Why did you make a film about origami?

Vanessa Gould was intrigued by the idea of origami as visual maths. Credit: B. MCDERMOTT

I was working on Wall Street in New York, earning a living with the mathematics side of my head, but not happily. I was number crunching by day but coming home at night and painting. My degree is in physics and architecture.

Then, around five years ago, I heard about a mathematician, Tom Hull, and a computer scientist, Erik Demaine, who were using origami in their research. I was fascinated with the idea that in doing something mathematical, you could produce something beautiful to look at. A friend challenged me to make a short film about it. I had never picked up a camera before.

How did you find the story?

Credit: R. J. LANG/PHOTO BY L. GARDINER

When I visited Tom Hull in Massachusetts, I felt that I'd hit on a gold mine. He showed me an origami piece called Five Intersecting Tetrahedra, a beautiful, three-dimensional pointed star made with 30 pieces of paper. As I was leaving, he said 'Hey, I'd love to introduce you to a friend of mine'. His friend, a paper-maker, started talking to me about the same medium of origami but from the opposite perspective.

And that became the story — the fact that artists and scientists were all working with the same medium. Whose hands are going to hold the paper, and what are they going to turn it into?

What are your favourite shapes?

Eric Joisel folds the human form in a way that really blows audiences away. And Chris Palmer makes a spinning top out of a single square; when you pull the corners it torques the paper in such a way that it spins for 30 seconds afterwards, and that always gets a huge gasp. There's also Miyuki Kawamura's Cosmosphere, a huge, self-supporting sphere which is made out of many hundreds of pieces of paper.

Are there any unusual uses of origami?

We focus on a woman in Israel, Miri Golan, who has developed a mathematics curriculum which she calls Origametria. It has been extremely successful, and thousands of kids every week in Israel learn geometry through paper-folding.

What challenged you most?

It was hard to present the scientific ideas in the film without intimidating the audience. The aim was to show science in a poetic and romantic way, but with depth so it could appeal to existing scientists and maybe titillate non-scientists. Art is a metaphor for science — they are just two different lenses through which we see the Universe.