Directed by Simon De Diesbach, Limites is a short film with an autobiographical narrative, captured in the forest of Chaney in Switzerland, where running embodies the intimate link between the protagonist and the forest.

The forest has witnessed a multitude of personal events and that is now being destroyed by a gravel pit. Immersed in a fragmented world, Simon questions the reasons that pushed him to 3D scan his forest. He questions his relationship with the living world, with the limits of matter, and with the limits of digital representations of nature.

We have spoken to Simon in detail about the project, starting with inspiration, about immersing himself into the forest, and then going back to the screen.

Before you read on, watch the full film below – full screen recommended, made exclusively available to CAN readers. Enjoy!

Duration: 7′ 37″ / Size: 1998×1080 / Language: FR with EN Subtitle

The beginnings

When Simon was a teenager, his father fell ill with cancer, and discovering running became an outlet for him. It was in the forest bordering the village where he grew up, in Rossens, Switzerland, that he used to run regularly, several times a week. A fitness trail runs through it, winding across the forest from end to end. He went there to release stress and anxiety. Through this experience of running, of crossing the forest, he had found a form of therapy that strongly contributed to shaping who he became as an adult. Back then, though, he couldn’t have cared less about the forest itself: it was just a place where he unloaded, he’d drive there and leave again right after, without really considering it.

It was 2019. Visiting his mother, as an adult this time, he came across an enormous gravel pit that had just been built. Brand new, massive, it showed off a gaping hole eating into the forest. That sight made him realise the one-sided relationship he had maintained with it: as a teenager, all that mattered was the personal benefit he drew from the space it offered him. As an adult, he looked at it differently, with a kind of deference. He felt the need to act, to undertake something, and as a digital artist, the desire came to him to try digitizing it.

Immersing himself in the forest to digitise it / environment and movement

The first step was finding the right tools, in this case a 3D laser scanner, the FARO Focus3D S70, a tripod-mounted machine. He secured a collaboration with FARO, an American company specialising in this type of device, which gave him the ability to use the machine for as long as he wanted.

I spent long days immersed in my forest, in order to render it digitally, focusing on the sections of the trail I used to run along. I returned across different seasons. The digitisation process was fairly slow: a single scan easily took more than twenty minutes, and since I generally did five scans per location, I always had a book with me to pass the time. In total, I digitised about thirty locations.

Simon De Diesbach

In the slowness of that process, the idea of digitally reconstructing the memories he associated with that run stayed with him. So he later decided, additionally, to add his own movements to the scanned space: through motion capture, it became possible to make space and movement coincide.

At this stage, everything was still highly experimental: he still had no idea what the final form of the project would be. This work, carried out as part of a Master’s in Film at Hochschule Luzern, Design & Kunst (HSLU), took four years to develop.

Back to the screen

Once the forest-scanning phase was complete, he found himself back at his screen, processing, compressing, cutting and cleaning up the forest’s 3D scans. Contemplating and manipulating these three-dimensional visuals of nature for long hours led him to question his approach, and more broadly his relationship to nature. The imbalance between his screen time and time spent in the open air, in nature itself, to borrow a distinction dear to Baptiste Morizot, unsettled him. All the more so since the rare times he went out to “s’enforester” (to borrow the term Baptiste Morizot revives in his book S’enforester, co-written with photographer Andrea Olga Mantovani, 2022: “s’enforester is letting the forest move in”), it was still by following the marked paths of a fitness trail.

My forest: a natural space, or simply a resource to consume? In the end, I’m not even sure I know what a natural space really is.

Simon De Diesbach

Alongside these reflections, he kept working with the data he had accumulated, and eventually found the workflow, as well as the software, he would use to complete the project. He settled on Houdini, a 3D animation software.

The challenge was figuring out whether the movements captured through motion capture, recorded while running in the forest, would align with the topology of the scans. The first tests proved conclusive.

From there, the shape of the project took form: he was going to make an animated short film based on his relationship to the forest and his experience of digitizing it.

Motivations and References

He constantly find himself questioning how nature is portrayed in contemporary Hollywood blockbusters. Its depictions are often detailed, high-definition, lush, idealized: their role is to feed the spectacle. But from a narrative standpoint, the environment, more often than not, simply hosts the wanderings of the protagonist or protagonists: it is pushed into the background.

Through its photorealistic renderings, the representation of nature in mainstream film culture carries the hallmarks of progress and modernity.

The Influence of Video Games

If it’s worth looking at how nature is represented in mainstream film culture, what about video games? One of the biggest trends in Triple-A video games over the past five years has been to let the player embody a character moving through an open world, free to choose how they begin their quest. Zelda: Breath of the Wild, published by Nintendo and released in 2017 on the Nintendo Switch, was unanimously hailed by mainstream media as a “game changer”: a game that brought about a significant shift not just in how video games are made, but in how they’re played. What was new was the introduction of an “open world” where the player is free to go wherever they want: climb, run, glide. It offered the ability to explore the world with far fewer constraints than in traditional games. Zelda: Breath of the Wild greatly influenced the video game industry by mainstreaming the genre.

Open-world video games have become the norm in recent years. This kind of game offers the possibility of going almost anywhere, made possible by technical performance now able to render far more data than it could fifteen years ago, for instance. I can’t help but think back to older 3D games, where the adventure was very linear, where you were pushed to follow a narrow path, and where straying off it meant running into invisible walls marking the limits. That reminds me of a reference a friend introduced me to: the German video artist Harun Farocki’s work Parallel II, which questions the notion of limits in video games. In it, you can see how the invisible walls of older video games have been replaced by “natural” barriers, reinforcing immersion and the illusion of experiencing the outdoors.

Simon De Diesbach

In 2023, Simon was in Stuttgart for the International Trickfilm Festival (ITFS), where his short film was screened in competition. Running alongside the festival was FMX.

FMX is an annual event bringing together the key players of the visual effects industry. He was able to attend a number of talks there, including one by the VFX artists behind Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, one by the studio that worked on House of the Dragon, and one by the New Zealand studio Weta, responsible for the visual effects of James Cameron’s Avatar 2. For that last one, the 1,500-seat conference hall was full. He was there too, and as the talk went on, he was overtaken by a strange feeling: that of witnessing a kind of hegemony, reflected in the sheer scale of the financial means on display, the vastness of the infrastructure put in place, and the ability, through armies of engineers, specialists and artists, to digitally reproduce the behaviours and physical phenomena of nature. That hegemony also came through in the numbers presented: the number of people who worked on the film, the size of the budget, or the level of its carbon footprint.

That conference, to me, is evidence that there is essentially no financial ceiling left for this industry in its pursuit of digitally reproducing the living world. It illustrates the paradox of our time, where we invest ever more in digitizing nature than in preserving it, a paradox that has, since then, only deepened with the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence. The datacenters required to run it, themselves voracious consumers of water, electricity and land, now embody a new form of that same logic: an industry of the virtual whose very real footprint on ecosystems is only just starting to be publicly questioned, to the point where some no longer hesitate to speak of a form of digital ecocide.

These images, much like Avatar 2 and films of that kind, immerse audiences in a state of total intellectual comfort: their photorealistic simulations no longer invite viewers to make use of their imagination.

By contrast, live performance offers an opposite example: the set is often left unfinished, whether by technical constraint or by choice, and it is the audience’s imagination that is called upon to sustain immersion and the continuity of the setting. A devoted regular at the Avignon Festival, which I attend every year, I never stop being surprised by the inventive subtlety with which the real can be conjured through simplicity and minimalism. Theatre is, in fact, one of the great inspirations behind my work.

Back to the film: giving the void a sonic identity / creating different kinds of immersion

It’s in opposition to that tendency that he chose to strip down the sets of his short film (a bit like in theatre), meaning the visuals of his forest, in order to offer a distinctive aesthetic of strange, surreal landscapes. The sets in his film are therefore incomplete, and the contrast between matter and non-matter is unmistakable.

Limits, as an aesthetic device, proved useful to Simon conceptually, narratively and visually all at once. On one hand, they let him reinforce the fragility of the forest, echoing the gravel pit and, more broadly, the condition of nature in the age of the Anthropocene. On the other, they gave the project a new poetics of space.

In the experience of the film, I also wanted to offer different degrees of immersion, plunging the audience alternately into the void and into the forest. This back-and-forth between non-matter and matter is conveyed through the sound of the forest, which gets muffled as the camera drifts into the void. This effect is a nod to science-fiction films like Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, where the sound of scenes taking place outside the shuttle is almost entirely absent.

Simon De Diesbach

Drawing inspiration from such a phenomenon, the behaviour of sound in space, carries even more weight given that his intention was to reproduce it using visuals depicting, conversely, a terrestrial environment: the forest.

His choice to cut nature apart and give it limits serves several intentions. First, it’s about putting nature back at the center by shifting perspective, allowing viewers to see the forest as a subject in its own right, rather than as mere scenery.

These limits also carry a critique of digitization’s pursuit of ever more realistic reproductions of nature, chasing an endless “wow” effect.

Finally, these limits also invite, more modestly, a reflection on digitized natural environments, video games in particular, whose apparent infinity can encourage a limitless relationship to space.

This isn’t meant to condemn the medium, which I myself enjoy, but to question what that total freedom invites us to feel, and perhaps to forget.

Besides Simon’s short film Le jardin (in development), he is currently working on the production phase of LimitsVR, the follow-up to Limites, this time taken in a more offbeat, humorous direction. It’s a collective, co-located virtual reality experience for 4 to 6 viewers at once, which he is writing and directing. The project is produced by Tell me the Story (Switzerland) in co-production with Dark Euphoria (France).

The experience places the audience in a sterile gallery where a digitised forest, sealed under glass, is exhibited as a work of art. Wearing their headsets, visitors explore this exhibition alongside a fictional audience (NPCs). When they sit down on the museum’s seating, they get teleported inside the exhibited ecosystem, thrust into the heart of the forest itself. The viewer’s position is upended, shifting from observer to observed, from subject to object, in a mirroring effect between two seemingly opposite ecosystems: wild nature on one side, the museum space with its codes and protocols on the other. Alternately absurd, funny and poetic, the piece questions our relationship to nature, its exploitation, and its aestheticization as spectacle.

For more projects, past and present, see links below.

Project Page | Simon De Diesbach