Flashover
Robert Walton
Flashover is a monumental, immersive artwork about wildfire. It is a journey through a bespoke architectural and sonic environment staging six animated works over fourteen screens. Pieced together from the memories of volunteer firefighters, Flashover contemplates the cycle of wildfires fuelled by the climate emergency and our collective failure to break society's disastrous habitual loops. It evokes fires past, present, and the inferno to come if we refuse to act.
A flashover, or burnover, occurs when fire sweeps across the landscape faster than firefighters can escape, forcing them to seek refuge in their truck until the fire passes. They create a water halo around the truck, wear oxygen masks, and cover themselves with fire blankets, hoping that the flames will flash over before their water and air run out. If they survive, they witness a transformed world where the fuel of living things is fully spent and flames ignite from thin air.
Flashover invites visitors to look beyond the human viewpoint to encounter wildfire from the perspectives of flora, fauna, and the fire itself by exploring a labyrinth of minuscule and monumental screens. Flashover was inspired by a single moment in the catastrophic 2019/20 Black Summer fires, where a volunteer fire crew, including our co-director, survived a flashover. To address this event the collaborators had to discover a new animation language by combining expanded photographic techniques including photogrammetry, 3D Gaussian Splatting, 3D animation, and dynamic simulation, with multichannel spatialized sound including custom-designed kinetic ultrasonic speakers, architectural space, and scent.
Project Collaborators:
Creative Team Robert Walton / Concept, Writer, Lead Artist & Director CJ Taylor / Concept, Writer, Lead Artist & Director Phillip Wilkinson / Lead Animator & Director StudioBento / Producer Kris Bird / Environment Design Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey / Composers, Sound & Music Gina Moore / Creature Animator Sam McGilp / Screen Lead Thing FX / Fire Animator Siyi Wang / Animator Lachie Careedy / Electrics Flashover brought together a team of over 50 volunteers, researchers, scientists, and artists from various fields, including emergency response, climate change, wildfire management, performance, visual art, animation, sound, and environmental design. This collaboration created an innovative and unprecedented arts-led interdisciplinary response to the emotional impact of the climate emergency. Partners University of Melbourne, NantStudios, StudioBento, Adelaide Film Festival
