The Puzzle

22 September 2010

Lead actress Katie Bignell during the on-location CERN shooting of The Puzzle


Pixel engineer Neal Hartman took leave from CERN in January, to follow his dream of attending film school in London. But he couldn't stay away for long. Last month he was back, and brought a crew of eight people with him, to film sections for his thesis project, a short film entitled The Puzzle.

The narrative follows an 11-year-old girl who inadvertently helps her father make a breakthrough in physics. The story, presented in a magical realism style, unfolds from the little girl's perspective, looking in on the strange and beguiling world of particle physics. Through her innocent eyes, her father is suddenly able to see what was there all along.

“It's sort of this fictionalised re-imagined history of how String Theory could have been discovered,” says Neal. “The idea being that it's that naïveté of childhood that allows you to envision the world any which way and to really get to that next level of physics where you reconcile classical and quantum physics – all this stuff that ATLAS is trying to do.”

“The thing that always struck me about physics and the work that people do here is that they have to always be re-imagining things,” he adds. “Always starting over, throwing out everything they know and kind of dreaming up new possibilities. That's a very childlike pursuit.”

Because the story is told from the girl's point of view and the film is purposely very visual in its presentation of ideas, Neal's hope is that it might appeal to children and non-experts alike by bypassing numbers and equations and showing that there is a lot in physics that is beautiful and intriguing.

“The idea was to visualise all of that,” he says. “In school it's just rules, rules, rules about all the different ways things work. With this film, we were trying to give this idea that there's a lot of mystery and magic to science – not literal magic, but the magic of discovering new things.”

Although CERN isn't named specifically in the film, many of the locations chosen – Building 40's cafeteria, the ATLAS Control Room, the Globe – are recognisable to CERN regulars.

“I think [CERN] has a lot of places in it and a lot of elements to it that are also really magical,” Neal smiles. “Really amazing things happen here, and yet often we think of it as being a normal mundane place.”

The film will be approximately 12 minutes long. A second, longer version (18-20 minutes) will comprise the original film plus several short interludes that delve into more technical detail but retain the 'otherworldly' feel of the main narrative. The idea is that the film can then be tailored for its audience, with the short version more appropriate for film festivals or younger children, and the other more in-depth version appealing to educational TV channels or science centres.

Neal's crew, including a visual-effects producer who has worked for Miramax, and a cinematographer and production designer who are graduates of the UK National Film School, shot about half of the live action footage at CERN in August, with a lot of people from ATLAS and CERN helping to make the shoot possible. Additional footage is being shot on location in London in October, along with 'green screen' sessions for the animated sections.

For Neal, returning to CERN to make his final project was always on the cards but still, he admits: “It was a little bit surprising for me that I chose to do that, but in the end it did feel like the right choice. I started doing this course and I realised that so much of who I am, and my personality and my opinions and everything are dictated by my experience – which is 16 years in physics – and it would just be stupid of me to ignore that.”

He settled on String Theory as the particular thread to follow, he says, because, of the philosophical comparisons it offers: “It's a really beautiful idea – that everything is made up of the same element that essentially just exhibits different states,” he considers. “I think that has a lot of undercurrents for humanity and the way that people look at the world; it's a nice thing to imagine that everything is connected by some sort of commonality. It's not so much of a leap to imagine that people are as well.”

The film is in editing now, and will be screened at CERN sometime early next year.

 

Ceri Perkins

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