Overview

Dark Echo shot in 2013 is, over a decade later, finally being finished.

A single dancer, Echo, wakes on a theatre stage like an unwound mechanical doll, her every movement fighting against a dress that snaps her back into place. As she reaches into the audience, she discovers every seat holds a convulsing, blurred body wearing her own face. As the camera pulls back to reveal the whole scene we see it as a marionette show inside a snow globe, with Echo wound up and ready to play again.

Told entirely without dialogue, the script (Draft 6, 2013) runs as a single unbroken piece of visual storytelling built around one image: an audience made of the performer herself.

Production

Originally shot as a fashion film titled “Dark ECHO” with model Echo Nittolitto at the Tabard Theatre in London, the production was booked for a single day when the concept genuinely needed three. The film’s centrepiece of an entire audience of identical, thrashing bodies, all wearing Echo’s face, shot at 3fps with a slow shutter to produce a blurred, ghost-like convulsion meant filming the same performer in every seat in the house.

That process alone consumed most of the available time, forcing more than half the storyboarded film to be cut on the day. The sequences that did get shot were, fortunately, the most technically ambitious ones, which is what has made the project worth returning to.

Post-Production

More than a decade on, advances in compositing and VFX tools have made it possible to finish the film as it was originally conceived. The revived post-production adds hand-painted VFX for the audience’s electrical convulsions and marionette reveal, alongside a new original score from Akkor (Üstün Yildirim), who has also scored Tage Und Nächte and Begging.

Original 2013 Crew

Director/Photographer: Mark Esper
Model: Echo Nittolitto
Camera Operator: Kieron Jansch
Sound Design/Lighting: Dylan Bell
Make-up/Hair: Lesley Vye
Fashion Design: Battenberg-Cartwright, Sarmite Ostanevica
Location: Tabard Theatre, London

Current Post-Production Credits

Editor/Colourist/VFX: Mark Esper
Composer/Sound Design: Akkor