THE SPACESHIP | Production Diary 5: Art Direction
As pre-production continues, the devastatingly irritating process of casting takes a backseat for a few days while we continue to weed through resumes and keep up on other tasks. Today was the first real meeting to discuss Art Direction, with award winning filmmaker and artist MIKE RADER who has been a kind adviser to our film’s need for obscure set pieces, props that don’t quite exist in the real world and a few other sci-fi-esque things that bring the production of THE SPACESHIP to the next level.
Mike will be helping us out on a lot of levels, from Art Direction, Set Pieces to the creation of props. He’s quite a talented guy and I’ve done a few write-ups on Film Anthropology and one write-up on TimesSquare.com about his work as an artist and a filmmaker. One of the “props” we’ll be constructing for our quaint little story is a submersible that will be used by our actors in a scene where they are exploring an underwater shipwreck.
The film’s biggest and most difficult set-piece, at least I thought, turns out to be a less stressful endeavor than I anticipated. I cannot reveal what this is (and no, it is not the spaceship or the inside of a spaceship or anything like that, it’s a lot more organic and grosse) but I can say that it’ll blow your minds when you see it in the finished film.
I fancy myself as coming from an experimental background and with an extensive history working with Anthology Film Archives’ NewFilmmakers series, that desire to continue to experiment has not subsided. In creating a sci-fi film that is original, but in certain area caters to some expectations, I find myself confronted with so many extraordinary ideas, specifically on the experimental level. I want to make a film that can be marketed to the masses and this project was specifically developed for this purpose – but on the other hand I want to be the artist that I felt I was when I was working on my short films. One of the most difficult tasks for me as I push forward to “figure out how to do this” is to steer away from experimental storytelling. I promised myself I wouldn’t do it and that it was for the short films only… it is so difficult to keep things simple and apart from keeping a hell of a lot of people on board, the need to keep it simple is by far the most difficult task.
So it is and so it goes and we push forward yet again!
-Eric Norcross
02/07/13
Sounds pretty interesting dude – looking forward to seeing the final production.