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brod-anthropology · 3 years

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Stuck in Nowhere- the making of

Link to script and notes

Idea

Someone is in a space station, real clunky, real dirty, you kind of get the idea that it’s not that well made and there’s a lot of groaning and concerning noises. The person, revealed in the first sequence through audio and whatever, is revealed to have been sent to space as part of a study to analyse how humans live and survive in space, a one person tester to see if a space colony is at all viable maybe. Despite intersections of B-roll of life on the spaceship like doing repairs and eating terrible packet food and stuff, generally miserable life but with great lighting because it’s a spaceship you know, the main plot is going to be told through video calls with ‘home’. It’s going to be set through daily video diary entries and radio calls with the station back at home where the spacer will be giving updates on physical and mental health and general condition of the ship, and the person at home will be giving them news from home, giving them updates on how the football league is going, how the election is going, how their partner is etc… and at the end of each call giving them an update of how long they have left till they are at the end of their term. Despite starting off normally, soon you get the sense that something is off as the radio calls start to not happen and the person on the spaceship is getting very worried by this radio silence- when the radio calls happen again ‘home’ operator insists everything is fine but the call quality drops each time and the operator is distracted and the call drops out intermittently and when asked about what’s happening down at home they actively avoid any questions about it. In the end after several panicked radio transmissions we piece together that something (implied to be a civil war or a coup of some form) has taken place and the country has descended into anarchy- the radio operator breaks it to the person in space that home no longer exists, and that they’re stuck in space.

Being low light and in such a cramped space we don’t actually have to build much of a set- i do want to have fun with the lights and the cinematography, I know it’s not my job (I’m back to being a scriptwriter and editor and sound designer) but I want this to be very lighting and sci-fi heavy. I also want all the audio to really paint the picture that they’re on a spaceship, I want as much space sounds as possible, I want gross 80s green chunky space text like Tron, if charlies doing more music I want synths- the whole shebang.

Needs:

-room to make into spaceship

-props for spaceship

-helmet/boiler suit

-actor (actual actor this time)

-voice for radio operator

-voice for ships controls??? Maybe?

Writing

As far as writing goes, I originally came up with this idea after hearing about the USSR astronauts that went up as part of the USSR and got stranded after it dissolved.

“Krikalev was stranded on board the Mir during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The country that had sent him into space no longer existed, his return was delayed and he stayed in space for 311 consecutive days, twice as long as the mission had originally called for.”

Obviously this is pretty much the exact situation I’m using in the script, the only difference being our astronaut never makes it home and gets told as much by ‘home’. We did talk about implying the characters and the nation was soviet or Slavic or even post-soviet but I'm not fully a fan of the implications and bias that that gets across- it’s a little on the nose and kinda distasteful, plus like the implications of the story being about an Eastern European country (even a made up one) is just a bit too xenophobic for my liking. So we’ve decided to just keep it as neutral as possible and have as little information about this mysterious failing country and just call it ‘home’- likewise I wanted to keep the character unamed and just referred to as the ships name (’nowhere’) just to keep the characters backstory a minimum and keep them mysterious. I think just being given this very neutral character with very little information makes it easier to put yourself in the shoes of the character and really project onto them, which is what I really want for this film- it's less about how the character reacts and peoples feelings for them and more about how horryfing the concept is, it’s less about the character and more about making the audience feel and react.

The making of

Well. It was something. And by something I mean a nightmare.

To start of with, not to doxx anyone, but Kit spent the whole week saying she was going to find an actor and send out an email and contact actors and talk to some people she knew, and then the Tuesday evening (so a week after she said she’d do all this) she says that she hasn’t contacted ANYONE or even booked a room or equipment (despite me asking her everyday if she’d booked things already) and that we can't film. I then find an actor THAT evening but he can't do Thursday because he's a third year and he has a dissertation in, which is entirely reasonable, and kit and Charlie then let me know for the First time (as I'm telling them I found an actor) that we can't shoot Friday or Wednesday amd can ONLY shoot Thursday, meaning I have to try and find another actor and let down the one who id literally just gotten. Then, on Thursday, I rocked up a little late just because I’d slept through my alarm but they said it was okay as they were running late too and that I didn’t need to be there for the setting up as I’d agreed to be the actor (which in itself was a push I hate acting, I hate being recorded and on screen and I hate having to watch and listen to myself so) I turned up and as it turns out they’d booked the wrong room and we were in a tiny recording suite that looked like a converted cupboard that had a humounglus desk in it and they were both incredibly stressed. I see why, the room was like a third of the size they thought it was going to be, but things didn't get much better when we started putting equipment together and it turns out they didn't have one of the things we needed (a projector) at the ERC and gave us an old one that didn't work, and then all of the batteries were dead. The, as it turns out, the card for the zoom was broken (it just kept coming up saying it was either corrupted or incomparable even though it was the one in there) so we ended up using Kits one from her camera and it seemed to work fine (this is foreshadowing) and then the zoom itself was apparently ‘broken’ and wasn’t picking up the main microphone on the boom and instead just using the built in ones- now I don't want to say I know what was wrong with it, but I definitely was right when I was telling them what was wrong with it, and the fact that both of them ignored me for half an hour whilst trying to fix it (to the point where kit almost started crying) and only then listened to me because they didn’t want to take it back says something (it also says something when they only listened to the first step of what I said to do and when it seemed like it was fixed they decided to not do the other steps that would actually have set it up properly but hey ho the zoom was ‘broken and then fixed’ according to the both of them). I know I sound salty and being overly mean, but both of them were just so not with it and rude to me whilst I was the only one who actually knew what I was doing the entire time so I'm an little scorned. Then throughout the actual production where I was acting I hadn't had any time to learn any lines (on account of agreeing to do the acting the night before) and Charlie (I'm guessing because he was stressed) decided that we only needed one or two takes of each scene which, from both an acting and editing point of view, was incredibly stressful to not be able to practice or have a variety. This mind of attitude went along with mixing up the shots and the scenes as we were working in such a small and cramped space me and Charlie didn’t have the collaboration we had on Hjank and he very had bis say in what would or wouldnt work and whether or not he thought a shot would be worth getting (I.e: Me doing more work in space, reflections of the helmet, etc...). At this point, despite knowing I probably should've stepped in and made my voice heard, I was just kinda tired and over it and I just wanted it to be over and done so I could go back to being in charge and try and work with what we got and what id made during the week kit wasn’t doing her job (i spent that whole week playing around with old TV’s and radio equipment at my parents and what stuff I had laying about my flat and had made a bunch of really cool graphics and some great foley work of a spaceship which I was really excited to use). Then at the end of it all kit ended up taking back all the equipment without getting any of the videos off the card so I had to go and explain to the ERC and luckily they could sort us out.

Editing

Ho boy! I almost went insane!

Basically, after I managed to sort out getting all the footage and audio files, I took a day off on the Friday (you know, like an idiot) so I could rest up, I was struggling really badly with exhaustion that day so I thought hey! Have a short break then get on with it. Come Saturday I started editing and soon I realised that we had well over a 7 minute film (bearing in mind it was meant to be something like 4 minuted max) at which point I start frankenstein-ing left right and centre and I manage to make something and have all I need plot wise and though it was very quickly paced and boring I realised I could just cut out the transition scenes where you gain more backstory and instead have the video call audio over the top instead- yeah it’s sad because you lose a lot of characterisation and it’s more telling the audience than showing but you know problem solved. This took me forever as well because I know realise that having to sit and listen and watch myself over and over and over makes me SUICIDAL and that acting in this film was a terrible decision- now I'm not a bad actor, but the acting in this film was terrible (again, i was told the night before filming I was going to be in it). Now I managed to get over this by just dissasociating and zoning out and focusing on my cool graphics and glitches and sound design (which I did have to pull in after I realised I went a bit too much on the effects afterwards) BUT, this was only the audio from the camera id been editing with. When I went to put the audio from the zoom in I realise, every single file has no wave pattern, which is very odd. I the realise it’s because the recordings are so, SO quiet it doesn't even visually register on premiere- meaning we pretty much have no actual decent sound. So i spend the next few hours going through lecture notes and YouTube tutorials and trying to salavge what I can and it is NOT Good. I ended up being able to save some of Charlies ADR work and I decided that the camera quality would just have to do for my voice and that seeing as it was a webcam in space the quality wouldn’t be great anyway. So then I end up having to edit for almost twice as long as I thought as now I'm having to salvage audio left right and centre and re-sync Charlie's ADR with what I'm doing in the scene (which doesn't match up at all because kit was the one reading Charlie's lines to me on the day despite Charlie being there) and having to ignore how unfitting his generically Californian accent he decided to do was. In the end I managed to make something watchable but HO BOY did I almost go insane doing it.

#103

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