Raphael Moreira Gonçalves

Film

Rouge Ultra is the fragment of the life of a young man fascinated by morbid images. For him, these are like a catharsis for the memory of the death of his best friend, which he witnessed as a child. This film mixes “real” shots and computer-generated images. I wanted to work on the idea of “factitious” images, to talk about the virtualisation of the world that the character imposed on himself in order to protect himself. I use 3D video capture (Kinect) so as to be able to insert the modelling of my actor in a CGI environment that I create or that I cut out from the “real” photogrammetrically, to play on the ambiguous realism of my images. I wanted to approach this project by associating the tradition of dark romanticism and its relation to morbidity, with the proliferation of ultra-violent images from the Dark Web. Setting up a cathartic passageway to reinterpret the romantic figure in the virtual, abrupt environment, like a materialisation of the asphyxiating cloud in which the character tries to run away or lose himself. For it seems to me that today social relations and even the feeling of existence itself are being redefined through this ocean of images. As if, at the present time, what is in play is a switch towards a virtual elsewhere that is simply a superposition over the world we know, with its beauties and abyssal depths.

Raphael Moreira Gonçalves