making the 1999 »tx-transform« movie

Between January and October 1998 the »tx-transform« short film was shot and produced. It was inspired by an equation by Bertram Russell on the theory of relativity and was intended to compressed the concurrence of the substance and science of the theory and the new filmic technique of »tx-transform« into a film. The narrative character of the text continued in images which were given their aesthetic quality by a unique type of movement through space and time. The production of the five minute long short was technically complex and given the relatively limited budget we had to overcome some challenges with innovative and unconventional solutions. The wonderful set photos were taken by Robin Riess.

Between January 24th and 25th, 1998 most of the filming took place at the Railway Museum Strasshof (Lower Austria). The fully functional steam engine we used was a 1943 DRB 52 100 built by the German Krauss-Maffei company. We chose this locomotive because there was a scale model train of it, which we needed for some FX shots later. The cameraman on set is Theo Ligthart.

The model- and VFX shooting was done with second cameraman Martin Putz in March 1998 in my studio. The miniature train model was built by artist Jeanette Schulz.

Here is an overview of the various production steps that were necessary to convert the material from the PAL video format into a form that would later also look convincing on the large cinema screen. However, the steps in which part of the material was transformed are not listed here – this process was carried out directly with the coloured and compressed (16:9 squeezed) images, which were then processed in the same way as the rest of the material.

In a subsequent step, all computer-edited images were printed out individually and re-photographed frame by frame with a 35mm camera — an ARRI Techno that had been specially modified for this purpose. When this method proved too costly and time-consuming, we developed an alternative by filming each frame directly from a high-resolution monitor. The idea underlying this process seems to have lingered in Virgil’s mind and eventually resurfaced in a new form: his experimental short film »Copy Shop«, which went on to be nominated for the 2002 Academy Award in the category Best Short Film (Live Action).

In parallel to the production of the »tx-transform« short film, a documentary about the process was made at Peter Joachim Filmservice (Vienna) in August 1998. Director Virgil Widrich.