Moon (2009), like one of my other favorites of recent SF films, The Man From Earth (2007), was made on a small budget. But where the latter solves the problem by essentially taking place entirely on one small set, with few props and special effects, Moon takes place on a high-tech moon base and features lots of fancy gadgetry and driving around on the lunar surface. All the more interesting, then, to see how they did it. My inner behind-the-scenes geek loves this blog by Gavin Rothery, Concept Designer and VFX Supervisor on Moon. I imagine that these days, you can just shoot everything in front of a greenscreen and make it look good in post, but a recurring theme on the blog is “if we used CG here, we couldn’t afford to use it elsewhere, so we needed to find a different solution.” Even the smallest of details become stressful:
We had a brilliant little machine that we used to seal all the food into little packages. It had a kind of transparent plastic pipe that sealed itslef into segments with a heating element and we used that to make all the space-food portions. The plastic tubing was quite hard to come by and took a few weeks to get delivered so once we started shooting, if we ran out of it we had a problem as we wouldn’t be able to bag any more space-food. We just managed to get the footage we needed, and we used up every last piece of this tubing on takes where we see Sam opening a packet on-camera. It might seem trivial, but this was actually quite stressful as every time Sam opened a packet it felt like another step closer to impending doom.
I will probably never be a filmmaker, but there was a period when I ran through Rebel Without a Crew and various indie filmmaker forums, and they’re full of this kind of stuff, and I find it kind of amazing — certainly more creative than most of the stuff that passes for “creative” these days. I find lack of money is a very potent creative motivator.
Oct 2, 2010