Destination Earth

One of the graphics titles screens from the
Jenni's Angels short film, Destination Earth.
Without giving too much away, I think this
gives you an idea of what it was about...

Well, Monday has arrived and we survived the 48 hour film project! What a blast. Yes, it was hard work, and we had some nail-biting moments at the end there, but it was a lot of fun.

Here's a very condensed version of events:

We found out on Friday night that our randomly selected film genre was "monster / sci-fi movie". My jaw about hit the floor. Those of you who know me know this was both the most exciting genre we could have gotten (in my eyes) and the most terrifying. All along I was thinking how awesome it would be to get Sci-fi, and yet I knew that it would be one of the toughest to do properly.

Our team, named Jenni's Angels, got off to a good start. We began with a brainstorming session at Indigo City (home base for the production) where everyone got to toss out ideas of all kinds. We then narrowed in on the concept, compared it against our resources (like shooting locations and F/X), and the writing team then went off to create the script. Friday night, Stacey and I came home and got a decent rest. It was in the hands of the writers, and there was not much we could do but wait.

We received our rough draft of the script via e-mail early the next morning, and hit the ground running. The team re-convened for a reading and tweaking of the script, shoot locations were confirmed, actors prepped, costumes described, special effects, music and graphics projects assigned, and everyone took off. The race was on. Except for an oh-so-brief snippet of sleep on Saturday night, it really did not slow down again until Sunday evening.

The Jimmy Cafe (where Stacey works) was one of the six shooting locations. Other spots included the Carter Observatory, the Botanical Gardens, Majestic Centre, and Courteney Place (for some street shots). The parents of one of our team members had their central city apartment invaded for the purpose of filming as well! Despite running all over town, they managed to get 95% of the location shooting done on Saturday. An absolute miracle was the fact that we had gorgeous weather on Saturday for the shoots. No wind & sunny. Very rare for Wellington this time of year.

My role, not surprisingly, was graphics and artwork for the film. We were quite ambitious about the number of graphics elements, considering how much time we had. Thank goodness for stock photos and clip art! Oh, and one publicly licensed photo of President W, which also made it into the final cut. Post-production was done in a whirlwind. Watching the editing process happen and seeing the graphics turned into animation by the F/X wizards in post-production was terrific! As a result, I am now fixated on learning how to use Adobe After Effects...

Our team turned in our film at 6:49:30 p.m., just 10 minutes away from the deadline. Mild drama involving last-minute renderings of the film, a "safety tape" being sent ahead of time, with the real tape being sent over at the last moment. The final product was literally being watched on a playback device in the car on the way to the drop-off, just to make sure it was OK.

48 Hours was both exactly what I expected and very surprising at the same time. Incidentally, we met a lot of really fun people as a result of working on this, and it was a terrific experience both professionally and personally. Thanks go out to Jenni's Angels for letting us in on the fun.

I will put up a link when Destination Earth has been posted to the Internet for those who wish to see it.