ASCENSION

Ascension is the story of an astronaut, his ship, and its computer as they travel to the brink of insanity and back. We follow the ship's mission log as the astronaut leaves his homeworld, becomes hopelessly lost in space, and returns to the same planet thousands of years later. The astronaut's logical and scientific approach to his mission slowly dissolves into insanity as his ship drifts off-course. Vividly hallucinating an idealized version of his mission, he snaps back to reality in time to realize that his destination and point of origination are one and the same.

I made this film as an undergraduate at San Diego State University. The black and white sequences are shot on 16mm film on huge paper mache sets built in my garage. The entire film was created in an intensive 2-week period of little sleep. Towards the end, I began to feel like the troubled astronaut in the story...