Cinq Terres: five fragrances,
five worlds, one film

What Cinq Terres is

Cinq Terres is a scroll-driven film for an invented perfume house, built by Atelier Vivance as a demonstration of its work. Five worlds run on one unbroken timeline and they are five hours of one day: first light, mid-morning, golden hour, dusk and astronomical night. The fifth returns to the first, so there is no end of the film to fall off. The perfumes, the brand and the shop are invented for the demonstration, and nothing in the shop is for sale.

I · Glacier, at first light

Glacier is the first of the five Cinq Terres fragrances, and the film opens on it at first light. A blue-lit iceberg stands on a still black lagoon under low cloud, dark hills behind it in mist, and clear blocks of ice lie scattered across a black volcanic beach in the foreground. The line on screen reads: “Pressed for a thousand years, until the light could not escape.” Its notes are frozen iris, glacier mineral and white musk.

II · Canopy, at mid-morning

Canopy is the second Cinq Terres fragrance, and the film arrives in it at mid-morning, in old-growth conifer forest. A deeply furrowed trunk fills one side of the frame; mist and shafts of light stand between the trunks further in, and moss covers the fallen logs and boulders on the floor. The line on screen reads: “Rain that never stopped. A forest that learned to hold it.” Its notes are wet moss, cypress and vetiver.

III · Dune, at golden hour

Dune is the third Cinq Terres fragrance, and the film reaches it at golden hour, on the oldest sand on earth. One dune crest runs corner to corner across the whole frame, a single lit face against a single face in deep shadow, with sand smoking off the ridge line and further dunes fading back into haze. The line on screen reads: “The oldest sand on earth. Still moving.” Its notes are labdanum, dry cedar and saffron.

IV · Tide, at dusk

Tide is the fourth Cinq Terres fragrance, and the film comes to it at dusk, with the flacon standing on wet sand. The sea is sheeted thin across the beach and mirrors the whole sky, so the bottle stands on its own reflection with the low sun laid out beside it. The line on screen reads: “The tide goes out and leaves the sky behind.” Its notes are sea salt, driftwood and ambrette.

V · Meridian, at astronomical night

Meridian is the fifth and last Cinq Terres fragrance, and the film ends in it at astronomical night. The Milky Way arches over a dark ridge and a still lake holds all of it, with a stony shore and tussock grass close under the camera. The line on screen reads: “Dark enough to cast a shadow.” Its notes are black orris, incense and oud.

The crossings between the five worlds

In Cinq Terres a world never cuts to the next one: the camera pushes into a foreground object and comes out the other side already somewhere else. Each passage names itself on screen as you pass through it — meltwater from Glacier into Canopy, sap turns to amber from Canopy into Dune, dry sand, then wet from Dune into Tide, a grain becomes a star from Tide into Meridian, and a star becomes the ice from Meridian back into Glacier. Four of the five crossings are a passage through an object. The desert is not, and we do not call it one.

How the Cinq Terres film moves

The Cinq Terres film is driven by your scroll: scroll down and it plays forward, scroll up and it plays back. Between the scroll and the picture sits a spring, so the image follows you and settles rather than snapping, and when you stop it comes to rest on one clean frame instead of two ghosted together. The film is painted into a canvas, a surface the browser draws pixels onto that cannot hold words, so it is written out here as well.

How the Cinq Terres imagery was made

The moving imagery in Cinq Terres was generated with AI video models and then composited by Atelier Vivance into one continuous film. Composited means the studio cut the generated clips and joined them end to end. Each clip was generated with its first and last frames fixed to still images, which is what lets one world run into the next without a cut. The end credit of the film says the same thing on screen.

Who made Cinq Terres

Cinq Terres is a demonstration build by Atelier Vivance, a cinematic web studio in Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan, directed by Fasih Ud Din Mazhar. The studio and its director are described at ateliervivance.com/studio/, and the case study for this piece is at ateliervivance.com/work/cinq-terres/, which the end credit of the film links to.