Kerri ní Dochartaigh — Thin Places

Process Note

Here my process pivots into an interrogation of what "thinness" actually means—before I allow myself to create a trailer, a video representation of the novel's excerpt. I treated "thinness" not as ambience or a convenient aesthetic cue, but as a term that needed to be tested for its operative commitments: what passage it authorizes, what boundary it presumes, what permission it requires, and what interruption it cannot absorb without changing the work's claim.

The piece is also shaped by its intimate production conditions, which matter to the ethics of the translation. Some of the footage was filmed by a member of Kerri's family—an authorship-adjacent perspective that changes the status of the images from illustrative material to lived record. That proximity functions like an additional constraint: it anchors the adaptation in a register of intimacy and responsibility that I couldn't fabricate from outside the text's world.

The sonic translation was composed by Eye of Seasons, an ambient music artist I regularly collaborate with. Ambient music has become, for me, the most reliable backing register for translation into film, because it supports pressure without dictating interpretation. It can hold silence, repetition, and tonal drift in a way that resembles how prose and poetry carry resonance across gaps—letting language remain primary while giving the adaptation a sustained emotional climate.

In this project, that matters because "thinness" is not a theme to be announced; it's a condition to be maintained under transfer. The workflow, therefore, is triply constrained: concept first (define "thinness"), then relational provenance (family-filmed material), then sonic method (ambient as a translation layer that sustains without explaining).