Honorable Mention – “Beyond Polaris” (France)

Title: Beyond Polaris
Runtime: 5 min
Country: France
Director: Jawad El Houssine
Placement: Honorable Mention
Competition: December, 2017

Synopsis: They never seen the light of the sun, they never feel the wind on their skin, they never touch the grass on their hands… We call call them The Children of the Stars. They born on space and they never lived on planets…

The young Serah Alec is one of them.

After her brillante study as a mechatronic engineers in Aldebaran University in Saturne Orbite, Serah has been affected on the prestigious Jumper station called Vega-51 inside the large Magellanic cloud in orbit around a mining planets Reah.

The mechatronic engineers have to keep safe the jumper interstellar, a big portal able to transport military and civilian people in others station anywhere in the galaxy. For Serah be a mechatronic engineers is a boring job… Everyday you doing the same things… But she don’t have the choice. The Children of Stars can only work in the space because of gravity…

During a daily check Serah seen a strange unidentified object coming from the nebula and getting into Reah orbite.

The telemetric station didn’t saw it and record it… Surprised and embarrassed, Serah decide to launch the Exya security protocol.

Aware of the risk, Serah embarks on an adventure that is both fascinating and dangerous …

DIRECTOR Q&A

OR: What was the inspiration for your film?

JEH: Since my childhood, I’ve always been fascinated about the future and what are human beings going to be. I read a lot about Isaac Asimov and watched awesome series/movies like Stargate, Star Trek etc and imagined myself in these worlds. Sciences was a big part of inspiration for my story. I wanted to make an unique and true story to explain How the Human being will be in the 30th century using science fact as Christopher Nolan did for Interstellar. Before writing the main story, I make lot of research about biologies, physics, engineering, history. Each elements of the story was carefully studied as the main concept of Children of the Stars well explained with scientists fact in the wiki of my website. Politics was the second part of my inspiration. I tried to understand firstly why since the beginning of the time we always make war and in what purpose ? Well… Energy, oil, water, food all kind of precious raw materials! Human being try to survive in its own environment and it will be the same in 30th century. They try to find new exo-planets(settlements) with ressource for surviving in this deep and infinite universe.

OR: When did you conceive the idea for your film and how long did it take before it was realized?

JEH: I started to write some concept script for Beyond Polaris mid 2016 with the main idea of my story. After I learned a lot about what I was looking for, I wrote the main part of the scenario (Univers/science in 30th century/Politics/Sociology).Initially the script was written for an video game RPG but I realized it would be very difficult to develop a game around this kind of deep story and I wrote a second part for a 3D animation movie to introduce the main aspect of my story: The Children of the Stars. It took me around 6 month to write the scenario and everything about the character design of Serah Alec who are child of stars with a complexe background… It was absolutely not easy to develop and write this kind of scenario where everything should have a scientist fact… I received an huge help from the composer Paolo Farina who always corrected me and sent me pertinent feedback during ce process. Beyond Polaris was developed in two part. The first one, was developed end of 2016 until April 2017. It was the first format in 720p that we developed in 3D and after from May until end of December 2017 for the full HD format. In total we took one year to develop 5 min of Beyond Polaris in full CGI.

OR: What was the most challenging aspect of working in a short film format?

JEH: Beyond Polaris is my first short film. When I started to change the story into a screenplay from a video game to a shortfilm it was absolutely difficult to take the most important part for the movie because at my sigh every aspect was significant to tell. I also had to consider the time production for this shortfilm because I chose to make this movie in CGI so I had to develop an interesting part of the story and be carful do not choose something too complex to develop as a 3D Artist. 5 min was the best format and solution for Beyond Polaris.

OR: What was the most challenging aspect of your production?

JEH: Producing a 3D animation movie requiert a huge attention during the modeling process. As a small team we didn’t had the same budget as an AAA production. Calculate a 3D scene into a CGI animation(rendering process) can ask severals days or weeks for only few seconds of shooting. Most of AAA team make their render directly on special graphic calculator (super computer) they can save time and increase the scene quality. Of course as an amateur team production we don’t have the same tools and we use regular computers. As we could not make real time render we was obliged to wait days or weeks to see the final result and hope they will have no glitch render… Sometimes it was good and sometimes we got glitches and we had to restart again… We had lost lot of time and we could save this time to add new 3D scenes. It was really frustrating feelings…

OR: Do you have any advice for first-time filmmakers?

JEH: Well… I don’t have enough experience to advise new filmmakers, but one thing is certain if you want to start your own movie production you should be very patient and passionate ! If you are ready to produce a 3D animation movie my advice for you will be firstly to know the exact length of your production because thanks to this point you will be able to know how many 3D scenes you need to develop and can focus on details in each scenes. Of course you will need to have a good (excellente ?) computer to make all renders and be ready to cry sometimes lol.