The Twitch test worked. The cameras worked. And then S.C. stepped out of the car, and I sat there watching the empty interior in silence, and that was the most interesting thing that happened all night.
First rehearsal. The setup held — two iPhones streaming into vMix, the feed going out to Twitch without drama. We tested camera positions and found angles that feel right: windscreen forward, driver framing, variations between them. Nothing revolutionary technically, but the point wasn't to solve the technical question tonight. The point was to find out what the form feels like from inside it.
There's a lot of potential here. I could feel it early. The moving car as a cinematic space is genuinely interesting — the world outside constantly changing, light shifting, the frame never quite stable. That instability is not a problem. It is, in the language of the Dogma, structural.
Driving shots with music playing. When the cut and the movement and the sound align, there's a real cinematic quality to it — something between road film and surveillance footage, in a good way. The Twitch stream handled it without issue. And the moment S.C. got out of the car: the camera sitting on the empty interior, the street outside implied rather than shown, the audience left to wonder what was happening outside — that was the most alive moment of the night. The constraint produced the image.
Side-frame shots with me in frame. In a live cinema context — where the audience can see the director on stage alongside the composer — my visible presence is meaningful. It's part of the form. On Twitch, seen through a car window at an awkward angle, it doesn't carry the same weight. The theatrical register doesn't transfer. Something to keep thinking about rather than discard, but it needs a different solution for this format.
"I'm sitting there watching an empty car interior and I'm genuinely wondering what's happening outside. That's cinema."
Two directions opened up tonight that feel worth pursuing. The first: guest performers — people who join a structured session without knowing what they're walking into. The car as a space they enter and inhabit, the live film forming around them. The second: an AI voice in the car. Typing in real-time via ElevenLabs, the voice speaking directly to whoever is in the vehicle. A Spike Jonze Her treatment — the disembodied director as character, the relationship between the voice and the space becoming the film. The appeal of both ideas is the same: they introduce an other into the car, someone or something the camera can be in relation to, which immediately changes the grammar of what we're cutting between.
Next session: put another person in the car. See what changes when there's an interaction to cut to rather than just a driver and a windscreen. And begin testing ElevenLabs — whether I can type something and have it arrive in the car in a way that feels immediate enough to perform against.