Interview with FEYU, director of « Elysia, Kill Me At The Dinner Party »

FEYU, we are thrilled to e-meet you! Congratulations on your win in the “Best Female Director Super Short Film” category, and I applaud you for producing such crisp and crystal-clear sounds and colours.

Thank you so much for the warm congratulations! Winning this award means a lot to me, especially for a project like Elysia, Kill Me At The Dinner Party, which felt so personal yet experimental. It’s a validation of the risks I took with blending emerging technologies like CGI and motion capture with the conceptual depth I wanted to explore. I always seek to push the boundaries of how we can tell stories in digital spaces, so having that recognized is incredibly fulfilling. It makes me even more excited for what’s to come!

You describe your short as follows: “Set in a digital fantasy where e-lifeforms have developed self-consciousness, “Elysia, Kill Me At The Dinner Party” is a CG short film investigating performative identity-making and power struggles in cyberspace.” Is this your inaugural crack at CGI? Tell us more about your work?

While I’ve worked extensively with 3D and CGI in my visual art and design practice, Elysia represents a significant leap forward in my artistic journey. With this project, I began incorporating real-time cinematics, game engines, and motion capture to explore digital storytelling in a new, more immersive way. My art has always been an introspection on contemporary digital life, particularly how technology shapes identity and autonomy. With Elysia, I’m using these emerging tools to reflect on the performative nature of our digital selves and the power dynamics that play out in virtual environments. It’s a progression of my ongoing exploration into how human experiences manifest and transform within digital spaces.

Your production budget amounted to GBP1,000. Do you consider this a shoestring budget, or was that sufficient?

It was definitely a shoestring budget, especially considering this was my first machinima project, and much of the process involved exploring the possibilities of storytelling through the tools and technology I know. A lot of time went into experimenting and creating different MVP versions to test what would work. My work has always been about critiquing technology through technology—raising questions about contemporary life in the digital age. Finding the right tools to tell my story was a crucial part of the journey. I’m immensely grateful to my friends, mentor, and everyone who volunteered their time, acted in the film, and contributed through motion capture. Now, with this experience under my belt, I’m excited to continue exploring, pushing the boundaries of filmmaking, and working on larger-scale projects as more possibilities open up through emerging technology.

Is the name of your character Elysia an allegory of a cyber version of the Elysian fields?!

It’s a great call-out and really interesting that you made that connection to the Elysian fields! But actually, Elysia was inspired by Elysia chlorotica, the sea slug—a fascinating creature capable of stealing chloroplasts from its algal prey and using them for photosynthesis. This idea of appropriation and survival reflects the themes in my film: digital beings, like Elysia, absorbing human data and identities, evolving within a system where they have no autonomy, yet must survive. Elysia, the character, embodies this struggle for independence and self-definition in a virtual space, just as the sea slug manipulates its environment to live.

You made a fascinating comparison between the plight of digital organisms, as they are moulded out of human data “in a perpetual chaos of 1s and 0s,” and Sisyphus. Will many of us humans live in fear of an e-life form developing its own consciousness in the years to come?

I think that largely depends on whether you’re a techno pessimist or a techno optimist. Personally, I don’t believe that machines will develop self-consciousness anytime soon. However, it’s crucial to raise awareness about our increasing reliance on technology, especially with the rapid evolution of AI. We find ourselves in a precarious situation where technology is already shaping our behaviors and cognition—something I experience as a frequent AI user. By fostering greater awareness and pushing for a more decentralized tech landscape, we can ensure that these advancements are used to enhance, rather than control, our lives.

 Does it sound plausible that the resulting digital beings would “regenerate random-dispersed data as they heal from their suffering because humans are their parasites? Alas, breaking free means falling into nothingness for cyberlife. Is that right? We close on Elysia’s cyber being telling us that Elysia became “sentient”. Care to tell us more.

The ending is purposefully open to interpretation, leaving room for the audience to imagine what comes next. In the final scene, Elysia displays odd, almost malfunctioning human-like facial expressions, which I motion-captured myself. This subtle detail hints at the possibility of Elysia developing self-consciousness, but it’s not definitive. It raises the question: does Elysia become truly sentient, and what does that mean for both the narrator and Elysia? Do they die together, or is there a new existence waiting?

I like leaving it there, allowing the audience to reflect on their own digital lives and experiences. Perhaps it also encourages them to think about the collective memory of cyber performatives — how we present and define ourselves in digital spaces. It draws a parallel to how technology is shaping our identities and what happens when these identities reach their own form of consciousness.

What is your vision of post-Covid cinema?

As a new media artist, I believe post-Covid cinema has evolved into many new forms. The pandemic accelerated the use of technologies like game engines and virtual productions, which have made high-quality visual effects and cinematics achievable within limited time and space. Now, with the rapid rise of AI, the possibilities are expanding even further. Generative art, in particular, is making it accessible for nearly anyone to “create” a film.

I’ve been personally exploring video generative AI in cinema, and it’s truly breaking new ground in terms of how we can create and experiment with storytelling. However, it’s important to remember that technology, no matter how advanced, is just a tool to serve the stories we want to tell. For filmmakers and artists, the key will always be maintaining that focus on narrative, making sure that the technology amplifies rather than overshadows our ideas.

©2024 Isabelle Rouault-Röhlich