The Infinity Room
Richard Johnson / Neal Hartman
CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, is a rare and beautiful example of international cooperation, a hope for the human experiment in a world turned chaotic and tribal.
The Infinity Room is a steam punk ode to science, an opera about a machine built by primates to find their origins.
This film follows a core team of engineers upgrading what is effectively the largest, most sophisticated digital camera ever made. Its mission is to look back in time to the beginning of the universe and understand its origins. It does this by re-creating the conditions just after the big bang, and snapping pictures of that mess – 40 million of them per second.
Now, we’ve turned our cameras on this groundbreaking machine. Filmed over two years using almost entirely Go Pro cameras, we collected over 600 hours of footage, and spent three years putting it all together.
The film takes you on a ride literally through the heart of one of humankind’s most ambitious technological creations. Made possible solely by the good nature of international collaboration, we see the nuts & bolts of the undertaking in a universal, poetic look at what is really required to make discoveries at sub-atomic scales. Our approach is neither romanticised nor cleaned and polished. You see the real people, the real work, and the immensity of the task at hand.
This NFT collection contains historically unique footage from inside ATLAS, in a series of “moving portraits” that slowly reveal, in a loop, unseen views into this special world.
The collaboration between Richard Johnson and Neal Hartman began in 2012. Richard had been writing and directing fiction in London and Paris, notably for Canal+. Neal spent 18 years as an engineer at CERN, and founded the CineGlobe Film Festival at CERN.
The Infinity Room will be released as a feature film at festivals in the near future.
Primate vs Origin Machine
The Wheel
Lift Off
Open Shut