archived-videos Aurora - Steampunk Film on Youtube

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Aurora The Film

Hi all!

My name is Chris Kellett and I'm an independent film maker based in Adelaide, Australia. I've just finished a film 3 and a half years in the making for a budget of only $1800 and wanted to share the results with the online independent community which has been so kind to us as we've been making it. The film contains over 375 VFX shots, 10 locations and a cast and crew of over 100 people who all worked for free, volunteering their time over 14 shoot days.

The film is a Steampunk Action Adventure film and is available completely free online over at the youtube link below! I'd love to know what you think of the film and any questions about how we achieved many of the effects and scenes in the film can either be posted in this thread or sent to the email below and we'd be more than happy to share our experiences with everyone.

Cheers,

Chris.

Aurora Full Film (34mins) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RG0BO2P78E

Email: aurorathefilm@gmail.com
 
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I'm watching this right now... so far, absolutely brilliant. I am a bit jealous, though. The setting is similar to a script I've been trying to secure funding for. A few questions I've come up with so far.

How did you secure the locations? The ship looks great; Did you get access to an actual boat? Some small details in the building interiors seem to look too advanced for the setting, but this is a really tiny nitpick. The fact you were able to get such great locations with such a small budget is absolutely fantastic.

What did you shoot on? At first I was thinking it might be DSLR, but you're getting some great keys if that's the case. It also wouldn't really fit if you started shooting 3 1/2 years ago. EDIT: I take it back, I'm pretty sure it's a DSLR. I noticed some moire in places.

Was there a digital zoom done in post at 22:51? The shot looks a bit off to me for some reason.

Some other thoughts... why are the gunshots and other foley so low? I actually had to go back to make sure there was even any sound for the guns, and I'm listening on a pretty nice speaker set up with a sub-woofer. The dialogue and music sound great for the most part, it's just the other sounds that need tweaking. EDIT: Actually, it looks like a character at 18:52 says something, but it's been completely cut out of the audio track.

There are also some minor continuity errors, like the long haired mustached guy's hair changing. Minor details, but things to look out for in the future.

All in all this is absolutely fantastic. I'm sorry for nitpicking a few shortcomings, I mean no offense. I hope to see more of your work in the future.
 
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Hi guys,

Thanks for the responses, more than happy to answer any and all questions people have so keep them coming! I'll try my best to cover everything so far.

SinEater - Thanks for the feedback. I'm sure any idea that has similarities is still worth pursuing, there were so many times we were worried things had already been done, especially as a genre piece like this is always aiming to be a genre film first before being ground breaking on any level. Its entertainment, it is what it is.

The locations were a big part of the money as we knew that it would do a lot of the design for us. We're really fortunate to have a pirate ship themed restraunt near where we are and it was literally our only option for shooting. We were pretty worried we weren't going to be able to get it but we struck up a bit of a relationship with the people and were able to get it essentially for free. We attached bluescreens to the sides (just giant blue sheets) to get rid of the town in the background but we were basically really lucky just having a giant ship that was concreted to the ground.

We shot on a Sony EX-1. Actually two of them which made coverage really good. We didn't have a letus adapter or any different lenses, just the stock standard. We would've shot on a DSLR if we hadn't started shooting back when we did. You were actually right the first time, we were shooting before they were out, these days we pretty much use a 5D for any filming if we're not trying to get a budget together to hire a RED on short films. It may look like its a DSLR sometimes but thats probably a lot of VFX shots where we've been able to blur the background to give us the depth of field we really wanted.

22:51 hasn't got any digital zoom or anything. I'd probably put it down to the focus being a bit out to be honest. It may have been pushed in to about 103% or something but from memory the shot is just a bit out ;)

Foley is probably just a mix thing. We pushed through the mix to get a premiere pretty quickly so I'd probably put it down to that if not a speaker thing. Usually the gun shots are alright but perhaps with more bass on your speakers its not as obvious? Not really sure.

Believe it or not 18:52 actually never had any sound. He just moved his mouth like that. He's pretty much miming 'what?' but didn't actually make a sound on set.

You noticed the hair! Haha, not many people do. We actually had to spend about $150 on a wig because he had really short hair by the time we shot in the mansion. One of the secrets to making this film was spreading shoot days so people were okay shooting for 14 days if it was a weekend here and there every month or two. Unfortunately this guy had another job in between with short hair, so 150 of our 1800 went to a wig which apparently you picked anyway ;)

Thanks for the feedback, no need to apologise, we love getting the pros and cons. If you don't believe the cons then you can't believe the pros. Hopefully we'll be able to bring people more of the Aurora world. We're really hoping we can push a tv series so heres hoping.
 
Hi TheArist,

Thought I'd do a second post seeing as the other was so long so you could see the reply! We knew we would never have a big budget for this and at one point we were writing a draft with that in mind. What we had was a climax that took place on a hill and some far easier locations, the problem was that it just didn't feel great setting a battle on a hill instead of in a big mansion for a film like this so at one point we decided to just write what we wanted and try to work out the details later. We actually found it surprisingly easy in some cases you might not think, the money actually went to some things you wouldn't really expect sometimes.

First off everyone worked for free so thats a huge saving. We didn't really expect things to take as long as they did but by having a cast and crew that were really excited to work all the time was a great advantage. One of the ways we did that was to shoot once or twice every month or two. It made it feel like you weren't tired and spending two full weeks shooting a film when in actual fact it was a two week shoot in total. We also always provided meals for people, that makes a crew pretty happy. We spent a little on food but mainly got stuff donated by families.

The mansion for the end fight scene was the big one. We put 750 into that. We felt that it was worth it, sets and locations were really big for us, we felt that if we got those right the design would do half of the work for itself. Things like Newport (the city in the cliffs) essentially cost nothing. We collected hard rubbish (once a year junk is left on the side of the road for councils to pick up and dump) for about a year, storing bits and pieces away in a mates shed knowing that in a year we would bring it all out for the market scene. That sort of foresight really helped. So we'd collect old crates, barrels, baskets and things whenever we found them that people didn't want anymore.

As I posted just before, $150 actually went on a wig to fix continuity with an actor who needed to get his hair cut for another job. Money really makes problems like this go away and we didn't really have another option.

We spent most of the money on costumes and props like the guns and a sword or two. We asked our local toy store if we could get a discount on pirates of the caribbean guns if we bought in bulk of like 15. Painted them up to look more rustic and drilled out the barrels. We went to a lot of Op Shops to buy clothes then threw coffee, wine and dirt at them along with cutting into them with knifes and things to age them.

We spent $200 on bluescreens. They were just big blue sheets and weren't brilliant, we spent a lot of time working on the keying for VFX and a lot of rotoscope work went into making the screens work, but when you've got no money you make do ><

I'd love to give you the exact numbers but I don't really have them. The big things were locations because it would give the film a level of production value. Props that were necessary we spent some on but always tried to get them donated from local theatre people. The costumes required a lot of hunting around and we never spent money on anything we weren't positive would make it in. We spent $100 on hessian which was used as costumes for the slaves. Turned into about 20 costumes and that worked great.

Mainly came down to really generous people and making them feel like the production wasn't them helping on your film, but rather it was their film too. That was a really great thing that came out of Aurora, it felt like everyones, where everyone was able to add something rather than helping for a couple of days on somebody else's film.

Hope that helps! Happy to answer any more specifics!

Cheers,
Chris.
 
Only had time to view the first 10 minutes. Of what I saw, it's pretty amazing what you guys have accomplished. It has a very Firefly/Serenity vibe to it, so I bet that will be a plus when you propose for the TV series.

You did a great job and one can tell this was a labor of love. Congrats to you, your crew, and your cast for putting their best efforts forward! One question, any stock footage purchase or is Australia that beautiful? :D
 
G'day mate,

Thanks for the feedback, look forward to you being able to see the rest. Everything we shot that is obviously real is shot in South Australia which to be honest is pretty beautiful. More beautiful we found once we started looking for locations because when we're not we're not really looking around us as much as we should. All the exteriors of the ship flying through the air and things like that though I must admit are camera mapped shots from royalty free photographs from Flickr, so I can't pretend its THAT beautiful lol. The cliffs at the start are the cliffs of moher in ireland, Diligo island at the end is the same place they shot the movie 'The Beach' in Thailand. Australia is a lot greener than I think a lot of people think seeing as we all pretty much live near the coast. The mansion scene at the end is a building actually right in the middle of the city so we had traffic outside the whole time we were trying to block out and the establishing shot that reveals it is actually set in the Botanic Gardens here in Adelaide and we just comped in an exterior mansion into the background along with some green mountains to try and give it a bit more epic feel.

EDIT: Also, we're massive fans of Firefly, to the point that we found out really difficult to write out things that were just plain already done by Joss lol. Any time someone says it had a remotely Firefly vibe brings great happiness to us ;)
 
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Hi Psychosis,

We've entered into a few and are looking to enter quite a few sci-fi festivals and things like that. We rule ourselves out of a few by putting the film online but this film is really designed for the online crowd opposed to one of the big festivals we would never get into whether the film was good or not, just because of the type of film it is. Definitely entering a few though so hopefully it'll give people a chance to see it on the big screen. I was actually really surprised that I thought the VFX looked better on a big screen, I would've thought that blowing them up would've made it easier to spot any small problems but it actually held up really well.
 
There were definitely a lot of hours searching for locations and appropriate royalty free images for this. I remember sometimes spending a couple of days then deciding to come back to scenes at a later date when we couldn't find what we wanted in an image to camera map. Most of the time we really preferred taking an image that worked without having to paint anything in. Unfortunately we couldn't use that logic on the city in the cliffs :P
 
Oh what a nice job, and on only 1,800. I agree with all the praise above of course. If there is one off-putting element for me, if you'll forgive me for mentioning it, it's the score. The music is very nice. But it's relentless. I suppose this is a matter of personal taste? Maybe it's just that it is loud, and again, perhaps only to my taste. But from the start it seems to go quickly to crescendo and then hardly abates through the whole of the film...undulating into loud crescendos quite often. I love a good crescendo, though.

So what's your next film?
 
The music definitely takes a front seat thats for sure. As a personal taste I really like the big sweeping scores of Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean but most certainly in a longer format the music would have to die down a little. I think the main reason to keep it up was to try and keep up with the really fast pace we set for ourselves in the edit as so much story had to come across in such a little time. What I wouldn't give for the resources to span it out in feature length :P

I'm actually finishing final treatments on a project at the moment which is yet to be announced but we'll be doing that shortly. Its another short which I'm keen to do for a few reasons, one of which is being to take what we've learnt from projects like Aurora and try to build something greater from that knowledge. Hopefully one such project to put learned things into practice will be an Aurora TV series as thats always been what we've wanted for the story.

Cheers for the feedback!
 
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