Samuel Swanson
Samuel Swanson, otherwise known as ‘Swim’, is a NYC-based movie director and one of the core producers working to make this year’s first Psychedelic Assembly a successful and intimate gathering. Samuel will speak about the new movie he’s working on and what kind of energy it will give to the world of psychedelics.
He and his team have been referring to it as: “The Next Mushroom Art House Movie” This will be Swim’s feature-length directorial debut. In his typical fashion, he is crafting an original story with a uniqueness that's charming, challenging, and irresistibly curious. In any Swim Swanson movie this far, the rules of reality are often bent, but only in order to help us talk about the truths and mysteries that always surround us.
The production of this movie will require an epic assembly of talent and radically inventive cinematic techniques. The creative team behind this movie is made entirely of superstars. James Murphy’s Record label, DFA Records, will be producing the score using music made entirely by their very own ‘Infinity Machine’ - a group made up of Juan Maclean and Greg Droggitis. The music they make is primarily played live to facilitate sacred journeys and is pioneering an approach to musical therapy. Now, after working in the studio since 2019, their recorded music will be facilitating a cinematic journey, one which Swim hopes to be a helpful piece of art that holds a mirror to the modern world’s current relationship with psychedelics. “If we make this thing with integrity and do justice to the movie’s subject matter, it could be an art project that becomes a piece of culture - one the whole world gets to have as a reference in the future.”-Swim Swanson.
Zero Space Studios will be facilitating this movie’s production. After moving from their space in Midtown, Manhattan where they ran an immersive psychedelic art gallery ZeroSpace has recently opened up a studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The new ZeroSpace is home to new-age XR production, Motion Capture, and state-of-the-art classical filmmaking. Their team of virtual production designers and creative executives are more than equipped and excited to tell this story. All these players seem to make up the perfect team for Swim’s ‘Mushroom Art House Movie’.
Swim is approaching this project the way he’s handled all the short films and commercials he’s directed up until this point - with an all-encompassing focus, and persistent sense of play. “It’s a movie that talks about being selective after indulgence and reintegration after transcendence. It’s big and exciting, yes - but we’ve got a lot of work to do. We need to make a big movie and we need to do it safely.”