the scale the wall outgrows.

The grain

the stipple's world scale grows with the pixel footprint (1x to 600x), so the plaster stays 6-8 px at every distance: the wall never stops being a wall seen close.

The dot, held

past about 2:42 the painted dot is smaller than one pixel. It is held at a floor of 2.8 px, at the exact place the camera puts it, so that it never disappears.

The rumble

from 4:00 the camera shakes, rising into the interruption, with a lurch on each blast. It is a rotation, and a rotation of a distant scene is a pure shift of the image: whole pixels, no resampling.

The words

Surfacings

193 events drawn from the film's own material - its dream sentences, its Latin tags, its refrains - eroded by a three-octave plaster grain so that parts of every letter are missing. Nothing before 0:18, nothing after the interruption.

Flinches

30 of them, each one frame after a scream or a blast in the sound: the wall's light jumps 5-19 %.

The flood

from 158.0 s the words stop being events and become a field - 672 of them, built from 566 whole sheets of phrases - until the wall is more text than plaster. It is clipped to the wall itself, so it never lies on the floor or the ceiling; it never enters a clear disc around the dot; and it drops out entirely for a quarter of a second before the third blast.

The reflection

the floor is polished concrete, so it catches the words - inverted, smeared and gone within a metre of the wall's foot. The words themselves never touch it.

The sound

The two songs

see the table below; both are cited, neither is licensed.

The cascade

190 fragments of 19 recordings, thinned by a random process whose density, level, overlap, band, pan and treatment are curves over the span from the song's entry to the interruption. A governor holds any one source to a fraction of the span.

The radio

221 radio-frequency events synthesised on the clock - carriers, beating clusters, squeals, propagation static, tuning sweeps. Nothing sampled.

The whimper bed

a surface from 0:40 - hiss, crackle, a slow wow - and crying on it from 0:55 to the interruption, under the music by about ten decibels. About a quarter of the crying is synthesised outright; the rest is whitened until the phonemes and the breath survive and the speaker does not.

The approach

the song's end section does not arrive; it is approached for 28 seconds - its own first two seconds reversed through a long room, lowered five semitones and soured by a slow flanger, rising and resolving into true pitch at the join.

The screams that are no one's

the scream at 4:41 and the roar at 4:49 are synthetic throats - a glottal line, the pushes of effort a body makes, period-doubling roughness, cracks and catches. Nothing in them is any recording's scream.

The closing sentence

"I hate you", which no source says: whisper grains from two of the recordings, whitened until only air is left, then shaped by a formant score. It is spoken in the dark, and ends 0.2 s before the dot returns.

Music

The interruption’s cascade

Every recording below is torn to fragments and treated; none is heard whole. They are cited, not licensed. This page is not ready to publish: 2 of the entries still need their artist.

Synthesised, not sampled

Verification

The film is checked against its own clock by a script, frame by frame and sample by sample. The last run:

Colophon

No generative-AI imagery. The picture is a physically-based render driven by one deterministic script; every sound is either a recording cited above, a synthesis built on the film’s clock, or a construction described here. The film carries no credits by design — they are here instead. Corrections and claims are welcome and will be made on this page.

W.U.L.D.: Incorporated · wuld.ink