50's Sci-Fi

I have a soft spot for the science fiction films of the 1950s—specifically The Blob and Forbidden Planet. The Atomic Bride From Beyond was our homage to this era of atomic horror.

The idea was simple, an invasion begins with an alien intelligence controlling the bodies of recently-deceased humans. Okay, not entirely original. There's a little "Plan 9 From Outer Space" in the plot, but the premise was enough to show how an invasion begins on a very small scale. What does it look like inside the home of just one man? From there, we can imagine similar scenarios playing out in every home, in every city all across the globe.

I decided to shoot this one myself. Black and white is all about contrast, so I spent some time in pre-production testing mist filters, building a monitor LUT, and even conducting makeup tests with our key makeup artist, Delia.

I knew I wanted to see the classic "War of The World's" style tripods so I built one in Cinema 4D, used an IK rig for the legs, and tested tracking it into a shot on the road in front of our house.

The Martian leader started as a robotic model, but filming was delayed so I spent some time using the sculpt tools to create a Martian visage. I also sculpted a physical one from clay, but creating the negative mold was too big a task for the project so I abandoned it.

The mouth was then pinned to the 3D model using Mocha inside After Effects. Once the Martian comped into the television set with static interference, the effect was done.

I would have liked to exhibit this film more. We did show the film at Ancient City Comic Con at the after hours short film festival. A couple minor gripes aside, we accomplished what we set out to do and no one else (at least in our region) had taken a serious shot at 50's era science-fiction. Most tend to play it for camp, but hopefully our sincere appreciation for the era is apparent in the final film.