I had to order a new stereo camera off the internet from HK since my last one broke. This of course meant that I had to wait a good few weeks before I even had the right equipment to get underway with this project. While I did go and film some random stuff on my phone and SLR just while I was out and about, I wanted to make a decent start so I decided I’d make an animated intro. This is my first time actually animating something that’s more than about ten frames long but luckily it’s not vastly different if you have an idea of what you want it to look like and a good few hours of spare time. I’ll create a post on animating stereo gifs as well as the process of creating this further down the line.

I also chose to go with an existential sort of approach to the film as it starts out questioning the nature of everything. From this standpoint I felt like I was able to really take it anywhere, because if you break down rules and reduce the nature of everything within the context of the film to an ambiguous mess (which it was always going to be) then you’ve got more freedom in re-establishing the world you’re trying to show or create.

I’ve since added parallel shots of my sniffing a banana and my housemate sitting on a couch that line up with the aliens on-screen. I also decided that the alien animation intro would be best suited as a dream that one of the people (not actor because he literally just plays himself) in my film would wake up from, otherwise It’d be a struggle to make it visually and conceptually make sense within the project. The footage I’ve used for the section under the microscope is all old archival stuff off YouTube.