“After Fubar Redux I wanted to do something more live action based (to show I could work with live action, actors, etc.) but also something new and risky too (in the same vain as Fubar Redux in a way). I have always been fascinated by space travel as a kid so I took that interest into a genre I’ve always loved in cinema – Sci-Fi. Since it’s a short film I had to keep the audience hooked, and I used the idea of a building mystery using theoretical research pushed with the idea of “what if?”

The script is written from research which exists today, and the way I approached it with the actors was to ask what they thought of the ideas presented in the film and then have them perform those opinions to the camera as a way of me getting their authentic performances. The use of a controlled set for pieces to camera and a lot of NASA archive footage augmented with VFX and some CGI was the approach I took in creating my shots in the film.”

Despite the gap between the release of Fubar and Project Kronos, the short’s script was actually completed around the same time Haz was wrapping on Fubar Redux. The folks over at Adobe came onboard as sponsors of the technology used to created Project Kronos and so the entire short was realised using Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of software over its six month production period. Haz also got some welcome support with some of the CGI elements in the film such as the Probe and other scenes towards the end.

So, have the ambitions of space exploration resulted in an increase of Earthbound opportunities for the director?

“The film has opened doors for my directing career, for example I was signed for representation by Scott Glassgold of I-AM Entertainment in Hollywood based off the trailer released a few months back and worked closely with him as I reached the end of the production. One thing I have learned on the project is working closely with studio led executives makes a huge difference and actually lets you see the bigger picture of the project as a director. I’m currently developing the feature film treatment of Project Kronos as well as other projects.

I want to take this opportunity to say a massive thank you to all the blogs and viewers for their awesome support in sharing it out on social media, etc. and of course the really good feedback comments.”

Formed whilst studying on the animation/illustration programme at San José State University, the six student members of Bronto House Animation studio decided they couldn’t wait for their studies to finish before becoming a part of the world of animated short films. Deciding that it would be a “lot of fun and a great learning experience to make a short animated film over summer vacation and the fall semester”, the collective finished their first animation The Pod back in 2011. It’s an epic science fiction tale of a marooned spaceman who finds himself in a battle to return his ship, after crash landing on a foreign planet. So how did a bunch of students come up with such an ambitious story?

“Being that our team is comprised of 6 college students, we felt that this was a dilemma we often run into. Do I sacrifice time I could be spending with a loved one to finish rendering a painting? Should I go buy some groceries or just continue drawing these story board panels? Should I sacrifice sleep to spend time massaging curves in Maya’s graph editor? We wanted to comment on how focus and determination towards a career often leaves us neglecting something or another.”

“That mixed with us all being sci-fi nerds left us with the story of The Pod.”

The sprawling narrative isn’t the only impressive thing about Bronto House’s first production though, with the visual elements of The Pod easily matching the grand spirit of the film’s plot. The team explain the production process behind their 9-minute animation:

“Our major hurdle was that we were a very small team with a tight deadline. So we developed a pipeline that involved Adobe Flash, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Premier alongside some nifty GarageBand and Audacity tricks. We used hand-animation principles in Flash and maintained an aesthetic that would be easy to work with while still looking “cool”. Even though we had a grasp of how we wanted to make the film, we still had no actual experience doing it. So the film-making process was definitely a learn-as-you-go type deal which involved a lot of creative problem solving.”

“The film was completed in several phases that often overlapped each other. During the beginning of our 2011 summer vacation we cut an animatic we were happy with; designed all assets of our film; developed style guides; settled on final color treatment; researched and tested our pipeline; organised our production schedule; and started initial animation.”

“When we started school back up in the Fall we finished rough animation and backgrounds. We then switched to cleaning up animation and collecting sound effects simultaneously. Finally we composited the animated shots with BGs, edited the shots together, added sound fx and created music.”

“We had a lot of fun with the sound effects and music. One of our animators, Nick Carpenter, actually ran along side a train with his MacBook Pro and a mic to get some of the major sound effects we used for the actual pod space ship in the film. Another one of our team members, Michael Harding, got his band (Drop Dead Sixty) involved who created all of the music featured in the film.”

“The Film was completed just before our winter break in Mid-December 2011. We were able to debut the finished film during an end-of-the-semester screening On SJSU’s campus.”

“We then went into sending our film out to various film festivals – The Pod has been in 15 film festivals/film competitions world-wide.”

“One day after we finished The Pod and premiered it, we set out to work on a music video for Drop Dead Sixty’s song, Mediatic. We finished the music video in 4 months!”

“We are all busy finishing up our last semester at SJSU and on the hunt for jobs in the animation industry. We have a few plans for post-college projects that definitely include short animated films.”

Eli Sasich’s ambitious short HENRI, about a derelict spaceship that becomes self-aware, employs an impressive mix of quarter-scale miniatures, in-camera effects, and computer animation. Eli joins us to discuss finding the perseverance to continue when it feels like your shoot is failing and using his split second reaction skills to create a fireball.

It honestly felt like we were making something that may never actually coalesce into a finished film.

HENRI Materials
Concept Art & Poster

Showlinks
HENRI
Distrify

HENRI (2013)
Hundreds of years in the future, a derelict spacecraft, controlled and powered by a human brain, floats aimlessly in the outer reaches of space. HENRI, the name of the ship’s power system, is an acronym which stands for Hybrid Electronic / Neuron Responsive Intelligence, and was the first of Earth’s Neuro-Tech space exploration research vessels. Trapped in the cold, mechanical prison of the vessel, the “brain,” which has no recollection or concept of self, gradually begins to experience disjointed images of its former life—images it cannot understand. Carrying the remains of a crew long dead, and becoming increasingly self-aware, HENRI experiences the instinctual desire to be free. Yearning for freedom and yet unable to move, the brain devises a plan to build itself a mechanical body from parts of the ship. Maybe then it will understand the images it is seeing—maybe then it will feel alive.

The full version of HENRI is available for rental or purchase, along with the 30min making of at henrithefilm.com

Dutch film production company PostPanic returns to DN for the first time since we featured Mischa Rozema’s stunning festival title sequence Year Zero for OFFF Barcelona 2011, a year and a half ago. Stardust sees Rozema take to the director’s chair once more, in this primarily CG short film that orbits around the story of Voyager 1 (the unmanned spacecraft launched in 1977 to explore the outer solar system)
 

Jane is unhappy with her dull husband and monotonous marriage. Thankfully, in the near-future satisfaction is guaranteed and upgrades are always available.

T is for Toilet segment director of The ABCs of Death and claymation master, Lee Hardcastle returns with An Alien Claymation, a fast paced, gruesome homage to 1950s B-Movie horror complete with bucket loads of (green) blood splatter and an eerie soundtrack which urges you to think twice about inviting aliens for tea.

A father gets more than he bargained for when he invites Alien visitors into his home.

Update: Hardcastle has now released a brief making off to clue us into some of the animation techniques he used to create the film.

Stuart Willis’ ridiculously ambitious graduation short Payload, sets relatable characters in a believable future to deliver a compelling story about hard choices and sacrifice. It’s a short which has garnered much praise online and an interview we’ve been looking forward to posting on DN. Stuart takes us through his methods of building an onscreen family you care about and the benefits of approaching production design as a branding exercise.

When you’re writing as a student film ‘exterior space elevator crawling up a cable’ eyebrows all go up for everyone & I’m thinking, “I’m insane, I’ve written a completely CG shot to open my film, this is nuts!”

Showlinks
Stuart Willis
Payload
Red Camera
Modo

If you happen to be in the ever decreasing minority of people yet to watch Payload in full, nows as good a time as any to see what’s impressed so many before you:

Payload (2011)
A family of scavengers. A corrupt spaceport. A callous matriarch. A home in the shadow of a space elevator. After a brutal attack on his father, Simon Carter must sacrifice everything to save his family.

Matthew K. Nayman’s Blind Spot provides a fresh new view on the apocalypse, in this refreshing science fiction short.

Sushi chefs finally get to show off their knife skills as they enter into an epic battle against an army of giant sea creatures in Dan Blank’s Monster Roll.

This short was created as a proof-of-concept for a feature about sushi chefs fighting sea monsters. It’s a crazy idea, but one we just really wanted to see made. So, we made it.

We sorely miss the tone of those big, fun fantasy movies we grew up with–movies like Ghostbusters, Gremlins, and Big Trouble in Little China. We also want to continue the tradition of more recent movies like The Host and District 9 where strong story, characters, and humor take priority over expensive VFX sequences. – Dan Blank

If you want to know more about the making of Monster Roll, Dan and team have kindly shared a series of behind the scenes videos online.

Inspired by 60′s & 70′s science fiction, Tyson Wade Johnston’s stunning science-fiction short Seed sees a lone astronaut embark on a solitary mission on a barren planet named Gaia.

If you enjoyed Seed, check out Tyler’s earlier short Exist…

The storyline of The Origin of Creatures is based on one of the most well-known tales about collaboration, the Tower of Babel. This tale is transformed and twisted and is set in an imaginary future, after the world is hit by a catastrophe. Among the remains of a devastated city lives that what is left of humanity. Human bodies are divided into separated parts of the body and are fused to special beings. Together, these creatures form a colony, they can only survive when collaborating. In the rubble of destroyed buildings they are trying to build a nest as large and as high as possible, so that the colony’s queen gets enough sunlight to reproduce, but due to miscommunication this mission is doomed to fail.

For Kaye, still a natural, augmenting will help him keep pace in this now hyper-paced world. However, after acquiring an off-market prototype, Kaye quickly finds himself fighting not only for his own humanity, but something much larger.

Read more on Short of the Week.

Drawing on a variety of inspirations (Robert Adams’ Summer Nights, Jem Cohen and the Twilight Zone) The Lights… was shot in London over two days in and around a show by Californian punk band No Age, who give Emily Taaffe’s night wandering heroine an experience she can hold on to forever.

Vessel features a blend of old school, practical creature effects and slick, modern day VFX. The story focuses on Liberty Airlines’ Flight 298 and its passengers. Shortly after takeoff, the passengers encounter an otherworldly force and are thrown into a fight for their lives!

Year 2086. Kate Sorin never imagined how volunteering herself as “base citizen” for Project Shell would determine her fate. The Western Confederation claimed that the creation of the cyber-clones would be the bridge to a free and equal society, without thinking that their human nature would fight against the role they were created for: to be slaves.

The individual 0258 escaped impersonating Kate, but everything went wrong and she saw herself forced to kidnap Kate´s daughter to survive, who died in the crossfire. Since that moment, Kate joined the CHD with a single goal, to find 0258 and avenge the death of his daughter.