Topography / 2021–present
Alexander Porter: spatial documentary and volumetric filmmaking
Place Becomes Protagonist Topography
01 / 12
I often begin with a place or an experience that conventional cameras cannot capture, then find the forms and tools it needs.
I like to bend photogrammetry, volumetric capture, computer vision, and game technologies toward stories of place, memory, power, and ecology. The work may become a film, live performance, installation, interactive world, software tool, or workshop. I spend time with people, landscapes, archives, images, and sounds, then ask what form the material needs. A recording made for a film can enter a performance; a scanning tool can become the basis of an installation. The forms produce material for one another. I make many of these projects with close collaborators, and I’m also interested in the way a tool can carry a practice beyond the things I make with it myself.
Recent Experiments
A loose feed of screenshots, prototypes, tests, and small studies from work in progress.
Strata / Installation
Strata Installation — visitor within dark scanned terrain
A 2026 visualization testing how movement can reveal scanned terrain, recorded walks, and documentary layers inside the developing installation.
See project ↗
Smooth Blair Witch
Smooth Blair Witch — LARPA screening documentation
A full-length stabilization experiment: every shot of The Blair Witch Project moves across a widened canvas, gradually painting the forest around it.
See project ↗More selected work
All projects ↗
Strata / Installation
Strata is an immersive installation that transforms the Badlands of South Dakota into an explorable landscape.
Director / Producer / Virtual Cinematographer
Styles and Customs of the 2020s
Four speculative worlds connected by a firelit cave.
Virtual Reality Director
Scatter · Co-Founder / Immersive Director
The Changing Same
A magical-realist virtual-reality work moving through four centuries of racial injustice, resistance, memory, and possible futures.
Co-Executive Producer / Technical Director
Scatter · Co-Founder / Immersive Director
Curio Aquarium
The Harvard Mark II relay moth became a cabinet of handmade software creatures, reconstructed in three dimensions and released into a shared artificial-life aquarium.
Creative / Technical Collaborator
Specular · Co-Founder / Creative Director
Commissioned collaborations
KFC: 11 Secrets
An alternate-reality campaign that sent audiences from a Matty Matheson film into codes, hidden websites, real locations, and the mythology of KFC’s secret recipe.
Creative Director / Puzzle-System Design
Timberland X Stüssy Interactive
A WebGL experience for the 2013 Stüssy for Timberland boot, with rotation moving the captured figures from glass-like surfaces into disintegration.
Director of Photography / VFX Supervisor / Interaction Designer
Yeasayer - Glass of the Microscope
A music video moving between microscope footage, underwater dance, and volumetric recordings of Yeasayer.
Kinect Recording / RGBDToolkit
Eden 2045
Eden 2045 is a ten-minute science-fiction film written and directed by James Lawler. Two characters meet along a running path while contact lenses project shared memories into their visual field. Shot in Prospect Park in June 2013, its memory sequences combined Canon 5D color with Kinect infrared depth data to construct three-dimensional video. The film premiered at CineGlobe outside CERN in March 2014.
RGBD Director of Photography
Questions made tangible
Camera of the Future
In a world where every device can see, what is a camera?
Workshop Co-Lead / Curator
Specular · Co-Founder / Creative Director
Learning Lab: Mars Base
An immersive educational environment offering dynamic course topics on demand.
Project Lead
Specular · Co-Founder / Creative Director
Fitzania
A tracked, glowing orb turned a preventive-health check into a game for the Museum of Future Government Services.
Physical Design Lead
Specular · Co-Founder / Creative Director
“This speculative framing, an improvised soundtrack by guitar maestro Bill Frisell, and Alexander Porter’s evocative photogrammetry all contribute to a singular, beautiful and immersive nonfiction work.”
“I saw the metal pole in VR and I grabbed it in real life. It was so natural, and so simple a gesture, but it put me right in that car mentally.”
Work together
I love collaborating and take on selected commissions, consulting, workshops, and teaching. I’m especially interested in projects that need a new visual, spatial, or technical language.