Hi there, I just wanted to let you know that I've moved this blog over to my new website where it's a bit better organised. I've been digging through my drives and prepped some stuff for new posts that you may find interesting if you liked Moon and how we got it made, so I'm intending to put some new stuff up there soon.

I'll leave this all here for the forseeable future but all the articles on the new site have been re-edited and some new bits put in here and there. All new postings will go up on my new site and not on here, this blog is essentially parked for now.

My new website can be found at www.gavinrothery.com and the moon blog located inside at:

http://www.gavinrothery.com/moon-blog-index/

Thanks for reading!

Gav

Here's a Sam Bell clone fresh out the drawer in the Sarang station, looking Fonzie cool.

Sam had to go through quite a lot of time in makeup in Moon and we did all sorts of things like drawing on his face and putting cotton wool in his cheeks to make him look different. But we left his tattoo. You probably noticed it in the film but might not have been able to make out exactly what it is. I couldn't when we first started shooting.

When I first saw it I thought it was sort of like an armed forces tattoo, like the SAS have a dagger with a snake wrapped round it. It has a similar overall shape and I presumed it was something like this. After a while I asked Sam about it and he explained it to me.

It's a chicken hanging from a noose. He said he got it so he can tell girls he's "got a hung cock".

One thing that tends to come up a bit when people talk about Moon is the ending. As we were doing everything on minimal resources we didn't have much extra footage to work with in the edit but there were a couple of small sections that got cut out and one of those happened to be the very end. In the shooting script, we had a scene right at the end, after the return vehicle hits the atmosphere, where we see a front door and Sam dressed like a biker trotting up, leaving a small, wrapped present, ringing the doorbell and running off.

We then see Eve Bell answer the door, find the parcel, take it inside and open it. Whereupon it's a small scale model of her house.

The idea behind this is that it's a resolution of Sam working on his model town and him making this last model sort of ties it all together somehow and him giving the present to Eve lets her know she's okay. Thing is, there's actually loads of problems with this and so we cut it from the film and a good thing too. There's just so much wrong with it. How would Eve know he was carving a little wooden Fairfield and "get it"? As she doesn't know anything about the clones of her father working in slavery on the Moon she's not going to care if he's okay or not. Also, presumably this is the house that the original Sam Bell also lives in as when Sam 2 calls from the Moon we hear his voice momentarily from across the room. What if he was mowing the lawn when Spaceclone Sam comes trotting up the driveway? Actually, thinking about it now, we should have filmed that. It could have gone completely mental. Imagine little Eve hearing the kerfuffle and coming outside to see what was going on? On a random Sunday morning? She'd have had an excellent story to tell all her mates at school about what happened over the weekend. "Daddy had one of his space-clones return from the moon to try and give me a present of a little house which was a bit weird and they ended up fighting in the garden and then the police came and didn't know who to arrest becasue they were genetically identical. I think Daddy might be going to jail".

We didn't really have the resources to be able to do this properly and we were trying to get an establishing shot of this nice house to set the scene and show how nice and rich the original Sam has become from selling his DNA into slavery. We had an idea of the kind of place we wanted but had no resources to shoot anything. I almost made up a VFX shot for this myself but the shot Duncan wanted would have taken me a week or so to get looking good working by myself and we just didn't have the time so we had to poo-pah that. I hate not getting things done but sometimes you have to suck it up and just realize that there's just no way and get over it. I also never got to use one of my designs for a cool hover-bike for Sam in this scene, hopefully I'll get to use it for another project sometime in the future.

It seems a bit strange when I think of it that the first thing we cut from the edit was the actual ending of the film, but I guess it just goes to show that when you're making films you shouldn't be afraid to cut stuff out if your guts are telling you it'll be for the best.

After making this cut, the ending we were left with was the shot of the return vehicle entering the atmosphere which sort of felt a bit flat. Fortunately, Duncan had the idea of the radio broadcast voice-over which really helped sell the final shot and give us a sense of closure on everything with the reveal that Sam did, indeed, return to earth. In keeping with our lack of resources, that last bit of radio broadcast where he's on about being a "Whacko and a nutjob" is actually Duncan. See what happens to your voice when you move out to LA?

One thing that keeps coming up again and again in this blog is me whining about how little money we had. I know this is going to sound cliched but it does spur you on to be a bit more creative then you otherwise might have been. It also puts you at risk of personal injury or death when the budget won't stretch to a stuntman, your principal actor isn't insured (and doesn't like the look of what he was being asked to do anyway), and you happen to be the same size and build as him. That is how I came to be in this position.

As we had pretty much no other choices, I ended up being the spaceman in Moon doing all the stuff that looks in no way dangerous at all on-screen but actually is. Sorry Mum if you're reading this, but when we were actually filming your little boy was a half-inch mis-step from falling ten feet and smashing his delicate, human face to bits on scaffold poles and the concrete floor.

We had two space-suits made for Moon, and were both identical apart from an orange stripe on suit 2. The actual costume was lined with double-layered duvet and was hot as a bastard. To compensate for the way body heat built up and the lack of any naturally moving air inside the helmet, Bills' chaps filled a motorized fan inside the helmet chin-area to provide ventilation, de-misting on the faceplate and a cool, refreshing breeze. I'm a huge fan of Bill Pearsons' work but that fan was rubbish. It just sat there next to my chin, whirring quietly and blowing the most minute waft of slightly cool breeze roughtly equivalent to a piece of dropped A4 paper. It was right in front of my face when I had the helmet on, teasing me with the promise of cool refreshment and never delivering. One time, whilst waiting to go for a take, I was in position and all alone and quiet up the top of some scaffolding straining to hear the shouted stage instructions to go. The fan was teasing and annoying me by doing shit-all. Annoyed by it's ineffectiveness, in a fit of pique I decided to show the puny motor who's boss by stopping its' pathetic drone by inserting my tongue into it. Which I did, and lost a little chunk out of the side of it. Cheers brain, nice suggestion. Here's what Mr. Rockwell thought of the whole thing the first time he tried the suit helmet on.

It didn't help with me having a little bit of hay-fever too as the duvets lining the suit were all made of feathers. It was very hard to bend and flex in (much like a real space-suit so I'm told by the internet). The arms were hard to move too as it zipped up at the back and was all one-piece so when you took it off somebody had to come round the back, take the helmet and yolk off, then the backpack and then unzip you and you'd sort of shrug the suit forwards and let your arms slide out. The front of the suit would hang in front of you like a tired ghost and as it was unzipped there'd be a gust of air and all the feathers would go up my nose. I wouldn't mind so much but there was nowhere to stash a hankie, so I had a runny nose most of the time. I grew to feel a sort of kinship with Mel Smiths' character in Morons from Outer Space. It's a good look for getting chicks.

The suit was so hot that you couldn't wear normal clothes underneath it which meant a complete astronaut ensemble of white leggings and baby-grow style top (same clothes Sam wears in the film), and the little cloth helmet. This particular item of clothing always got on my tits as it was supposed to have two little boom-mics coming off the cap like the Apollo astronauts wore, but the costume designer forgot to add them. We were all so busy that nobody noticed until we'd already filmed the little helmet and by then it was too late to change them. There wasn't much that got past me on this film but this is one of the things that did and every time I see that little hat, it makes me cringe. The whole point of that little helmet is that it's supposed to keep his communications gear on his head and the mics in front of his mouth. The absence of the boom mics makes it completely redundant. Whenever I see it on-screen I can't help but think "nice baby-hat, space-man".

Funnily enough, a lot of the potentially face-changing danger that I was exposed to came from the suit itself. The combination of no tactile feedback, no feet-bending or sense of feeling or touch, no looking down, sideways or behind, being super-hot and misty, not being able to hear anything, weird extra weight on my back throwing my balance and generally restricted movement and vision made making a cup of tea a risky prospect. Adding that the set was up in the air suspended on chains, covered in scaffold poles and various other hard, knobbly bits that were slippery having been dusted down with grey powder to represent the fine lunar dust and it gets a bit more likely that my mum won't recognise me when the casts come off.

As if clambering all over that thing with no peripheral vision or feeling in ski-boots wasn't hard enough, during the crash scenes it was cocked up at a 15 degree angle making it into a slippery slope of certain death. The suit had snowboarding boots painted white for the feet so you can imagine how little tactile feedback you get when you're just trying to walk and you can forget bending important bits like your ankles and toes. Chuck in the helmet base that completely prevents you from looking down and the overall knumbness from thick gloves, hard to move arms and a helmet that pretty much deafens you to the outside world and you're good to do some stunts!!

This is one of the fantastically detailed animatics I did which is a pretty straight-forwards shot of Sam getting into one of the Rovers through the hatch in the roof. We see this at the beginning of the film whilst the credits are coming up. Looks pretty straight-forwards right? Well it would have been easier if the set of the rover hadn't been mated to the rover cab interior as this put it right up in the air.

Anyway, I'm banging on a bit about the massive danger a bit too much now. It's not like I was fired across a canyon in a rocket-propelled bucket or anything, it was just very easy to fall and it would have been bad for my face if I had. I ended up doing quite bit of this sort of thing on Moon and probably the hardest bit to do was pretending to be in Lunar gravity after Sam falls over being sick in his space-helmet. It was all shot against green-screen and I had to spring up like I weighed about six stone in the complete space-suit without any sort of rig or support. We got it in the end but I had to do it about thirty times. I couldn't take the suit off as I'd sweated all inside it and it was soaking wet but the studios were freezing and if I opened it up I'd just freeze in a couple of minutes and catch the shittiest cold ever, then just have to get back into the cold, damp suit and go again. I don't know who's got that suit now but whoever you are, if you're reading this, please don't be tempted to put it on. That thing must be absolutely minging and almost certainly a bio-hazard.

Here's us filming the shot from the beginning of the film that pairs up with the animatics above.

I didn't bother editing this clip as I thought you might like to get a glimpse of what it was like as we were actually working. So there you go, un-insured space stunts on a budget. Like I say, we ended up doing a lot of this sort of thing and the bit I'm most proud of is opening the rover-hatch and coming in at the end with my gun to finish off Sam 1 only to find him already dead. In the zero-budget spirit of things I just grabbed some of my paintball gear and took it down to the studio that day so the space-assassain is actually me with a bit of extra belt-kit and a couple of extra pouches with my trusty Tippman X7 with a tactical light with a tail on. If you look closely you can see the gas line that I just tucked into the belt so it looked like there was a bit more going on as everybody likes floppy cables and shit like that.

When you watch this scene in the film, don't feel too concerned for Sam 1. The only real danger he was in was getting a bollocking from Gerty for covering the inside of the Rover in little orange paint splats.

Home. K-Stage, Shepperton Studios. Where the tea urns never run dry and you're always no more than two minutes away from industrial strength solvents or a plate of chips. The Sarang set construction period was a really interesting time for me. Seeing this place become real that I had constructed in my head was such a weird thing it's hard to describe. The final set was so close to my designs that it was like being inside my own head. I know this might sound a bit arty and wanky but it honestly did.

Duncan and I would visit the set whilst it was under construction a couple of times a day and sometimes spend all day in there if we were needed for anything. As the base became more complete there were endless little tours checking out where we were going to site monitors, lightboxes, could we get some dolly track in here, a light in there, etc. The construction crew would play old school dance music really loudly from a ghetto blaster at the side of the studio whilst they worked giving a tour of the studio a weird party vibe.

One of the things that really surprised me was how much paint the construction crew got through. The set would be sprayed and it was closed off in sections with transparent plastic sheeting as this work was underway. It looked just like on the TV show Dexter when he's doing his murdering business. We had this thick brown paper on the floor which was supposed to keep the place clean, but was really annoying and slippery to walk on. It's funny how you come to associate things together as now, whenever I hear thick, brown parcel paper being wrinkled it takes be right back to walking around the base with a pencil in my mouth drawing little marks on the wall where I wanted graphics to go.

Gerty wasn't the only robot on station in Sarang. R2D2s little brother used to show up on the set and just stand there, staring into space. I guess it's tough trying to break into showbiz when you're got a more sucessful older sibling.

In the pic below you can see a chat occuring around the comms console. You'll see the overhead lighting recess areas are covered in transparent plastic.

When we were shooting, these areas were covered in a couple of stepped layers of tighter fitting film to diffuse the light and had light-boxes mounted above them. One afternoon whilst we were shooting, we were intermittently interrupted by quite a loud buzzing. It would stop and start and we had to stop shooting to locate the sound as it was interrupting takes. After ten minutes of scratching our heads we realized a fly had become trapped between the plastic layers and was slowly cooking to death in the trapped space. Occaionally it would summon the will to live a little longer and make another noisy but futile bid for freedom. We couldn't get to the fly to either release it or put it out of its' misery, so we had to keep shooting with the threat of interruption and hope the fly died sooner rather than later. Turned out it took a couple of hours to bake his little insect brain. Cheers Mr fly, you really slowed us down for an afternoon with all your noisy dying.

This is the padded bulkhead sections before they were moved into the set. You can clearly see on the floor the areas where various bits and pieces of the set have been sprayed white before they got taken into the main set. There was loads of spraying going on throughout construction and the whole set got painted time and time again. Like my lungs.

This is the poly-board layout that was put together by the drawing team prior to construction. I've always loved these little models and it pains me a bit that they are so temporary and fragile. It's essentially a paper model held together by pins so it's really delicate. These things are always falling appart in the offices from everybody poking at them. Probably got binned ages ago.

The Infirmary overhead section was suspended by chains and used to drift and sway if it was touched. It used to be pretty annoying sometimes as it had quite a bit of inertia so if it got knocked it'd take a while for it to stop moving.

One part of the set that still annoys me is the harvester-interior section. I'd always wanted this to be "more", and generally have a more cool stuff going on but in the end we could only afford a little three-wall-and-door type set. It's actually the reverse of the Airlock door and we doubled it up in the film. When you see Sam leaving Sarang at the beginning of the film to get in his Rover is this same door as when he's inside the Harvester. The tape over this door is restricting access as this door was one of the main ways into the set. We'd enter through here in the morning and stay in there until lunch, then back in again for the afternoon. This door was one half of the tiny airlock room, which had a door at each side with the pressure suits hanging left and right. If the set had just been sprayed and was slick with wet paint we'd have to tape areas off so that people didn't keep walking through. They did anyway. Nobody used to obey signs and notices like this. When we were shooting, Sam used to hide in the airlock and close both doors smoking rollies, which was properly naughty of him. Funnily enough, I only ever caught him doing this as Sam 2. Thinking about it it might have been Sam in character. I'd never made that connection until I wrote it just then. You'll see R2D2s little brother edging into this shot again. He's so attention-seeking. I think he might be on drugs.

This is what the Sarang set looked like under the studio lights once everybody had gone home. It was pretty spooky and really quiet and still. I used to like wandering around the set when there was nobody else there and just sitting in the corridor nice and still and zen. It was really peaceful and a great place to get away from the pressure for a little while which was weird as this is technically right in the middle of it.

This is as close a picture as there is of the entire Sarang set and I had to lean right out over the scary gantry to take it (which is why it's as a bit of a rubbish angle). You can see here how the Monitor Room tower was up on scaffolding hanging off the end of the main corridor. We built the decking around it to provide access to the outside of this part of the set as there was all sorts of electrics for lights and monitors up there. I always found this part of the set pretty annoying as if you were inside the tower and somebody was outside working the monitors, the walls were that thick that if they were crouched right down you had to shout really loud for them to hear you. I spent a lot of time shouting instructions to people across noisy sets on Moon as it could be a very noisy place to work. In the top-right corner you can see a part of the clone-room food-storage wall leaning against the edge of the set next to some smaller scale bulkheads for the forced perspective set that are being worked on. You can see here how the main corridor ceiling was hung from chains from the roof.

The Return-Vehicle room and the Infirmary both had open ceilings that were never covered. The Return-Vehicle cables that were hanging down were actually cables from one of Gary Shaws' old Motion-Control rigs that he had knocking around in his garage.

Do you like biscuits? Of course you do, who doesn't? We ate quite a lot of biscuits for Moon and as our budget was so absurdly tight I'd go around and grab all the little plastic trays out of the bins and use them as set dressing in our Moonbase. If you look closely you'll also see printer cartridge boxes and Ikea knife-and-fork trays. The trick is that if you can apply this stuff with some sort of an eye for balance and form, when you paint it all the same colour if just looks like a new, cohesive thing. It honestly makes me cringe telling you all this sort of stuff. Bear in mind that I've been trying to make a science-fiction film since whenever and it's not been an easy ride. Of all the types of film to make, an Independent British Science-Fiction film must be the hardest. But we managed to pull it off. In my head I always imagined this moment to be a bit grander but here I am talking to you about how we stuck some biscuit trays on a wall and painted them white. Go Team Sci-Fi!!

One area of the set design that Duncan and myself were kind of putting off for the most part was the clone room corridor. There was so much to think about with the rest of the productions' incessent needs that I had it in a box in my head and was trying to clear some time to get down to sorting it out. The rest of the base was designed and under construction by this time so there was already an established design language to use to get a hook on. This part of the base was never really explained very clearly in the shooting script and Duncan just wanted a long corridor that just seemed to stretch on forever. The idea was to have one side lined with stored clones and the other with piles and piles of space-food racked up like a survivalists' christmas wish-list.

I knew there was no way we'd be able to come close to getting a complete set built and as I was trying to loose VFX shots wherever possible set myself the challenge of ruling out any additional spend and set out to get the whole thing done in-camera. Sounds quite simple, and we had some space allocated for whatever solution was reached. The picture below shows a part of Shepperton K-Stage. We can see the Rec-Room in the middle of the picture and the pressure-door to the "greenhouse" service area where Sam grows his plants is open. This area hasn't been constructed yet. You also can see through the open roof of the Rec-Room and into the kitchenette/dining chair where Sam eats. This photograph makes the studio look quite narrow, as most of the set is obscured from view. I took this from up in the reds (the overhead gantries) and you can see the suspended metal walkway on the right hand top side of the pic cutting off the rest of the view of the studio below. The floor-space we had to build the corridor set in is in red at the top of the image.

So not much room then. Todays Sci-Fi Challenge: Make an infinitely long corridor for as little money as possible in a small corner of the set. My idea for this is a bit tricky to explain but it basically an infinity room that traps the light using mirrors. The diagram below is how I endeavoured to explain to to everybody.

Nice and complicated. It's actually quite a simple concept, it's just tricky to explain the concept of how the light was going to be trapped. I thought this was a good option though as we would have complete freedom with the cameras and the room would literally stretch into infinity. We did have the down-side of the reflected portion being a litteral infinite repeat but as that was the intended design anyway it didn't seem to really matter. The mirrors isolated Sam, crew and cameras so as long as we took precautions against accidental reflections we should be good to go.

The down-side with this design was that it needed a couple of pretty big mirrors. By pretty bit I mean about twelve feet wide by six or seven feet high in one piece. These would have been expensive but the illusion would have been perfect. In the end the glass would have cost a bomb so we had to re-consider. This is where our Mr Tony Noble proposed a forced perspective set which was a really good idea for keeping the costs down. He'd done one previously on a Sainsburys ad where a little carton of milk walks down a street and so we sat down and had a watch and agreed that it was a good solution. It's probably easier to show you what we did than to explain (as with any optical illusion), so have a look at a few pics from the construction and I'm sure it'll make sense.

So you can see that we were building a section of "real" set for the Sams to walk around in with a pyramid-on-its'-side type shape at the end where we'd bring all the perspective lines together over as short a space as we could get away with. This was a great illusion although it did restrict our camera coverage quite a lot. it didn't seem to matter at the end of the day as we got the footage we needed from this clever little set but we did have to watch how much we moved the camera as the perspective was always trying to give us away.

You can see from these pics how well it worked from the right angles. We had the food stacked down one side and the clone-drawers on the other. Although this set looks like a good result, beware suggesting solutions like this if you are going to have to actually work on the thing. Getting the detail to follow across the real-size areas into the the forced perspective areas is a complete ball-ache. We had a chap cutting out ever decreasing versions of the food containers out of foam for two weeks. Poor bastard. I hope you'll agree it was worth it in the end though.

This pic shows the side of the "real" portion of the set where we can see the stored clone-food of lots of delicious trifle and beans and the ladder leading up to the roof of the set. In the film we see Sam descend this ladder from the "return" vehicle floor panel but in reality the two areas were in diagonally opposed corners of the studio. There was actually nothing above this ladder and Sam had to stand on a bit of decking and just lower himself down. We're such tight-arses we didn't even spring for an elevator. You can see on the left-hand side of this image how abruptly the set stops so we really had to be careful how we moved the camera. In the end it was unavoidable that we would be covering off the edge of the set, and so the cheesy loaf got a couple of plastic palettes we had painted grey from the greenhouse area and just propped them up to plug the end of the set. Worked for Red Dwarf. Worked for us.

This is Duncan disturbing Tony whilst he was having a nap. We all used to sleep in the clone-drawers as they were incredibly comfortable being made out of luxurious bare wood.

This is the first time the clone-room set appeared as it was in this early press photo. I think this was in the first three or four official images to come out from the film and was also one I did initial colour grade tests on the establish how we would have the injured Sam 1 look. It was always a balance of desaturating his skin whthout taking too much out of the blood so it stayed red and didn't go too black. I've got some better pics of this set but I'll need to have a dig around to show you how nicely it came out. One of the things that I particularly liked was the light at the end in the far distance. For some reason I found this very creepy and would have had to go down there to see what the hell was going on and why it was all lit up. It was never in our original plan to film but I would also have loved to see Gerty down here at one point in the film just doing some menial stuff and perhaps getting the clones artifacts out of the drawer. If any of you spotted how it was done or thought it was done some other way leave me a comment as I was always curious to see how people would take to this particular optical illusion. By the way, I wouldn't recommend sleeping in a drawer, my arse is still killing me and sometimes you can't get yourself out.

I thought I'd share something special with you today and it's definately something you're not going to be seeing enywhere else, the "first" VFX shot from Moon. We'd wrapped our shooting at Shepperton and Duncan had just gotten a new MacBook Pro (these lovely little metal machines were used extensively on Moon). We were at home having some sleep and generally trying to get our heads together as we entered post and my life was about to become overtaken by Excel spreadsheets for a week or so as we rooted through all the footage and got underway with the edit. It was exciting being at home and getting footage through on hard-drives and we'd spend a lot of time just looking at what we'd just shot and generally getting familiar with it all.

Duncan decided he couldn't wait for the next few months of post production work to be carried out and so we decided to load a random shot into iMovie. At the time neither of us had used this excellent bit of software before and so we thought we'd take it for a spin and see what we could make it do. If you've seen Moon you'll likely be familiar with the shot of Sam driving his Rover. In case you're not, the footage shot in the studio looks similar to the image below.

I'm not sure exactly how funny this is going to come across as but by the time we were addiing the sound effects we were both crying and pissing ourselves with laughter. Our first step was to enhance mood so, it had to be noir. He's driving a car so we'll have the car noise in there a few times. The car sound effect sounds a bit exciting so we knew we needed to amp up the motion so we put the earthquake thing on there just to get a bit more of a kinetic feel. And everybody likes monkeys so lets bosh that in there as well. It's basically all you need to make a film like Moon and perhaps we should have done the whole film this way. We'd have been finished in a day and a half, it's very quick to use. The xylophone effect is something that I really don't think you can have enough of. It adds tension and drama. Apparently the new Robocop re-boot is going to be xylophone-heavy. So here it is, the first ever VFX shot completed for Moon by myself and Duncan on his new Mac in about twenty minutes. Piece of piss this post-production business.

I know that this stupid little video isn't a huge part of the making of Moon, but the ability to muck about a bit and have a laugh when the rest of your life and career seems to be hanging by a very thin thread cannot be underestimated. We were so exposed on this film both professionally and financially that I'm not going to try and describe the constant pressure and related weird-feelings that we all had as I'm not sure I'd be able to. But at least we could still find times now and again to have a bit of a laugh whilst we were doing it.

I thought I'd take the opportunity to show you a bit more about how we worked out what we were going to do with the vehicle VFX and lunar exterior shots in Moon. Particularly regarding the practicalities of actually getting them on film, as I ended up doing a lot of setup work to ensure the shooting went smoothly and it's not something you'll be hearing about anywhere else. I'm in a weird position in regard to Moon, as I have so much data from the film sat on my hard-drives at home that just doesn't exist anywhere else. When I found these folders containing all these files I thought that an insight into this process might be of interest to any of you potential film-makers out there.

As we were predictably under-resourced I took it upon myself to block out as much of the film as I could in CG so that we could be more prepared for shooting. Shooting requires a plan and shooting VFX requires more of a plan. Until I'd got all this sorted I couldn't be 100% confident that it was all going to work, so I sacrificed yet more of my already minimal sleep and boshed through it night after night whilst we still had the models under construction. This all ended up being a bit rough and ready but I'd gotten used to this being normal Moon operating tempo by now and I was in the zone and able to stay awake on 2-3 hours per night. I really needed to be comfortable that we had a plan going into the model shoot as we only had eight days in there so this became preferable to lying unconsious wrapped up in my lovely warm duvet having my hair stroked in dream-world by a robot unicorn. Given that the first day of the model shoot was actually a test day, we really only had seven. Over this period we had to shoot a hundred and forty three setups with all kinds of combinations of models and all on a rostrum 32x24 feet that needed to be re-dressed frequently including ripping our Sarang set in and out of the middle of the table. Just thinking about all this now makes me want to have a word with myself and go put myself to bed.

Below are the original animatic blockout frames that I did for scene 145 where we see Sam 2 take a dying Sam 1 back to the Rover crash site so that when the "rescue" team arrive they find the dead space-clone they were expecting. You might notice that in these original blockouts things are a bit different from the way they appear in the film. This is becasue we were moving forwards at such a rapid rate and my work was covering so many areas that I didn't have time to keep everything 100% up-to-date. You can see the original Rover 1 under the Harvester whilst the two Sams pull up alongside in a more advanced design of Rover 3. Also, you'll notice the crashed Rover 1 is on its' side and the access is simply kneeling down and poking your behelmeted head through the hatch.

You'll see that a lot of the frames have a weirdy looking green version underneath them. This is an accompanying VFX animatic and is intended to show the crew exactly what we'll need to have ready on the set before we start shooting. They turned out to be a really good way to communicate clearly with the set-builders as they tend to not get too deep into the technical side of VFX. They were also good for the rest of the crew to get a general understanding of what was going on. I would pin these up on a board in the sound stage at the start of every day as they were really useful in establishing our running order. When you have your shots printed out nice and big and pinned up on the wall like this they are very easy to get an overview of and group into similar setups. This can speed you up quite a bit over the course of a days shooting.

Moon was an effects heavy production and I always find it preferable if the people I'll be working with on-set have an understanding of why I am asking for things to be done a certain way. Some people see VFX as spooky magic made of gossamer and spiders dreams but I find that if you can engage with people a bit and make them understand why they're painting these things green, etc, they'll generally get that extra bit more interested in what they are doing and give you that extra bit more. These green-screen blockouts were really useful in showing stagehands and crew what we needed built, where the divides were between green-painted props and "real" bits and pieces, the kind of range of movement and weight they need to bear, etc. These things might sound obvious but they are exactly the kind of thing that will get mis-interpreted and you'll turn up on stage with the rover hatch painted bright green when it needed to be realistic which will stop you from shooting that shot. Or the rover-roof won't be safe to bear a persons' weight as the construction crew didn't think anybody would be standing there. Stuff like that. Even framing up a green-screen shot can be hard if there's nothing to go on, but with these simple references we knew where we needed to put the camera and also how much floor-space we needed, something that can be easily mis-understood without a visual reference. Working like this is a really good way of maximising your time and getting a lot of value out of a few cosy nights snuggled up with a cup of tea and your favourite computer.

The motion sequence above is how the animatic sequence for the body-replacing scene was as we went into shooting. As you can see, it's been tweaked quite a bit and has updated designs added and is generally a nicer piece. I tried to get as much time with the animatics as I could so I could spend time positioning cameras and setting up the shots to make sure they were right. This development work was pretty fraught as we didn't have much time and there was only me covering it, but you can see how closely the final animatic resembles the end filmed result. Preperation win.

A few things changed as we were moving along. Duncan and I were both concerned about the crash sequence as we didn't have any budget to produce models that would be doing anything specific. Our miniatures, lovely as they are, are basically toy cars with some lights on that we pulled along a big tabletop with wire. We knew we'd likely be relying on cuts in the edit to make the crash sequence work. As it was it almost didn't.

When we were shooting the miniatures, if we needed anything extra that wasn't on the call-sheet, I'd wait until we were shooting something similar and then jump in with a quick request. As we'd be al set up for shooting something similar it kept setup times down to a minimum and we grabbed quite a few extra bits and pieces we really needed to get some of our scenes working. With the Rover crash we fed the wire that pulled Sams' vehicle through a part of the side of the Harvester wheel mechanism and back out the other side at an angle. This way we could pull the rover into the side of the Harvester even though it wasn't designed to do so. I knew it would only be used for half a second or so and we grabbed it as an extra shot. It only slowed us down by perhaps twenty minutes, which, in this case was totally worth it. We got the shot of the Rover heading into the Harvester tracks and hitting it from above and behind which really helped the scene to work.

When I was putting the animaitc scenes together, they immediately showed a hole and this was the missing element that the scene needed to work. Creating the new shot in the animatic showed me immediately that the hole had been filled and so I set out to the model shoot with the agenda of grabbing a few extra bits of footage like this. It's all well and good having a plan but you still have to think on your feet and be honest with yourself. When something could be better, get off your arse and make it better. Otherwise it'll get done half-arsed and when you see it up on the screen it's too late to change it and you'll just have to live looking at it forever. Unless you're George Lucas.

The animatics were incredibly useful for these sorts of things. As we were working on minimal budget, we were only shooting things we were sure we needed . We were shooting them as fast as we were able, whilst making sure they were still what we intended and needed for the film. Consequently, we didn't have loads of spare footage lying around and so we were constantly at risk of getting in the edit and not having any options to fix things that weren't working as we'd have no additional footage to work with. The animatics were great for this as I could put scenes together and tell immediately if they worked or not. I spent quite a few late nights in my bedroom just trying out scenes and moving shots around so I could be happy we had nice sequences and I could get my two hours sleep. Now and again it'd be clear we needed an extra shot to make the sequence work and so I'd just knock it together in 3D and re-cut it and see if it worked. It's kind of like peeking into the future to see if the sequence you intend to film is going to work out or not. When you're making films it's handy being able to save your own arse like this becasue you don't want to be in the edit suite a couple of weeks later realizing you've forgotten to shoot somthing. If you have to go back, it's going to kick you right in the bank account.

The examples below show a random scene in the Rover cockpit and you can see from these angles that the scene will cut together just fine. I was taking into accont camera setups and reset times as one big trap to fall into with animatics is that you just re-site the camera with every cut. When you get on-set this means that after every shot you'll be moving the camera, light, etc and have perhaps half an hour or more of down time where you're not shooting anything. I was trying to not move the cameras around too much and keep them in a few similar positions which meant that we would be able to shoot the scenes quickly and in groups. Moving the camera really is a large part of down-time on a working set. You can see from this sequence that we'd only need to have one side of the rover removed and the camera can stay in roughly the same place whilst we shoot the whole scene. Things like this really help the AD team get the shooting organised  and by you understanding what everybody else will be doing on the actual shoot you can really help everybody else out. If you're careful, you can strike the balance of getting just what you want artistically whilst simultaneously building all sorts of time-saving measures into the actual shoot itself. It's quite likely that nobody will ever realize you ever did this as people tend to assume these kind of things happen co-incidentally, so don't expect anybody to say thanks. Just concentrate on making everything better wherever you can and it will all work itself out.

Sometimes VFX issues are also made clear at the animatic stage. The following shot is from the scene where Sam 1 looks up at the jamming tower. It was clear from this that we would be having a big, reflective, shiny shiny helmet right smack bang in the middle of the frame. Not only that but you can get an idea of the kind of distortion that's going to be needed on the fake-reflection of the tower that'll be getting composited in later. So best not get the camera crew in the reflection then. Lots of big black drapes with the camera poking through sorted that one out. You really have to have this sort of thing sorted out in advance or you'll never get through your shooting schedule on time and on budget. One thing that can always happen with rough art like this is that you might not be there to explain everything. This only happened one time on Moon and the mis-understanding was quite comedy. Have a watch of the clip below. This shot is from the scene where Sam calls Eve back on earth. He has just hung up on her and starts punching the dashboard of the Rover because he's upset and frustrated. When this appeared on the call-sheet, the description was "Sam is frightened". Of course he is.

The animatics were a really rewarding part of the film-making process for me as I got to immerse myself in my computer for a few hours at a time and get some nice sequences together. I'm really happy with the way the whole thing came out and I hope this insight into how this stuff was planned was interesting. I know it's easy to look at it as a body of work and see a load of crudely made CG puppets unconvincingly animating around but for the time and resources we had available they really saved our arses and brought up all kinds of issues that we were able to solve ahead of time and hence get the film made. These little CG stick-men showed us so much of what our film was going to be before we'd even set up a camera. So next time you're at the pub have a drink for stick-man CG Sam, the hardest working pixel-person on the Moon.

During the making of Moon there was a place that I'm sure many people would have loved to visit and so I thought I'd try and give you more of an idea of what it was like there. The place is Bill Pearsons' model shop on the Shepperton Studios lot and depending on your viewpoint it is either a cramped, cold, messy shed that stinks of solvents or a magical cave of tiny science-fiction wonder.

The photo above is the prototype Moon space-helmet built at one-sixth scale and made here to fit an action-man. We also used this as a prop on the motorized action-man torso that drove the sixth-scale rover but you never really see it in the film. The plastic shapes behind it are early pieces of the helmet fresh out the vac-forming machine. The greenish piece in the background is the front-chest part where the little light was mounted. This was actually one of those lamps that mounts on ones' forehead that makes one look rather foolish. We pressed loads of everyday practical lights into service on Moon as we couldn't afford anything bespoke. The rover miniature headlights were little maglite torches and the light inside Sams' helmet was a bike light. When the other clone finds him in the crashed rover and his helmet light is flashing it looks like an emergency light but is actually just a setting on the cycle-lamp. You know the ones that flash and are intended to stop cyclists getting their fragile bones smashed to bits by stupid drivers in low light. Those ones.

There were lots of other normal lights all over the place, including our round Ikea eight-quid lights from the lounge. The lamps on the front of Gerty were little flurescent tubes that were only six inches long.

Duncan had one of these on his desk for years becasue it looked really cute and it actually got used for all sort of things we filmed over the years. At one point I was working on a little commercial for a friend of ours, Aaron Stewart-Ahn. I was dressed like a futuristic ghost-in-the-shell-on-zero-money-in-a-basement type scientist with these big goggles on. The light was inside the goggles making a slit on the front of them glow, and giving the appearance of me being very much from the future. Those lights get around. As we were dressing the set with stuff from home we grabbed it one morning on out way down to Shepperton as we were nearing the end of the model build and just trying to get things looking good for free wherever we could. It ended up just sitting in the production offices for a few days. When we were doing the reccee for the pre-light (walking around the set discussing how and where we were going to install all the lighting), Gary Shaw suggested gluing the light to the front of Gerty to make him stand out a bit. It totally worked so we managed to find another and thats why Gerty's got those lights on him. You'll notice they weren't in my CG design renders, nor in any pics of the model build. I think it's really important when you're doing things like this to be completely honest with yourself and take good ideas wherever you find them. In my role as designer I could have got all stroppy that somebody was trying to "interfere" with my design, but the Cheesy Loaf was right and I knew it. The lights made it look better on film. Nice job Reverend.

I know this pic isn't in the model shop but it does have one of the models in it and I wanted to introduce you to a few of the faces behind the models. I talk about Bill quite a bit as he was a key figure in the making of Moon and so here he is in all this Glaswegian glory leaning on the edge of our lunar surface miniature set. Bill is a very gregarious and charismatic man and is full of excellent stories about his life and times working on small, forgettable productions such as Alien. Bill's also a DJ and at the time where we were wrapping on Moon he was contemplating shutting up shop and returning to Scotland to his previous career in radio as nobody wanted models anymore. I remember telling him that we were going to do our best to bring them back and make them cool again as I knew that miniatures that had been fed through a contemporary VFX pipeline could look really good relatively cheaply. He's a busy chap right now.

I think that Bill was pretty cynical when he first met us as were were just a bunch of guys that nobody had ever heard of with zero money trying to do a space film here in Britain and to be honest it's not unreasonable at all of him to expect our ambitions little film to fall flat on its' Moon-shaped face. It took us a while but you could see as we were proceeding that he was starting to come round.

By the end of the project everything was pretty cosy and, speaking for myself, we had a stressful but enjoyable and pretty much controlled miniature shoot. It was quite funny when we started out working together and I mentioned how cool it would be to get in Cinefex magazine. This was more a general (lofty) ambition of mine, the same way I always wanted to get some comic art in 2000AD. Perhaps I should send some samples off to Tharg. Anyhow, Bill totally poo-pahed the mention of the magazine in relation to our film explaining that they only cover "proper" (as in proper budget) films, and we basically had no chance. I couldn't disagree with him really. However, when we got the film finished, Bill called up a couple of people and all of a sudden we've got Cinefex on the phone wanting to talk to us about Moon. Turned out they'd shoved us into an issue at the last minute and moved their other stuff around to fit us in. Apparently we nicked a few pages off Star Trek. Too bad JJ Abrams. Recently we did a Moon Q&A at the BFI on the Southbank in London to mark Moons' first theatrical anniversary. Afterwards we got a bit mobbed (which always takes me by suprise), and somebody asked me to sign their copy of Cinefex. It did occur to me that if I could have travelled back in time to my original conversation with Bill and told him this information he'd have laughed and told me to fuck right off.

In the background is modelmaker John Lee who's been working on the harvester model. You can see by the missing front-plate on the model that he's been inside it fiddling. The miniature set was really mucky, dustmasks and kneepades were pretty standard as there was a lot of cat litter sprinkled around the place and it hurts like a bastard when you go down on one knee onto a stray nodule, it's like some kind of lego-kneel super-pain. To be avoided.

Here we see Bill in his workshop working on Gerties' heavy-lifting arm. You might have read in my previous posts about the scary red heater with the exposed element that I was always terrified would set me on fire when I had my back to it. Check out the red glow on this pic. You can almost taste the danger. I secretly suspect that the model team liked having dangerous shit all over the place as it made them look like they were living on the edge all the time whenever anybody came to visit. Bill was one of those guys who tends to have trademark clothes and I don't think I ever saw him were anything apart from Denim. He's sort of like a Scottish cowboy but with massive knowledge of paint and glue. I loved talking to the model guys about their materials as there was so many combinations of glues, plastics and paints that worked differently and if they were put together wrong, who knows, they might give off a poisonous lethal nerve-type gas. I'm not actually joking about this. There's a whole science behind model construction that you won't find in any book and if you get it wrong you may die.

Here we see another of the modelmakers, mr Steve Howarth. Steve was the guy who built the Harvester model and also the main Gerty unit. In this picture we can see Duncan holding up the partially built rover model in the same scale as the harvester model. We built the miniatures at two main scales, one-sixth and one-twelfth.

These scales were really useful as they were immediately recognisable; Action Man and Star Wars figures. We built all three rovers at one-twelfth scale and also the harvester. We then built a single rover at one-sixth scale which had interchangable rear components and ID plates so that it could be dressed as either of the three. We also built a section of the lower-side of the harvester so we could do the rover post-crash with the nice sixth-scale rover smashed into the ground. The jamming tower was built complete at one-twelfth so we could crash the harvester into it and a close-up of the base section at one-sixth.

The jamming-tower base had some really nice detail in there that the model team put in and I'm not sure exactly how clear it came across in the film. The structure featured an airlock door identical to the locks inside Sarang, but it was harshly welded shut with a big bar across it to prevent access. You can also see a trashed door-code type box on the left-hand side that has had the face ripped off and has wires hanging out. Nice bits of detail going on here. Nice work lads.

The main Sarang base exterior was built at one-twelfth scale and there were a couple of other bits and pieces that had indeterminate scale as it just wasn't important as they were filmed in isolation and later composited into shots. These were the satellite and Eliza Rig models. Duncan became very attached to the Eliza rig and it disappeared for over a year when we wrapped. All the models got taken and put into storage and when we went to retrieve them it had gone. We searched around for months but couldn't find it. Then, one day, it just turned up in a random box. Perhaps a ghost moved it.

In these images above, you can see the twelfth-scale rovers in various stages of construction. You can see in the last image that the rover has wooden place-holder wheels on. Bit of a tip for any aspiring model builders out there; look at all the stuff lying around on these work-surfaces and take some tips. The rovers didn't have to do too much but they did need to be pulled quite fast over a rough surface over and over again so the wheels and axles needed to be incredibly tough. The twelfth-scale proportions and intended lunar gravity meant that we needed to shoot at 137 frames per-second. Given that film is 24 frames per second, the action would slow down by around five and a half times. So to get the rover speed we needed to pull it across the set at five to six times faster than we actually wanted it to look. So pretty fast actually. As the lunar surface was maximum 24 feet by 32 feet we ran out of table pretty fast.

I got such a kick out of seeing all these models being built at Star-Wars figure scale. When I was a puppy I used to love my Star Wars figures and ships. There's something just so right about the scale. Seeing these rovers come together so loyal to my CG concepts was amazing and the scale felt so right. I'm not sure if it was becasue I've spent so much of my life mesmerised by Star Wars toys but I used to annoy the shit out of the model builders becasue I couldn't help picking them up and playing with them. Sorry lads, but it's your own fault for doing such an amazing job. Make some shittier models and I'll leave them alone.

The gallery above shows build progress on the single sixth-scale "hero" rover. This is the main model featured in the film as it was the most detailed and we could get closer in when we were shooting.

The lunar landscape was pretty generic and typically filmed at a low angle so we didn't need to do anything with this, we could just swap the models out and go from big to small as we needed. We also mixed the scales on a few shots too which was a bit naughty but nobody seemed to notice, especially where we see a rover pulling up at the crash site. We'd put the large rover in front of the camera and keep nice and low and we totally got away with it. It looked really stupid from round the side though as the incorrect scales were immediately apparent.

I grew very fond of the sixth-scale rover and I ended up taking it home with me after the shoot. I really need to get round to making a nice case for it so it can sit with all the stuff in my office. The model team were amazing improvisers and Bill had a lot of bits and pieces to hand in his workshop. It would make me cringe a bit inside as he'd be grabbing stuff from his shelf and snapping things off to hold them against bits of models to show me what they'd look like. He had all sorts of excellent things lying around, some were famous models from shows such as Red Dwarf and others were just as beautiful but from unseen pilots or dead projects and so may never see the light of day. One afternoon Bill said he had something to show me and came out of his back room holding a black bin bag. He pulled out this model from the bag and handed it to me and asked me if I recognised it (which I did immediately). It was the miniature of the Nostromo engine room window from the wide shot of Ripley trying to set the self-destruct sequence from Alien. From my perspective this is pretty much what a churchy person would experience if a vicar said he's got the Ark of the Covenant down in his cellar and do you want to come and have a look? As amazing as this was, I did actually beat this when I got to play with Vasquez' smart gun from Aliens. Close-run thing though.

Part of the external base design was the "return vehicle" clone-incineration unit that was disguised as a rocket. John Lee from the model shop just turned up one morning with this beautiful thing.

Look at it. How gorgeous is that model? It's not been properly painted and dirtied down yet but look at the form. Scratch built overnight. This is what the exterior of the clone burning room looks like and it pains me a bit that we didn't get more coverage of it in the film as it's absolutely beautiful. The figure in there is a little Doctor Who man that Bill used for scale reference and was always lying around his studio, so technically David Tennant was kind of involved in Moon. At least a little tiny slightly plastic version of him was.

Have a watch of this and then I'll tell you what it is.

This is our lovely Production Assistant miss Ella Harris helping us out with a special effects test in the car park outside K Stage by the skip. It might look like we're just monkeying around with strap-on cocks but it was actually a test for a scene that we ended up cutting from the film.

As Sam starts felling apart we were originally going to make a bit more of this and there was a scene in the original shooting script where we saw him have a pee and some blood comes out. We actually shot this but it ended up not really working; the camera was above and behind Sam and you could just see the end of his winkie poking out as he does his secret boys thing. His pee flow was supposed to turn to blood causing him to freak out a bit and generally re-inforce the whole concept of him dying with some internal bleeding. Everybody likes a bit of internal bleeding.

In the run-up to shooting we weren't exactly clear on how we were going to do this as we had so much to deal with it seemed pretty low-priority until it suddenly rushed up from over the horizon towards our faces. Then, one afternoon, Duncan was digging around on the internet and he found this.

http://www.realwhizzinatorxxx.com/

The Whizzinator. Pretty special eh? It's a device sold by a US company and is intended to be used to defeat drug tests, the idea being you can literally pull your winkie out and do some wee right in front of somebody, no further questions your honour. It's essentially a strap-on rubber cock with a hollow pipe running through it that attaches to a pair of pants with a bag for pee and a tap to make it all go. It even comes with some dried urine in powder form. Isn't technology wonderful?

So we got some make-up on it to bring it to life a bit and hooked up a couple of bags so we could run some fake wee through it and switch to blood by flicking a tap. It didn't really look all that when we filmed it as the blood was pretty diluted and so you couldn't really see much of a change and it just looked like a visit to the little space-clones room.

Ella was brilliant fun to work with on Moon, she's got a bit of a potty mouth and it was always hilarious when she'd say rude stuff over the walkie talkies. Randomly, we'd just jump onto the public channel and do comedy dictionary definitions of the rudest things we could think of but make it sound like proper production chat. It was hilarious watching somebody working over the other side of the set with their walkie on their belt and this very straight-sounding comedy filth just come out of their radio as if they weren't concentrating they'd not even notice. The game became trying to say the rudest stuff and say it so straightly that nobody would actually notice. If you've not been on a film set before, quite a few people have walkie-talkies on them and they are usually worn on the belt. They tend to be on quite loud if there's no shooting in progress and so there's a constant chatter of radio talk going on around you all day. I can never help but press them into service for comedy value because I just think they're excellent fun.

Lunar Industries hope you enjoy your space-penis.