Since the beginning of modern cinema, viewers and critics alike have been transfixed by light contrasted with darkness. This interplay of light and dark was typical of film noir, a metaphor of good and evil in plots that featured crime, detectives, and mystery. We celebrate this genre through a salute to Augustin-Jean Fresnel, the inventor of a lens for lighthouses that was later used for movie and theatre lighting. Light Years features serial murder and a star-studded group of suspects over a half-century of film. Whodunnit? Ultimately, we learn that the Fatal Fresnel Lens has incinerated five cameras that recorded their own demise.

Director Statement
Greg and I love film noir. We were talking about how people get murdered, when we wondered what it would look like if the technology of filming itself caused the crime? That is, what if the camera itself kills someone? What if the camera itself is killed?
The fresnel lens will melt a penny in a few seconds...so Greg stripped one out of a projector and we used it to focus the sun on the cameras that were filming. We burned up five of them, and they filmed up until their moment of destruction. Our tribute to light and noir.

Directed by Wesley Shrum, Greg Scott