The Final Dreams of the Station Perithea

Aim

Our project is a Science Fiction short-film. Our aim is to craft a story with big blockbuster ideas and visuals in a much smaller medium.

The Story:

Our film follows the crew of the space-station and listening outpost, 'Perithea'. Prior to the film’s start, the station has been catastrophically damaged in a devastating meteor shower leaving the ship beyond repair. 

With their communication systems destroyed and oxygen reserves dwindling, the crew decide to accept their fate and channel all remaining power into the station’s ‘Dream-Deck’, and advanced V.R. recreation platform, in search of one last lease of life before their inevitable end.

The crew then take it in turns to live out their wildest dreams, most cherished memories and darkest fantasies. A death-row meal for the senses. However, through these choices, the crew will soon learn far more about the friends they thought they knew than they could ever have possible imagined.

The Journey So Far:

This film has has been in development for a long time. Back in 2021, we first spoke about collaborating on a Sci-Fi project which Al had outlined the structure of and had begun to write. We would then swap ideas back and forth about how to put meat on the bones, then Al would go away and write some more.

Fast forward to August 2023, and we decided to film the first three pages as a no-budget proof-of-concept, we've come to call, 'The Prologue'. Costumes were made, Mission-Patches designed and industrially sewn, then actors and make-up artists brought on board (the Prologue can be viewed at the end of our pitch video above).

Then in March of this year, we launched our main crowd-fund campaign. We raised over £5,000 and - in July - we entered production on the first half of the film which captured two of the three remaining crews Dream-Deck sequences. In October, the team will reconvene to re-film the above Prologue with industry standard cameras, and to film all of the interior Perithea scenes (we'll be filming in old World War II tunnels, which - in a year - will be turned into an underground museum making our short one of the last productions to capture them in their original state). Below you can see the first official still from our July filming.

The Practical Model:

To follow in the footsteps of the TV shows and Science Fiction films which fostered our love of Sci-Fi when we were young, we knew we had to do things properly. As such, when it came to deciding how best to film the exterior shots of the Perithea station, we decided it wouldn't be CGI but will, in fact, be achieved by making - and then filming - a practical model. This has been under construction for the past year and is the work of Glaswegian artist and graphic designer, Alistair Quietsch, aided by Dave Graham and Neil Smith under the banner of ISM (Industrial Shite & Magic). You can see the progress of the build as well as interview with Alistair below. It's been an enormous process and we're immensely grateful to Alistair, Neil, and Graham for their hard work.

Watch the video here - MODEL BUILD VIDEO

Why the Second Campaign?

Since our first crowd-fund closed, news of the project has spread as pre-production and then filming got under way proper. As a result (and much to our surprise) we've been approached by several individuals asking if there's any way they can still donate to the project. This then led to us thinking that there may be others who missed out on donating the first time around and this has now led to us opening this Kickstarter. It's for for a much smaller amount, but we wanted to do it formally under the banner of a crowdfund so that those remaining individuals who do want to back our short can donate in the knowledge that their money is being stored and handled securely and not just going into a random bank account.

These additional funds will all go back into the production in some way: allowing for one extra hair and make-up artist for the October shoot, funding the cost of renting the green screen studio to film the practical model in, or something as simple as paying for cast and crew lunches in October. Every pound, euro, or dollar donated to this Kickstarter will be used to either bring that extra level of quality to the finished film or to look after our phenomenal cast and crew.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made