People small, life large: the 6:30 swimmers

There are four people in this frame and not one of them is taller than a thumbnail. Two are already in the harbour, one is on the ladder, one is standing with a towel. It is six-thirty in the morning at Barangaroo, the light is still low and flat, and the tower runs straight off the top of the frame.

We keep people small on purpose. The moment a figure is large enough to read as a specific person — a face, an outfit, an age — the viewer starts deciding whether that person is like them, and half the audience decides no. At this size they are not characters, they are evidence: evidence that at half past six this is a place where somebody swims.

It also solves an old CGI problem. Entourage figures fail at close range, always. Small, backlit, in motion and half cut by water, they are unfaultable — and they do more work than a photoreal close-up ever would.

The last reason is the honest one. This is what Sydney actually looks like at that hour. We did not invent the ritual; we only built somewhere to do it from.