DP Oliver Downey and Director Neil Oseman have just finished shooting a trailer for a feature called The Dark Side of the Earth. This will be a family fantasy adventure film set in 1914. "It's a credit to Neil's tenacious nature that the trailer was shot," acknowledges Ollie Downey. "That and the strength of the script, artwork and quality of the set," he added.
The plot of The Dark Side of the Earth hinges on the world stopping turning; the survivors live in perpetual sunlight but their water supply has run dry. They build an airship to travel to the other side of the Earth, which is in perpetual darkness, where they seek out Chronos, Old Father Time, to ask his aid in restoring the Earth's rotation.
Neil Oseman explains the 'look' they were trying to create. "We wanted two contrasting colour palettes for each side of the Earth, very warm earthy tones for the light side and colder blues, greens and purples for the dark side. The scene that we shot for the trailer was set up on the airship in transit between the two worlds so it's a little piece of the light side on the dark side. Ollie lit it with classic blue moonlight through the windows and we had the warmer interior lights because this room is where the lead character goes to feel safe."
Ollie Downey says that he used KODAK VISION2 200T 5217 film stock because he wanted to use the slowest finest-grain stock he could get away with on his necessarily limited lighting budget. "The nature of the project with its action sequences and puppets meant that visual effects and compositing would play a major role and it would be very post-heavy," he explains. "I'd like to thank Rob Garvie at Panavision who kindly supplied a Panaflex Platinum and Primo anamorphic lenses and Ole Mienert at Panalux who ensured that we had the lamps required to shoot 200T," he added.
"We used film rather than video," he continued "because of its exposure latitude, the texture in the blacks and because very simply we wanted it to look like a decent budget movie, not television."
The shoot took place just before Christmas in HDS Studios at Hayes on a set designed and built by Ian Tomlinson. Ollie acknowledges that Ian was responsible for "the wonderful artwork that attracted a lot of the cast and crew to the script in the first place."
Ollie concludes, "Neil and I firmly believe that the scale, style and nature of The Dark Side of the Earth make it pretty unique and we're hoping that the trailer will encourage someone to back it further."
For further details on this exciting project, please see the website at www.darksideoftheearth.com
