Shane Carruth - Tumblr Posts

I decided to make an infograph for Primer, the 2004 ultra-low budget sci-fi directorial debut of Shane Carruth. This is a time-travel, greed, and manipulation. It is also incredibly hard to follow. Perhaps this snazzy timeline will help your brain process the convoluted storyline.

There are not very many characters: the plot centers around two characters and through their interactions we are introduced to some additional ones. But since this movie is about time travel there are different versions of the two main guys: one gets 2 versions, the other gets 3 (possibly more, but that is never explicitly explained). 

I wanted to make the timeline more visually appealing than the few I have seen in the past so I decided to use a system of symbols for the major nouns that pop up throughout the plot (such as names and time machines). Hopefully that did not make things harder to understand.

Here is the complete infograph. Clicking on the image will bring you to the full size version.

The movie deals with time travel in the sense that, with the device from the film, a person can travel back in time but not forward. One interesting thing that occurs is that the amount of time spent in the time-traveling device equals the amount of time in the past the time-traveler has journeyed: if it was Thursday and you wanted to go back to Monday you would have to spend 3 days just waiting in the device.

Note: for those of you thinking, "What about when Abe shows Aaron a version of himself entering the storage unit? Isn't a new version of the two guys created every time they travel back in time?" I am not counting those short-term multiples as new manifestations of Abe and Aaron because as soon as they enter the device, the multiple ceases to exist. In this infograph the only way a new version of someone can be created is through the use of a failsafe device.