Quark Star
(2005, interactive motion picture, 70 minutes)
Billions of years in the future... the fate of humanity rests in the hands of one deep space explorer. One vulgar, obsessive-compulsive, prejudiced guy in a tin foil hat. What could possibly go wrong?
Stuart Bing is all alone in the depths of space. All alone, that is, except for the two million clones of himself. When his starship starts to malfunction, he calls back to Earth for help, only to find that robots have taken over the planet, led by a spiteful, mechanical stand-up comic. Bing’s only hope is to discover the secret of the all-powerful Quark Star, and even then, it may not be enough...
Filmed on a Fisher-Price toy Pixelcam while isolated in a loft in rural New York, Quark Star is more like a video game than a movie. It's a DVD-only motion picture, presented as the rescued captain’s log of Bing’s starship. The viewer chooses different sections of the logs to view, and they play back differently every time. Director Simon Tarr also plays Stuart Bing, all of his clones, and the Evil Robot Leader.
Quark Star is available from Amazon, and from the disc-by-mail version of Netflix. Since Quark Star was designed to use the programmatic structures of the DVD format, it is not available online.
Selected Screenings: UFVA 2004 (Audience Choice Award)
