About

Control, and the mistakes

There are a number of different techniques but they are all derived from a similar process.

It's a combination of the control I am trying to apply in the design and the organic random mistakes that come out of it. I love that about it. It's actually what I think attracted both Terry Malick and Darren Aronofsky. Both of them were drawn to the organic-ness of it, and the fact that a lot of that comes from its unpredictability. They both used it as a medium for communicating something, and what Terry has done with it is a very personal thing that very much draws on his life.

It is all happening in front of the lens, and I'm not enhancing any of it afterwards — I take a lot of trouble to make sure the colours you end up looking at are the colours that were actually there at the time. I use organic particles because they bring a randomness to the way things flow, and I choose the pigments as much for how they behave as for how they look. The paintings only exist for a short time before they turn into something else and the moment has gone.

A legacy of art and innovation

I have always had a fascination with nature and I guess it's hard to disentangle that from my father's work as a biological illustrator, and then a natural history filmmaker.

As a child, I was always fascinated by the design of nature and the magic of it — the fact that it was a completely alien world when you got down to smaller levels. I suppose that has sort of driven both the inspiration for the artwork as well as the techniques I use — some of the things I am shooting now are very organic, nature-based materials, and a lot of the materials I am using or the processes I am filming, are natural, organic processes, so it's all these wheels within wheels.

My father is Peter Parks, a cinematographer and an Oscar winner, and we have spent a lot of time diving together over the years, filming some of the smallest and, I would argue, most important creatures in the ocean.

Funnily enough, some of the images in the film were actually shot by my dad — Terry approached my dad for some of the marine imagery he was shooting thirty years ago. For The Tree of Life he was looking for some of this more abstract pre-birth, outer space, big bang-type imagery that comes across in my work. He came to me totally independently, not realising the link.

Capturing movement and light

That influenced my creative path, although I ended up working in this field via a rather tortuous route, having originally studied engineering and industrial design at The Royal College.

I think that background is still doing most of the work, really. Every piece needs something built for it — the optics, the lighting, the timing, keeping the temperature and the air where I want them. The glass I am shooting through is a mixture of things I have made recently and things a great deal older than I am — some of the optics are 180 years old.

Mastery in 3D and film

I guess there are three main strands to what I find myself doing — there's this side that we are talking about, the fluid art, which is a much more abstract, much rawer thing that I am communicating, then there's the natural history side, which finds its root in the natural world, and then there is the element of working in three dimensions.

A lot of the last twenty years has gone on supervising stereoscopic 3D on features — Gravity, Edge of Tomorrow, Fantastic Beasts, No Time to Die — and the same questions have come round again in VR and AR.

I believe that science, nature and art are so interwoven and it's the combination of the three that fascinates me. The tendency in our society to separate different fields of knowledge can be frustrating.