Favourite Colour: Black Confronts Confinement, Memory, and Mortality in 'An Absence'

An Absence is a short film based on the poetry of Chris’ (Favourite Colour: Black) colleague and friend Mark Prime, who died two years ago. He met Mark when he was a young advertising creative who gave him a job, and they stayed in touch after bonding over horror films and creepy 80s TV ads. During the covid lockdown they did several projects together to keep from going mad, eventually resulting in three short films, and a ‘zine’ of Mark’s poems paired with Chris’s images.

This project started out as an attempt to learn a little about AI video. After two years trying to ignore the rise of the technology that has the current creative industry in a headlock, Chris decided he at least needed to understand it a little more, and so he set out to create something himself as a test.

The visuals depict the former Greenwich District Hospital, a 1970s-built brutalist monster which closed in 2001. In Chris’s archive, he has a folder of low-resolution digital shots of the place from a visit shortly before it was demolished in 2006, and he thought it would be interesting to use AI to attempt to ‘resurrect’ it.

He distinctly remembers the atmosphere of the abandoned hospital as he explored its oppressive corridors. He’s not the slightest bit spiritual, and doesn't believe in ghosts, but it was the most haunted place he’d ever been. He said ‘It was impossible to be there without thinking of the thousands of births and deaths it had witnessed. Every door felt like a presence was waiting behind it. The acoustics were disorientating. There were signs of break-in everywhere, and nature had begun to reclaim the building. The hospital had a non-denominational chapel that was straight out of a David Lynch film - circular and wood panelled with an ominous curtain at the end that was too terrifying to peek behind. And then there was the oddly threatening tone of the form I had to fill in - in order to gain access - which warned me there may be ‘unknown occupants’ hiding within its labyrinthine depths.”

These photographs were the starting point to create moving images, using AI to imagine what shadows inhabited the building, what was further down the corridors as well as behind its doors and curtains.

As the experiments developed, Chris kept thinking about a poem of Mark’s which had been read at his funeral. Which he thinks Mark wrote when he was ill. “I know Mark had to spend a lot of time in hospital in his final years. And so it seemed (to me, at least) to reflect the visuals poignantly - its gentle, melancholy beauty lamenting the loss of simple freedoms beyond the walls of confinement.”

Anil Aykan - designer at Barnbook Studios and one half of electronic duo Fragile Self - performed and recorded the poem.

The full film can be viewed by following @octopus_inc_uk.