No Passengers Episode 3
In the early post-Covid days of virtual production filmmaking, Territory Studio was commissioned to work with Soho House and Porsche on a short film featuring a Porsche Taycan racing through an alien world. I led the creative direction of the world-building in collaboration with Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian. The brief called for a surreal collision of science and futurism: an absurd, otherworldly landscape far removed from the polished conventions of corporate space imagery.
The world began with a single piece of Suminagashi-patterned fabric, whose flowing forms reminded me of map contours. These became the foundation of the landscape, into which I wove references to Nelly’s wild scientific experiments. A particle collider, two Schrödinger’s cats, alien kaiju and time portals populated the terrain. For the finale, the world would fold back on itself in an Inception-inspired sequence as the car raced through a wormhole in space. The ambition was to create a fantastical world where anything could happen, yet the ideas remained rooted in real science.
Technically, the project pushed the boundaries of what could be achieved on a virtual production stage with Unreal Engine rendering in real time. Epic Games subsequently invited me to speak at one of its events about how we had realised this world. The project explored the largely uncharted territory of extreme world-building for virtual production, demonstrating how shots that would be impossible to achieve practically could be brought to life safely and at low cost.
