It was very important to me that this material have the authentic look & feel of a 1980s TV program, so we shot with 16mm film on a used Eclair ACL I found on eBay– a popular sync-sound documentary camera first introduced in 1971. It’s a fantastic machine! Using some helpful how-to youtube videos, I spent a few days learning how to load and operate it, and it worked like a charm.

Eclair ACL 16mm side-by-side with 5D Mk II. We shot all the scenes digitally as well so we could edit the video while waiting for the film to be developed & transferred.

All of the titles & graphics were also shot high-contrast on reversal film and then composited, just like they did it in the old days. The swirling Beyond the Infinite logo was printed out, taped to black cloth on a spinning turntable and lit. We then mounted the camera directly above it, spun the turntable, and zoomed in with the lens to achieve the effect seen in the video.

Otto aligns our logo on the turntable beneath the camera.

Logo in finished frame.

The insert shot of the asteroid was meant to evoke early NASA footage. I wanted it to look as if it were shot timelapse from a satellite’s low-resolution camera. We found a piece of volcanic rock that had a lot of good texture, spray-painted it grey and rested it on a black spoke in the center of our turntable. We then spun the turntable very fast and shot slow-motion while zooming out on the lens to give it the appropriate motion. I used black&white reversal Super 8 film to make the background go fully dark and give it a very grainy texture, complete with dust & scratches. I got the frame markings by pointing my Super 8 camera into the viewfinder of a medium format stills camera and shooting a high-contrast matte.

Kori prepares to spin our asteroid miniature.

Still from finished frame.

This was an incredibly rewarding shoot, everyone involved did a fantastic job. It’s a lot of work to do for about thirty seconds of footage! For the complete movie, we plan to film an entire full episode of “Beyond the Infinite,” and that’s going to require a lot more in terms of materials, costumes, location shoots, and film stock & processing costs. If you want to see this film made, please help us out on Kickstarter by pledging or sharing the link with your friends!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1282316546/c-299792-km-s

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1282316546/c-299792-km-s

Over the last year I’ve shot a trailer and tons of test footage, but in order to get this film off the ground for real I still need much more– full sets, more costumes, props, miniatures, equipment. If this kickstarter campaign is successful, I’ll finally have what I need to make C a reality.

Check out the page, we’re offering some nifty rewards. If you like what you see, share the link with your friends!

Set for the spaceship interior scenes.

Miniature Work:

The model was put together from various hacked up pieces of plastic toys and models, which were then re-assembled and spray-painted. LED lights were installed for the engines and wired to a switch inside the model.

Crewmember extraordinaire Al Gonzales built the model; here he does a rough assembly of unpainted pieces of the ship.

Model with hatches open showing batteries and wiring.

I decided later that I wanted blinking red lights on the front of the ship as well. Rather than rebuild the model, I positioned laser pointers on stands to the spots where I wanted the lights. They were then “blinked” on and off by waving a card in front of them, blocking them from hitting the model. In addition to saving some time & hassle, I think it gave a unique quality to the lights that LEDs wouldn’t have provided.

Laser pointers used to simulate blinking lights on the front of the ship.

This worked because for all of the shots showing the ship moving through space, it’s the camera that’s moving instead of the ship. A wide 20mm lens was used for the opening shot to emphasize the movement as the ship gets closer, this was essential in achieving a sense of scale. I used a tabletop dolly (an “OmniTracker”) that required a flat surface; these surfaces and all the equipment used near the model had to be painted black or covered up with black cloth, so as not to reflect excess light onto the model. Rather than give an all-around detailed view of the ship, I wanted the light to be very harsh, with bright highlights and pitch-black shadows, mimicking the conditions in space where there’s usually not much around to diffuse or reflect light from the closest star.

This shows the ship mounted next to the platform the camera slid across. In this test shoot you can see what the model looked like with a white card used for fill, but ultimately I decided to go for the harsher look without it.

Pieces of black cardboard were attached in front of the lens to block off lights and parts of the studio visible in the shot due to the wide angle.

Black cardboard attached to the lens masked out much of the set in-camera.

The stars were created by stretching out a piece of black cloth and poking holes in it with a thumbtack. Lights were then pointed at the camera through the cloth. Simple, but effective!

Holes poked in cloth.

Adding the stars to the shots of the model was the only thing that required limited composting in post. Though I attempted to get both the ship and stars in-camera, it would’ve been too limiting for camera movement and lighting to do all the shots this way. Instead of shooting the model against greenscreen, I just masked out the stars that passed in front of the ship in Final Cut.

Test shot where the stars were shot along with the ship in-camera. This also shows an earlier test version of the model, made out of fewer parts.

Everything was done through trial & error, we just kept shooting stuff until it looked good. Using the 5D Mk II for miniature work had its advantages and draw-backs; I had to stop the lens down considerably to avoid shallow depth of field, but the camera’s light-sensitivity helped offset this problem. Everything was shot at ISO 1250, at around f22, with a single 1K light.

Here I tested out moving the light on the dolly instead of the camera, to simulate a fixed camera position as the ship turns. These shots were part of a test shoot and aren't featured in the trailer.

Spaceship interiors

Though part of the film’s concept is an attention to physics and realistic outer space phenomenon, realism wasn’t the goal for the shots of the ship interior. Instead I wanted to go for an eye-catching retro aesthetic that would create the impression of technology beyond our current understanding but at the same time invoke a familiar science-fiction feel. I found inspiration in the neon colors of 1970′s and 80′s sci-fi. Films, anime, and video games back then often used bright colors and dark shadows to great effect. I wanted red and blue to be the dominant colors (an exaggerated visual reference to the observable “red shifting” and “blue shifting” of light that occurs when objects travel at very high speeds). Green was also used prominently to fill out the technological background of the ship.

Rough concept art for the ship interiors.

Screenshots I took from various media that influenced the look of the film.

My biggest limitation was a lack of funds or resources to build sets. Fortunately, the style I was going for allowed me to build the set almost entirely out of tricks of light and depth of field. Black flock was first hung up to cover all the walls of the studio, creating a completely dark frame as the base starting point for every shot. I found that attaching pieces of white tape to the background and then throwing the tape out of focus could result in some interesting patterns. Lighting the tape with gels allowed me to turn the patterns whatever color I wanted.

Strips of tape arranged on black flock, illuminated with green light.

Early test shot of Caroline Winterson as Lieutenant Malleck.

I then discovered that if you placed an object with a lot of holes in front of the tape, and shot through it, you could get a very interesting effect when the focus was set in front of the holes. Each hole effectively became a perfectly round “pixel,” and the tape would determine the shape formed by these pixels. Pegboard with evenly spaced holes was painted black and placed over the tape. The end result had a surprisingly digital look for something created in a completely analog fashion.

Corkboard, with light shining through.

James Fauvell as Operator Hale. The pattern of lights behind him are created by the out-of-focus holes in the corkboard.

A few pieces of scrap metal were used to provide some base shapes, and projectors, flashlights, and laser pointers provided other effects. Foreground elements included plastic tubes, milk crates, and other stuff that was lying around.

Xandra Stegmaier as Operator Tam, on set.

Getting ready for the shot.

What it all looked like between takes. The main lights were ordinary household fluorescent tubes from Home Depot, gelled and flagged as necessary.

On low-budget shoots, greenscreen work can often end up looking muddy & un-photographic. Even if you have great resources for post-production, you can find yourself on set lighting to get a good key instead of lighting for a mood or the content of a scene. If  you can afford to take an open-minded approach, I think there are always alternatives to greenscreen and CGI. They are of course useful tools under the right circumstances, but I think many filmmakers over-rely on them, and have forgotten how effective the old techniques can be. Seeing an actual effect right through the lens gives you so much more control on set, and when you do need to combine multiple elements in a shot, there’s so much you can achieve with very simple compositing, as opposed to generating all your material on a computer.

—

Shooting the footage used for this trailer took a lot of time and effort, and there’s a lot more work I need to do to complete the final film. This is a completely indie production with no outside funding. If you want to help us make this film a reality, please support our project on Kickstarter! Check out our page for more info, and if you like what you see, pass the link along!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1282316546/c-299792-km-s

No CGI or greenscreen is being used in the making of the film; instead I’m going back to the old-fashioned methods of miniature photography, rear-projection and in-camera effects. I’m shooting on a shoe-string budget, so I’ve had to get creative with limited resources; a lot of the interior sets are built out of tape, milk crates, holes poked in cardboard, and tricks of light & depth-of-field. Expect some in-depth behind-the-scenes posts in the near future!

Starring:

Caroline Winterson, James Fauvell, Dan Region, and Xandra Stegmaier.

Sarah Silbert in "Metro-North"

Huge thanks goes out to my talented actors: Zeth Zena, Shermaine Liggions, and the lovely Sarah Silbert. They all went above and beyond.

I rented equipment from DuAll Camera. This shop has a large array of Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm cameras for rental or sale, all in perfect condition. Tons of lenses and other accessories. The guys there really know their stuff, and were very helpful in going over how everything works and providing tips. I ended up selecting the Beaulieu 4008 ZM II, a French camera made in 1971. This camera was tailored to professionals rather than the home movie market; it has interchangeable c-mount lenses, and mine came with a Schneider 6-66mm zoom. You get control of the iris right on the lens itself, which I much prefer over the small, unwieldy exposure wheels on other S8 cameras.

Beaulieu 4008 ZMII, on its way back to the rental house. The vintage instruction manual was a nice inclusion!

Other features include fully ramping framerate (from 1-70fps) and a variable shutter that allows for in-camera dissolves. Very cool stuff. The main gripe I have with this camera is the handle, which is simply too small to get a good grip on (see pic). This makes handheld work a bit more taxing than it has to be (and this camera is practically all-metal, so it has some heft).

The grip is woefully tiny. Main flaw on an otherwise beautiful machine.

Th 4008 originally came with a rechargeable battery that clipped onto the side of the body, but such batteries are now decades old, so DuAll replaced them with apparently custom-made, long-lasting powerpacks (I shot three days and 7 rolls, never had to change once– though I suspect this may be due more to the light power consumption of the camera than the batteries’ capacity). These run off a thick red cable that plug into the old battery socket, and you wear the packs.

I bought negative S8 film from Kodak; 200T for daylight scenes, and 500T for evening exteriors / dark interiors. 500T is much grainier, but I figured its added sensitivity would be necessary for the low light scenes. First time dealing with Kodak, and they were swell; very pleasant customer service. I had developing done via Pac Lab, also located in NYC, however, I hear that for negative S8 they just send out the film to Pro8mm in Burbank, CA. Very few places develop negative S8 these days, but I was too worried about light levels to shoot reversal.

I had the video transfer done at DuAll. By their own admission they were not really set up for negative transferring, but I needed it done quickly and cheaply. They did their best under the circumstances, and ran some tests with me beforehand to figure out what settings worked best with the footage. Someday I would very much like to get a better transfer done; there is just too much flicker for me, and I feel the true quality of the negative isn’t represented currently.

[UPDATE, August 2011]: The film has been updated with a 1080 HD scan courtesy of Screenshot, in Berlin. Excellent service and excellent quality. Updated film on Vimeo.

One scene took place in a dark club, so for the main tracking shot of the lead actress I decided to rent a battery-powered, 200-watt Pocket Par and had Zeth follow her from the side with it (thanks for gaffing in a pinch, Zeth!). Totally essential for decent exposure, and I think it lent the scene a very cool feel.

This film is very unusual for me for a number of reasons: I was basically trying to degrade the image as much as possible, I shot on film rather than digital, I went entirely handheld, and shot it in 4:3 fullscreen. The idea was to put more emphasis on movement and color than on image quality and detail; I wanted it to feel more like a motion painting than a motion picture. Usually I am much more concerened with stable shots and image quality, so this was a big experiment for me. Overall, I am extremely pleased with how it turned out.

Need a DP or editor? Check out my website, www.derekvangorder.com.