This is the first post (of a series) regarding the everything that goes into my demo reel project at Vancouver Film School. The chosen idea, at the end of last term was Hovering Lights (the title will probably change), a (very) brief story regarding some people experiencing a UFO sighting over Vancouver. The original concept is right below, and it’s a brief story involving an amateur cameraman and his girlfriend who find themselves in the middle of a major event and keep shooting. The whole thing won’t be more than two minutes long, and will have just a couple of shots, not all of them loaded with VFX. The main idea is to make it look real footage and fool some youtube viewers.
It’s not hard gathering good reference on the track I want. The hard part was compiling the whole lot together in less than two minutes. Seriously, six feature films and one short, packed together to set the mood for my own idea, took me a day to cut through. Cloverfield and Dark Skies are the main references, but I also have a lot of elements coming from Chronicle, District 9, Project X and just a few ideas from Signs and War of the Worlds. From the gaming side, a great deal of camera style comes from What’s in the Box, which is heavily inspired in the Half Life universe, and, since we’re talking Half Life, the soundtrack comes from Black Mesa Source, composed by Joel Nielsen and one of the best game soundtracks I’ve heard recently.
The goal is to reach a 30 seconds video near the end of the term. So far, we’re around 1m20s, but I’m sure we can shrink it some more. The main flow of images, color and situations kind of follows what I have in mind for the script. It just won’t be as apocalyptic or chaotic as all of this (no exploding buildings, crowds or huge wide-shots). Even though I have plenty of reference, it’s kind of hard to find an alien themed movie that doesn’t have too much “epicness” in it. Independence Day was originally in the list as well, and ended up kicked out because everything was too huge (even the ships).
The best thing I noticed while I worked on this mood reel was how clear the plot was becoming, over the hours and according to my doubts and questions around “how do I edit this together and it still makes sense?”. Before this, I had the idea, yeah, but it was still in the realm of free-ideas, too perfect and with too many holes in it. Now it’s gathering shape and form, and soon will be ready to shoot!