Re-Wire

Digital Props

For David-James Fernandes' directorial debut, I created a convincing, patched-together Frankenstein of a computer – and its interface – for Dr. Vanuz's mind-altering laboratory.

We employed vintage hardware on loan from ReBOOT, including several Pentium 4 towers and a decades-old Compaq server rack decked out with a few hundred kilos' worth of UPSes and hard drive arrays.

I installed Linux on one of the PCs and replaced its highly-polished default user interface with XMonad, a tiled window manager. I enlisted Matt Corks' expertise with zsh shellscripting and did some research on dzen, a Linux-based widget engine. All of this was wrapped up into one master script so that the actor would actually be able to type in the command himself, hit enter, and have the imagery appear in real-time.

Alex Steacy contributed the graphical interface that was also controlled by the actor, Shawn Lawrence. My TagTool also makes a cameo appearance.

Re-Wire screened at the Hamilton Film Festival, Boston Underground Film Festival, Rhode Island International Horror Film Festival, Toronto After Dark Film Festival, Fantasia International Film Festival, and Athens International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It is now available on iTunes.