Hasta La Motion!

“Ten Meter Tower” is one of four videos produced by independent filmmakers who have received support from the nonprofit Sundance Institute. It is a social experiment which found people that had never jumped off a 10 meter tower and filmed the results. Would you jump? Or would you chicken out? “Ten Meter Tower” is a short film by Maximilien Van Aertryck and Axel Danielson. Through an online advertisement in Sweden, the filmmakers found 67 people who had never been on a 10-meter (about 33 feet) diving tower before, and had never jumped from that high. They paid each of them the equivalent of about $30 to participate and filmed it all with six cameras and several microphones. The duo say it was important not to conceal the fact that this was an arranged situation, and thus chose to show the microphones within the frame. Ultimately, about 70 percent of those who climbed did jump. They noticed that the presence of the camera as well as the social pressure (from those awaiting their turn beside the pool) pushed some of the participants to jump, which made their behavior even more interesting. Maximilien Van Aertryck (http://www.maximilienvanaertryck.com) and Axel Danielson (http://www.plattformproduktion.se) are documentary filmmakers based in Gothenburg, Sweden, who have worked together since 2013: «Our objective in making this film was something of a psychology experiment: We sought to capture people facing a difficult situation, to make a portrait of humans in doubt. We’ve all seen actors playing doubt in fiction films, but we have few true images of the feeling in documentaries. To make them, we decided to put people in a situation powerful enough not to need any classic narrative framework. A high dive seemed like the perfect scenario.»