ECLIPSE OF US

PROJECT BRIEF

In September 2024, Carlos Sales, a talented virtual production manager and good friend of mine approached me with a challenge. He wanted to make a proof of concept showcase for his work as a virtual production designer, but needed a creative head as the backbone. And even better, he wanted to do it in 5 weeks. So we got to work. This page is dedicated to our process to create a quality proof of concept short film with a small timeline and even smaller budget.

INSPIRATION

While developing the script, I took heavy inspiration from the film The Cranes Are Flying (1957, Dir. Mikhail Kalatozov) for both the visuals and the story. Eclipse of Us follows a couple struggling with the rapid progressions and stressors of nuclear war. Taking 50’s expressionism and bringing it into a modern context was extremely important to me when developing the aesthetics for the film.

Pre-Production

Carlos Sales designed our virtual spaces, allowing the team to fully break down where our characters would be in space to plan shot lists, overheads, light rigs, and more.

We had two virtual spaces to shoot in: one “exterior” and one “interior”, so having these spaces to manipulate made it easier to adjust our lighting however we wanted, including a “sun” that stayed put to light our scenes.

This unique attribute of pre-production allowed me to take my vision and storyboards and logistically plan them in the virtual space, allowing my camera team to plan rigs in advance much easier. Plus, we could location scout wherever & whenever we wanted.

With this technology, my DP Steven Zhou and I were easily able to develop a shot list we agreed on and could picture before the shoot.

PRODUCTION

Production was broken up into two days: one for our interior location of the warehouse, and the second day for our exterior location of the nuclear plant. Each day ran about 8 hours.