‘Hope’ by Max Cooper and Thomas Vanz

Hope is a visual poem about the journey of a thought, with a scale transposition to the gigantic/cosmic, it tries to represent the brain’s complexity and the birth of a feeling, as a charged particle travels through neuron and gives the power to create information and the emotion, Hope.

It has been made using real shots of macroscopic chemical reactions, recorded with a 8k camera, with a 100mm macro lens, that turn the shooting into a microscopic observation and permitting to avoid CGI most of the time. Using this process allowed me to conceive the most complex figures possible, without getting rid of the natural beauty, and the extreme complexity of the neuronal system.

The creators linked the idea of hope, in a personal, human sense, to the journey every ion has to make across the neuronal membrane – an infinitesimal part of the most complex machine, with each particle striving for it’s destination, driven by the charge gradient across the membrane. It’s not biologically accurate of course, it’s an epic-scale dramatisation of a fundamental process that is making you aware of reading this right now…