Thanks so much for the warm words and the encouragement Ponty!
It's really motivating to get such a positive feedback!
About your question and the practical side of making the movie:
First, this is a first film (apart from a 4 minute experimental short done a year before) and we've had to climb quite a steep learning curve (albeit less steep thanks to invaluable advices of you guys, on this forum in particular), so there were undoubtedly many basic blunders made on the way, and some lucky mistakes too!...
The budget was a few thousand dollars (4000 approximately). That includes everything but the camera: mostly the material and "junk" used for the "space station" set (that fit snuggly in the living room of a friend's apartment we sub-rented for a few weeks): wood, (lots of) screws, foam-board, old electronic stuff, etc..., the spacesuit (made from a collection of heteroclite "bric a brac", from Cricket gloves, roofing equipment and oxygen supply parts (so that the actor did not suffocate!), to a modified Russian high-altitude pilot helmet bought in Estonia), and the travels cost to bring the actors and family to the film sets (the main character is played by a french singer and we had to bring him a couple of times to Holland where most of the film was shot). And that's pretty much it. The rest was food and drinks (including a couple of good bottles of red wine...).
The camera was a canon 5D, mostly fitted with a 24-70 2.8 zoom lens (although a pair of shots were made with a rented 14mm lens to increase the sense of depth in the otherwise quite claustrophobic volume of the space-station set...). The zoom was great to quickly adapt the framing without repositioning the tripod (which was essential as we were filming on a very tight spatial and time constraint).
Some powerful, yet cheap, Fluorescent bulbs and a"chinese" tungsten fresnel were used to light the set. (the tungsten was used to light the astronaut in the space sequence, to simulate a hard directed sun light and create strong shadows).
As for the camera work, I think I did all the mistakes imaginable when dealing with the frame rate and encoding: most of it had to be painstakingly corrected in "post"....
All sounds were done in post thanks to the talent and hard work of my friend and colleague Julien who did also essentially all the music too. This was planned from the outset as a time-saving component during the shoot (in fine, it was quite time consuming indeed, as every little sound had to be reproduced (or imagined) and matched later on, but we had so little time to shoot that having a "quiet" set would have proved too difficult and stressful to cope with).
The editing was done on a mac with final cut + after effects.
Last but not least, Friends and family were (heavily!) put to contribution as actors and little helpers all the way until the completion of the film. The "special thanks" section in the credits does not feel quite enough to properly thank them ...
I'm putting together a little BTS to post on vimeo in the next day or two that should give some more insights on how this film was put together: I'll let you now when it's done.
And, as you suggested, I will try to send it to some festivals (actually I've tried a couple in Europe already, without success, but I'll keep trying anyway!)
My god, this was great! One of the few truly good short films I've sat through on this site!( And yours was 16 min). You've got immense talent, man. Everything about this was great. Now you need to get out there and show people what you've got!
have you sent it to any festivals in Europe or America?
Also, I would love to see some BTS footage and know some more details like what equipment you used and how much your budget was.
Again great film, dude!