Written by Brandon Payne
So after a long few months we have finally completed our next film The Mothership. When going in to watch or critique this project, see it as more of a 20 minute collection of everything we’ve never done before - a complete leap forwards in terms of style, genre, structure and narrative.
The Objective
When working towards this film we looked at what we have and what we don’t have - our strengths and weaknesses or even just things we’d love to try out. From inspection of all our shorts we land on one common denominator - they’re short - however this is something we’ve been working on ever since the start, building up 5 to 10 minutes each time until we’ve mastered the structure of our films, all for the preparation of PERPLEXITY (our first feature).
It’s easy to come up with an idea and stretch it out to the 1 hour mark just to say you’ve made a feature, but is it really worth it? Your first feature is going to be a defining moment in your career so it has to stand out - for us, The Mothership is one step towards that.
-Brandon Payne
For the actors, again we took another few steps forward with the introduction of practical effects and a much more methodical approach to our choreography. I can’t say we didn’t get injured (including myself) but I can certainly say it was worth it and definitely had an impact on the final film. We used fake blood, perfectly hidden and situated tubing, as well as utilising a bow and arrow as our protagonists main weapon.
This proved extremely difficult trying to attach the arrow to our actor, know when to place it and when to fire, as well as thinking about the edit, all the way through the shoot!
Not only did we want to increase the length of our film, we also wanted it to be done proportionately; there needed a reason for this one to be 20 minutes as much as Reminiscence 14:00 and Seventeen 4:00 - this is why I spent so much time cutting it down as much as I could and was only left with 1:00 minute shaved off!
In addition to the length we also wanted to look at the filming style and how it would impact this type of film; it’s a survival and we’re alone on the ground with our protagonist Blake. We have no idea what awaits us or what’s around the corner, so naturally we trail closely behind our leader in case of attack. Portraying this was a great challenge and to really get the feel for us as an audience being alongside him, I primarily shot wide at about 24-50mm for the vast majority of the film. It threw us onto our feet and really shows our characters perspective, no zooms or well-lit and gorgeous imagery, just the harsh and gritty reality of the ultimate survivalist mission. Long takes were favoured and tracking shots were an absolute must, so you’ll probably notice how well they worked in this project after watching, and why we chose to do it.
Despite our struggles and setbacks, we finally made it to release. This is a short preview although within the next few weeks I’ll have a mini blog series covering the entirety of our 3 shoot days, every step of the way. These will be released after March 24th but for now, click here to watch the trailer. I look forward to the release and hope you do too!
-Brandon