Magic Craft

When vacation starship MAGIC CRAFT is lost in deep space, can a tourist and her plant friend find their way home?

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Length7 mins. 43 sec.

DirectorAngela Seehagen

GenreExperimental

Video

Pitch video

Synopsis

Tea spends another day as a space tourist aboard the Magic Craft vacation starship. She quit her job and spent her savings, eager to take this trip and be the ‘captain’ of her own adventure. Unfortunately, the auto-pilot-controlled space vacation is dreadfully boring and she's counting down days to her return to over-populated Earth. Suddenly, the ship warns of an object in the flight path. Tea disables auto-pilot, but the aged system and her inexperience leads to collision. Luckily, it's with a small, mysterious object only found in textbooks: a plant. After retrieving it, she learns that it's the last living specimen and plans to put it back in space, but Magic Craft enters a wormhole! Now hopelessly lost, the terrified Tea must find a way home, and a safe place for her new friend.

The team

Our lovely dream team is ready to scheme up some powerful plans to make films quite supreme.

Angela SeehagenDirector, Editor, Writer, Producer

Cody KennedyProducer, Motion Graphics

Tim RutherfordProduction Design

Production Design

In later episodes we plan to build and explore planet surfaces using the same greenscreen and digital techniques as we use with miniature models. Here is a rough example of a greenscreen shot composited onto a virtual 3D planet environment.

With imagination and some wicked post production skills, our team can create beautiful galaxies for the Magic Craft to travel through. Here is a shot from our 2015 test footage of the Magic Craft flying towards the screen.

Part of the charm of the Magic Craft cockpit will be the small size. Designing a small space will challenge us to ensure each wall shows visual interest and fun angles. Here is a snapshot of an initial creative cockpit sketche from a side POV.

We aim to create a stark contrast between the vastly open galaxy and the claustrophobically small ship interior. Here is a shot from our 2015 test footage showing the Magic Craft travelling through space.

A large portion of the film will be shot within the Magic Craft cockpit, which means we can spend a lot of time creatively determining a design that will best reflect the ship's character and, of course, be functional. Shown here is a snapshot of initial creative cockpit sketches from the top and rear POV.

Practical DIY lighting will be incorporated in the design of the Magic Craft cockpit. This makes for quicker shooting, freedom of camera angles, and lots of fun looks. Here is an example of the lighting on the test footage console. While this console no longer exists, we will be constructing one with a similar feel.

Miniature model construction provides us with an affordable way to travel through outer space. Focusing on small details and creative paintwork, our expert miniatures crew builds lifelike models to shoot on greenscreen. Here is a picture of our Magic Craft test model being 'antiqued' with white paint.