CASEY’s Carlo Van de Roer Teams Up with Taika Waititi & Rita Ora in ‘Toru'

CASEY director and inventor Carlo Van de Roer co-directed 'Toru' with fellow New Zealander Taika Waititi. The art installation opens in the West Bund Art Centre in Shanghai and will travel around the globe later this year.

​The installation features a three-channel video starring Taika Waititi alongside singer-songwriter Rita Ora. Their electrifying performance weaves together elements of Māori mythology, including the myth of Tane, the Māori god of the forest who retrieved three baskets of knowledge - the basket of light, the basket of darkness, and the basket of pursuit. 

Each film operates as a different recollection, or interpretation, of the same performance. A new filmmaking approach called PlateLight enabled the filmmakers to capture the same moment with different lighting conditions as separate pieces of footage. The result are three versions of the same film, presenting an accurate record of the past that is fluid like memory, authorable like myth. 

​PlateLight was developed by Satellite-Lab, an R&D studio co-founded by Van de Roer and Stuart Rutherford at the New Museum to develop new in-camera based film-making technology. The technologies have been used in several CASEY productions for clients such as Lexus, Meta, Nike, Samsung, La Mer, The North Face, Dolby, LG and Microsoft.

As an in-camera approach, they allow Van de Roer to create without the need of Al or CGI; in fact, achieving the relighting flexibility Al is currently striving to provide, while maintaining the integrity of a real performance and real lighting. The visual language embraces both photographic accuracy and plasticity, while enabling the filmmakers to control lighting after the film has been captured. 

Toru draws inspiration from the embrace of art and technology of the Light and Space movement of Southern California. The set was designed to present a changeable representation of space and materiality through lighting, and the project was shot not far from where Robert Irwin and James Turrell experimented with the perception of space through light.

​​The filmmaking technology used to create three films of the same exact performance is a brand-new approach patented by the team at Satellite Lab. In a physical space, the films are presented on three screens as a triptych. Online, the work is presented as an interactive video that lets the viewer control the lighting through clicking. 

The project is one of a series of collaborations between Carlo Van de Roer and Taika Waititi. Satellite Lab technology was also used in key scenes for the Marvel features Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love and Thunder.