(Released
July 27, 2009)
In May of 2009, I stumbled
upon the already begun STAR (Space, Time and Reality) animated film contest on
BricksInMotion.com.
Before that, I had just begun reading Isaac Asimov’s novel “The End of
Eternity”. From that, a simple idea for
a film that would fit the contest’s theme came to. But I didn’t feel I had the time or energy to
make a film by the July 26 deadline.
Then I remembered my friend PWC who I had met on YouTube sharing
stop-motion animation tests back and forth.
From our emails, I felt like we shared a similar view of what made for
good quality animation and he seemed like the kind of person I could work well
with. So I pitched my story idea to him,
and he decided he would help me make the film.
Had he not been able to, “Crisis Reverted” would have simply never been
made.
With only two and a half
months before the deadline, we began working like mad on the film. I wrote most of the script, and I had such a
blast writing it that it just kept growing and growing in size and detail. Having read a good bit of Asimov lately, I
really wanted to follow his lead in creating a fantastic future for humanity
that still felt realistic. By the end of
May, we finalized our script, a whopping 15 pages. The story could essentially be split in two
parts: scenes in the 27th century and scenes in the 33rd
century. It made sense then for me to
film the dialog heavy 27th century scenes and PWC to film the action
33rd century scenes. Since
the
After filming so many more
shots in just a few of days than I ever had, I came to realize that we would
still not complete the film by the contest deadline. So we decided we would cut three non-essential
scenes from the film, with thoughts that we’d still film them eventually for a
“Director’s Cut” of the film. It was a
little painful to cut them, but in retrospect, had we not, we definitely would
not have completed the film by the deadline.
The last 2 weeks before it, I was doing post-production work every free
moment I had, right up to the day before the deadline. In fact, I submitted the film only 15 minutes
before the deadline, spending the last full day and part of the night on sound
design and filming and editing the prologue and the end credits. Including credits, the film weighed in a
substantial 18 minutes, 20 seconds.
The film premiered in the
live STAR Contest’s Film Festival on the internet on July 26, 2009. It was very well received by those who hung
around to the end of the festival to watch our film which aired last. We “released” it on YouTube and Vimeo the
next day. On August 15, the contest
results were announced and we were so pleased to have placed 3rd out
of 22 films, behind The River by Nikolas Jaeger and CYCLIC by David Boddy, two very
excellent films.
I have to congratulate and
thank PWC for his great help and hard work on this film, without which it would
not have been made. And special thanks to
my wife and three kids for sharing me with this project. They are my greatest blessing and my first
and foremost audience.
|
Link |
Version |
Duration |
Description |
|
Full-length |
18:20 |
Streaming
on Vimeo.com |
|
|
Part
1 |
7:10 |
Streaming
on YouTube.com |
|
|
Part
2 |
4:28 |
Streaming
on YouTube.com |
|
|
Part
3 |
7:09 |
Streaming
on YouTube.com |