About A Lonely Sky
So how do I make a film about a bunch of test pilots in the desert in 1947, and show them drinking and flying and drinking some more? Ireland's not really known for it's great deserts, oh and I don't really have any money to make it either. Nothing to worry about there. Honestly.
I wrote the screenplay for this short in October of 2002, as an entry for a scheme the Irish Film Board runs called 'Short Cuts'. It wasn't selected. There's not a hell of a lot about it that's 'Irish' really, it being set in the Mojave desert in California. I guess the fact that it had aerial shots, and stuff that isn't really in a lot of short films, made it look like it would be too expensive and difficult to make. (Actually in the beginning there was only about 5 or 6 effects shots). I created a few test shots with CGI and felt that when it came to the real thing that I would be able to carry it off. So I decided I'd just make it myself (a background in CGI helped a bit).
Before doing this I produced a short film for a friend of mine, Ruairi Robinson, called 'The Leveller' which has recently been completed as 'The Silent City'. This was great for seeing what it was like to make films with no money at all!
In February of 2005 I saw a photo of Keir Dullea (2001, A Space Odyssey) on the cover of a magazine here in Ireland. He looked exactly like what I had in mind for the key role of the Older man in the film, and what good luck, he was here for a few months in a production of Ira Levin's 'Deathtrap'. I sent him the script, he accepted the part and so now all I had to do was make the film.
I felt that directing the film and trying to produce it on my own at the same time was a bit too much especially as there was no money to make it, so I asked Seamus Byrne, who I work with on commercials to co-produce with me. Having directed commercials and promos over a few years helped me to get a really great crew of people to work with.
The film was shot on a stage in Ardmore Studio's, Ireland, over three days. We shot on 35mm. A set was constructed for the bar, and a small section of the X-plane was constructed and shot against a blue screen. All other elements were created with computer madness. The Boeing B29 mothership, the Bell X1 rocket plane and the Lockheed P-80 Shooting star were all built within the computer as were the environments that they fly in. Given that there was no real way to fly and shoot these planes the only route I could take was this.
Before I shot the film, I paid a quick visit to California, where I took a comprehensive set of photos of a B29 at March Field Air Force museum in Riverside (where I was made very welcome by the staff of the museum). I also took some photos up at El Mirage dry lake, which looks pretty much like Edwards Air Force base, which is pretty impossible to get near (especially being a non-american citizen). I was even chased out of a roadhouse style establishment by a shotgun wielding lunatic for taking a shot of the exterior as I got out of my car. I didn't stick around for coffee.
The locals around there seem pretty savvy to film production, because after the first incident, I took to asking permission before taking any photos, which was generally responded to with a request for a $100 deposit!(for what, I'm still not sure). After all this, I just resorted to winding down the passenger window and taking photos as I drove by place (kinda like a drive-by-shooting, but without the death element)
The result was several rolls of film (my pre-digital SLR days, ahhh) of desert panoramas, scrub brushes, joshua trees, cracked mud of the dry lakes, vast empty skies and the odd pick up truck which I thought may be tailing me because I photographed their front porch (hey, I've seen Steven Spielberg's 'Duel'!).
Having been there helped (it is pretty damn bright(and windy too)). I could explain to the actors (who with the exception of Keir Dullea were Irish) what the place was like, and could even give them grains of sand that were and still are ingrained in all the cameras/phones/various equipment I had with me.
I really wrecked Production Designer Paki Smith's head when we working out how to make the bar. He initially came back to me with drawings for a bar, which had the windows boarded up, with only cracks leaking light through. This was primarily a budgetary thing, being that there was no budget, how the hell could we show anything outside. Now, having just come back from the High desert and remembering what it was like I was pretty insistent that I needed to see the desert outside. Given that if you were in an interior on location and shot out towards the windows, it would pretty much blow out to white. I stitched together a few photo's of the desert and Paki painted an 80 foot wide by 20 foot high backdrop, all by himself. I think it nearly killed him, but in the end it worked great, and through the camera it was very convincing.
We Built the cockpit area of the X1 aircraft, which was rocked manually, to provide a rough flight. For components, I got a load of old wiring looms and pipes from a scrapyard and gave them to Paki and Bobby McGlynn (who assisted Paki). They placed them and painted it all up and turned it into a piece of aviation hardware. The cockpit panel was made up of real aircraft components, most of which were borrowed instruments. The Rocket switches panel was fictitious. Bobby fashioned a joystick out of a length of scaffold tube, some gaffer tape and a few wires. Nice.
The post production process of creating the aerial sequences, started with creating 'animatics' (animated storyboards), which showed the movement and timing of each shot. I cut these into the edit of the entire film, and this was the basis of all the work that was to follow. I started by building the X1 plane, which was the simplest of the aircraft, followed by the B29 and P80.
For the technically inclined, I used Softimage XSI for the entire 3D process. I did some tests with Ruairi at one point in 3DS Max, because it has a really fast and good rendering software (VRAY), and these looked great. Problem was, I would have to learn how to use 3DSMax (which I wasn't inclined to do!) or get him to do all the effects (which he wasn't available to do!). I stuck with the devil I knew and did it all with XSI and Mental Ray (which IS good, but not nearly as fast). Cut to several months later.... I have a little less hair, certainly a lot paler, (maybe it's the screens?).
All the aerial/external shots were computer generated. The planes were modelled up with subdivision surfaces (polygon modelling). I painted up textures in photoshop from a mixture of photographs that I took of a real B29 and other aircraft. The effects were created with multiple passes, each shot required slightly different approaches, some more simple than others. Here is an example breakdown of the Boeing B29 taking off with the X1 underneath.
The background and mountains were created by using terrain generation software to form the basic shapes which I used to start matte paintings with photos of real mountains and desert plains that I photographed. These were either mapped onto simple 3D geometry or composited as background plates. They were very high resolution images (up to 15,000 pixels Square).
There are over 80 shots in the film which were effects shots, some 60 which were completely CGI, totalling approximately 5 minutes. For some of the bar scenes I placed glasses in hands, put moves in shots and enhanced the 'glow' of the light through the windows. The entire film was written out at 1920x1080 and scanned back to film for a scope print for projection. Looking back now, I'm kinda glad that I did all the effects myself, but at the time I'm not so sure that was the case!
The film was first shown at the Cork film festival in October 2006, where it was in competition, and will be submitted into other international festivals.