Anchored in observational documentary footage filmed over three years, Truth or Consequences weaves together virtual reality worlds, an improvised score by Bill Frisell, archival footage from the area, and a soundscape built from field recordings captured in the town.

These elements create a feeling of the past, present and future intertwining. They allow the film to be rooted in listening to the five main people, while exploring complex and unresolved themes around progress, history, how we care for the Earth, and what it means to live a meaningful life.

The heart of the film is documentary footage filmed in the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico (“TorC”) over the course of three years. The film spends time with many people in the town but is centered around Yvonne, Olin, George, Katie and Philip.

Creatively led by artist Alexander Porter, the film contains animation-like sequences filmed in virtual reality worlds. Creatively misusing photogrammetry, a technique which creates 3D models from images, the worlds were created from the documentary footage.

Collaborating with Hannah Jayanti, Elliott Mitchell and Claire Hentschker, they extracted individual frames from the footage. This allowed them to create 3D models of places in the film such as Yvonne’s trailer, George’s museum, Philip’s trailer park, the spaceport. They placed these 3D models into a video game engine and built a custom recording software. The sequences in the film are first person recordings of them walking around this strange and familiar world in virtual reality.

Filming in VR created a human presence with handheld camera movements that echo the documentary footage. Because of the creative misusing of photogrammetry, the models are intentionally incomplete with artifacts that echo the experience of remembering. They feel as though a future archeologist (the filmmaker? the audience?) is trying to piece together that which came and went. 

The original score was created by legendary guitarist Bill Frisell, who improvised to projected footage over the course of a year and a half. An intuitive, collaborative process where the film and the score responded to each other, this allowed Bill an immediate, emotive and spontaneous response, creating music that matches the sensitivity and lyricism of the film.

The film uses archival footage to associatively and emotively connect the personal documentary stories to broader historical themes of technology, labour, family, nostalgia, expansion, excavation. All set in the area surrounding TorC, the archival was gathered from home movies, recently declassified DOD films, educational and promotional videos.