Latest / Exploring Humanity Through Sci-Fi / The Shipment — A Father's Last Cargo

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The Shipment — A Father's Last Cargo · Exploring Humanity Through Sci-Fi

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  A slave trader left that profession to haul cargo from one different planet to another,
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  but one job he desperately needs has a big price to pay.
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  This is exploring humanity through sci-fi. This continues my mission to get a better
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  understanding of ourselves through sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and comics as our mode of exploration.
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  The Tribeca Film Festival's 25th edition just ended recently.
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  Back when I was covering the festival, I sat down at the Roxy Hotel in New York City
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  with fan-favorite Alex Ponovic and his director Bobby Bala and more talk about their film
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  The Shipman that I talked about, where Alex plays that slave trader.
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  Sat down with director Bobby Bala, producers Arwen Fryer and Ana Carrizales, star Alex Ponovic,
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  director of photography Naeem Sutherland, who joined us later,
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  and makeup designer and artist Sarah Elizabeth.
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  Really what appeals to me is you can strip the sci-fi elements away. It's really
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  a movie about a father and his daughter, which is obviously relatable to anybody,
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  and your daughter is in the film. So talk about how the story kind of came together
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  when you were putting this film together. Yeah, so my first goal for my first film
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  was that I just basically wanted to make a film with my daughter. That was really the only
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  thing that I had in my mind. So I didn't have a story or script or anything like that.
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  I just thought that would be kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
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  And so she was nine or 10 when I started writing the script. So there was a small window of time
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  when otherwise she would be too old. So when we started shooting the film, she was basically right
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  at the, we just got it right under the wire. Otherwise she would have been, she actually,
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  even during the shoot, she had a little bit of an experience. So that was my first goal.
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  And then how I thought of the story was I was at a gas station and saw a big rig pulling to the
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  gas station. And I saw a big trucker get out and he helped his daughter out and the guests.
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  And I wondered if he was like a single dad. And so I just thought, well, how would that play out
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  if it happened, you know, somewhere else, like a galaxy far, far away, that whole kind of scenario.
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  So I just thought it would make a good story. And that was the kind of seed from the heart.
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  Did she do the paintings or is the paintings from Boston?
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  She did a couple of them, but no, we actually had an actual professional painter to paint those.
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  And, you know, it had to be done in a kind of a childlike way to look too professional.
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  More on the shipment in a moment.
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  Alex, I mean, you, you're obviously playing a dad.
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  What, what kind of struck you about him when you, when you started playing?
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  It was interesting because when we worked on it, we approached each other and then working with
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  his daughter and, and just kind of getting the relationship. I love the idea of
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  a morally and integrity is integrity is question conflicted man that, that is trying to do the
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  right thing through difficult circumstances. And I love the idea of, you know, where this character
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  would find these little moments, even though he's throughout all of his mission is to always do the
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  right thing and he falls short quite a bit. So I love that, that structure of, you know,
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  I get a lot of roles because of my stature. And so a lot of times when I can see the depth
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  in the character and I know I can, I can investigate it and do, do some literal critical
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  thinking and finding my own deficits and my own deficiencies and, and kind of putting that into
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  the character I find that's, you know, and for, for me as a performer, it opens up my rib cage,
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  shows my heart. And I, and I feel like those are the stories that I want to tell. And when I read
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  this, this was one of those stories. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the original Star Trek,
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  the best story is when Kurt had to make a moral decision. And this is obviously,
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  I mean, it goes against really who he is, but he's, you know, the road to hell is, you know,
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  usually based with good intentions and this is what's going on. So, you know, he's doing it for
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  his daughter, but he's kind of compromising who he is. Yeah. And then compromising the relationship
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  that he had with somebody that he loves so much. And that's why there's, you know, the moments that
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  he goes through when he's by himself and he can't really stay in his own skin. So he has to go to
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  other measures. And so that idea, it really struck me and I thought it was written beautifully and I
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  thought that the moments were beautifully done and, and then shooting it was just like, it was
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  one of those things where it was, it was about, about being a collaboration and that's another
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  thing that I absolutely love. So it worked. Some of the shots in the spaceship, especially in the
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  openings, even, even musically kind of reminded me a little bit of 2001. Is that obviously an
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  influence? Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. So I'm glad you picked up on that. Yeah, no, it was when I was
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  writing the script, it was funny. We just went to the Guillermo del Toro talk last night and he said
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  he would put headphones on when he would be writing the script or doing the sketches for storyboards.
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  And that's, that's what I did when I was writing the films, I would watch different films and
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  soundtracks from different movies and, and what I would see in my mind. So the sound, the music
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  really influenced a lot of what was seen on there. And then I, after writing the script, I created a
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  previs animation of what I was seeing. So that, that really helped in a lot of ways, just to see
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  if the shots were working and just to see if the story was working and just if that emotion was
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  coming through. So if you know that it works in previs, you know that it's going to work
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  on screen as well too. And I have to say that the music, the score is an original score done by
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  Crispin Hans and they brought in the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. So we had a live orchestra
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  and a live choir and Crispin Hans wrote one of the most beautiful pieces I've ever seen. I'll
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  tell you a quick story. So these guys invited me into the studio and when I walked in, just by
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  timing, they were doing the symphony thing to a green screen of the performance. So the film
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  wasn't completed. So they were just looking at it for reference for the scene that they want to do.
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  And I happened to walk in right when it was my scene playing, but they were just watching it.
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  There was no music and no joke. I'm watching it going, I fucking suck. This looks, that's
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  a terrible performance. What's going on? And then the music started. It was like, I'm awesome.
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  And I was like, I love music. It made me so much better. And that was one of those moments where
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  I thought the score was just absolutely stunning and beautiful. And so we have to give props out
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  to Crispin. Yeah, he was amazing. We were for months together just in the studio there.
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  From a producing standpoint, it looked like you had pretty big sound stages you had to work with.
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  So how did you kind of find the space? And I guess there was green screen involved too, right?
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  There was a little bit of green screen. Yeah, we rented out two warehouses in Vancouver that
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  Bobby ended up finding. And we just painted all the walls green. We built the soundstage.
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  I think we bought up all the green screen and chroma green paint in Vancouver,
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  trying to paint all of these walls. And it took about a month, probably, of painting.
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  Yeah, but it worked out in the end just because of the nature of the shots that Bobby wanted.
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  We just needed a really large space. Or two spaces.
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  Setting up the next set while we were finishing up this one.
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  And I wouldn't recommend that to you.
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  I was to look back and say, what were some of the mistakes that were made? That would be one of them.
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  I wouldn't. If I was to do it all over again, I would have rented out a proper green screen studio
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  and built all of our sets in a smaller warehouse and then transported them to
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  the proper green screen studio and just paid the daily rate there. Because
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  paying 20, 30 people on set at Union, that really adds up. And all the electrical and
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  everything that has to go up to set, that all costs so much. It would have been just
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  much more efficient and cheaper to do it that way. But you live and learn.
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  Makeup-wise, you had to design a few races for them.
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  So when Bobby and Arun approached me for the project, they actually had some character designs.
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  I think Bobby had spoken with someone who had some digital renderings made. So I had some
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  base to go off of and then we altered and adjusted as per physical restraints for actors.
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  One thing that was cool was the slave keeper character and the mechanic guy,
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  neither of them had any coloring or anything. Bobby didn't know exactly what he wanted,
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  so he let me play. That was really great that Bobby and everybody trusted me to come up with
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  some ideas and we did some tests and showed them some stuff. You were the longest hours.
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  You were like 4.30 that put on makeup for six hours. Those were not small makeups,
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  but they were fantastic. I mean in our scope it was interesting because our scope was so big when
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  we started and then we kind of pared it down and then we kind of went a little bit happy medium
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  between the two again. And some of that happened kind of real close to filming, so we just had to
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  kind of work with some of the things that we needed. And there were some wonderful creations
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  that she made that didn't make it into the film as opposed to keeping the story tight.
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  And so those were like torturous moments for me because I was like, oh my god, they look awesome.
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  I get it for the story, but she did a lot of work. Yeah, my team, I couldn't have done it
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  without my team. It was an amazing group of people and we actually ended up doing,
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  so we had four main characters, which was the mom, the dad, the slave keeper, and the mechanic,
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  but then we had three additional background characters that were fully created on the spot
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  looks. And then we actually had at one point had done four children, so there were a lot of aliens
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  and then unfortunately we didn't make them, but you know. More of my Tribeca interviews for the
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  shipment in a moment. I like the texture of the slaves, you know, they're like the lines and all
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  of that. Did you base it on anything or? Well, that was actually the one that we had more of
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  a full rendering, so Bobby had given me, I think it was a stage artist. Yeah, yeah,
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  Jonas Blomqvist. Yeah, so I don't know how, yeah. So yeah, it was based on his sketch and we got
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  permission from him to his design. Yeah. Were they like full creations? That one, so we actually,
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  we used the actors bodies a lot, which was fantastic. We created hands for all the characters,
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  feet for all the characters, and then we did what's called a cow, which is basically
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  shoulders, head and then some face pieces. So the blue aliens, mother, father, they actually
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  had the most restrictions because the, I mean, if you look at them, you can realize that the
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  eyes of the alien themselves are a good couple inches above where a human eye is. So they would
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  have to look through these little tiny holes and they definitely, they had some long, tough days,
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  but yeah, we did a lot of body painting and had about three artists on each person to get them
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  done and to get them to be comfortable. One of the things that I really admire about her
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  professionalism is that she assigned makeup people to these people so they could have a good time.
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  They could have all their needs because they're wearing these things for hours. It's a big task
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  to us. You really got to look at the idea of this is an indie. There's not a, this is that, that's
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  why like when being on set and being a part of this project, you know, and you know, starting
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  the fourth season of Van Helsing and having a whole team and a network, the work that they did
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  and the amount of time and the leadership, it was, it was fantastic. And you always got to keep
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  reminding them like this is an indie. Yeah. I mean, it's hard for people because when they see
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  the final product and they see the highest quality, they think that our set was running a, it was a
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  union shoot because people were hired from the union, but the way it was run, it was fully indie.
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  So it was a beautiful chaos of running around and getting things done and going from warehouse to
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  warehouse. It's a testament to, you know, we're all from Vancouver. Vancouver is a very, has a
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  very amazing indie scene and people wanting to get together and make projects. So it's a testament
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  to how Vancouver is run by indie filmmakers. And the talent. A film like this running an indie way
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  without the talent we have on set, it would have been impossible. Every single person was extremely
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  insanely talented. Well, and one thing that I think really was awesome is everyone believed in the
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  project and wanted to create this. And so we all worked together. And I think that's one of the
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  benefits of it being an indie instead of a full-on union was we could help each other out. So, you
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  know, if someone needed something moved, you could sort of help with it, or if, you know, you needed
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  help sewing a button on or something, you could help. And so it really made this a huge collaborative
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  thing. And that is so amazing and special. You know, one of the things I like, George Lucas did it
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  and Ridley Scott did it, was it was a lived in universe. And what I mean is the ship is not
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  pristine. Like in 2001, there's little dents here and there. Things don't always work. You might have
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  to kick something once in a while. Was that kind of an inspiration to make that kind of world? And
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  obviously the ship has problems as we see it. So, I mean, like a lot of other Star Wars fans, I was,
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  when I first saw like the Phantom Menace, you know, I was super excited about it. I think it was in
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  1999 or something. And when it came out, I was expecting something completely different, but
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  instead I saw all these like shiny ships and everything. I was expecting like this lived in
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  world that was really broken down and beat down. And so I wanted to create a film like this. And
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  when I started writing it, this was before the first Star Wars came out, the new Star Wars.
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  Yeah. So I felt there was this huge, a lot of fans and a lot of people that were hungry for
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  seeing that kind of world. But by the time I finished three Star Wars films had come out,
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  you know, so they, so, you know, they got a little bit of that. So they weren't as hungry,
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  I guess you could say for that. So, yeah, I wanted to make a film that was very gritty,
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  just a lived in world, just greasy. And that's the kind of, you know, I'm hoping this could
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  turn into a TV series or a feature film or something. So I even want to up that a little
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  bit more for that. The detail in the shipment, right? We talked about the shipment being a
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  character in the film, and it was really amazing to work with Bobby and the sound team, because
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  you're super picky with sound, how it sounds, the steps, how it sounded inside the shipment,
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  the fact that we needed to be very authentic about the broken sound of this, because in a way,
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  it was mirroring this broken man. So that relationship had to be sort of established.
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  From the very beginning, Bobby had a very clear vision of how he wanted
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  this universe to look and feel more than anything else. He wanted it to be broken and run down and
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  grimy and dirty, as if these people have been living here for thousands of years. I think the
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  original Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back in particular were our biggest points of reference
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  and how we wanted this just to feel for the audience. It was something familiar, kind of
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  broken, but lived in for sure. Right. There's one scene that resonates, there's no dialogue in the
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  scene, is when your character is looking in at the shipment and seeing them, and he's just,
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  you can see the wheels are turning inside of him, how he's conflicted. What was it like to
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  shoot that, and did you know you had, like you got it after the scene was over? Yeah, it was funny,
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  we never looked at dailies ever. The days are just so long, but I knew that when we were shooting,
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  and we usually did an average of about four or five takes, but their performance, Alex's
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  performances were so strong, and he just knew the character so well that I was just confident that
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  that's why we were able to just, it just went really well, because he just understood the
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  character, and you know, casting is just half of the movie, like we heard last night in the
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  interview, so yeah, no, it just, he just made my job as a first-time director so much, you know,
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  more, yeah, I don't know if easier is the word, but just more efficient, and he's just very
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  understanding and very patient, and knowing that this was my kind of first time, so we collaborate,
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  collaborated really well in that way. If we, if it was another actor that was like less patient, and
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  you know, it would have been like more stressful. I don't think people realize what an amazing job
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  Alex did. I mean, he's literally standing staring at nothing, and in front of a green screen, there's,
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  most actors at least get something to work with, and he's, there's 40, 50 crews staring at him,
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  and here he is trying to perform, and he's really got nothing to, nothing to work with, and it was
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  just a testament to his remarkable performance. We were talking last night, I think I was telling
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  you that Alex is a technical actor, is what I would call a technical actor. He got the role,
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  he gets the role down, that's what I observed. He understands what it is, he's done his emotional
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  digging, and then he's on set, where's the camera? Can you get a call sheet? Oh, we need to bring one
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  more. Get a call sheet for Alex, and Alex will look at the call sheet and would ask, is the master,
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  are you going to do a close-up? Where's the camera? So I think that that shows in the film,
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  he brought that technical aspect to his performance, and for us, it was really beautiful
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  to watch, because in, on green screen, that's a very important skill to have, and also he was
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  working with, with Ishana, who brings all that freshness, that is super fun with a first-time
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  actress, but also she was working with, with Alex, and Alex really helped her to connect with this
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  fantastic role, so it was, it's a beautiful collaboration to watch. There's just so many
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  things that could have went wrong, but it, somehow the stars were aligned and everything
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  kind of worked out, you know, like, especially working with Ishana as a first, her, her first
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  time on set, and Alex was super patient with, with her, and I really thank him for that.
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  Like, that kind of experience for me, and it's very simple, yeah, like, I do my script analysis,
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  you know, I do the work, but then, honestly, it's like, I'm six years old playing cowboys and
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  Indians, and I'm picturing, okay, we're doing this, we're doing that, like, it, it was, it was,
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  it really brought the, the childlike kind of enthusiasm out, and then on top of that, having
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  someone that hasn't done it before was really refreshing to me, because I would have loved
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  someone that was there for me, and so being able to gel and still keep the father-daughter
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  relationship tangible, and still, and I think that helped the, the father-daughter scenes,
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  is because off-camera, we would talk about the scenes, and I would help her, and
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  so it helped me just as much as it helped her. Her performance, there's something that resonated
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  with me, too, and where she's in the room painting, but you can feel that there's something
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  missing in her life that anybody asks, really, not just, you know, young folks, is this all there is
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  for me, isn't there anything more in my life, and that's, and I thought that resonated with me,
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  I could, I could feel it in that scene with her, that she was trying to find out who she was,
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  but is this all there is? Yeah, no, definitely, yeah, it's always nice to hear when, you know,
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  you try as a director to portray something and convey a certain emotion, and you know,
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  someone can pick up on that, that's great to hear. Yeah, I mean, I just wanted, that was part of the story,
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  that she, you know, she just wanted to go to school, like, that was her dream of, you know, being with
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  other kids, and playing with other kids, but she's just been on this ship her whole life, so, but then
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  she's also doesn't want her dad to be alone either, right, so she's kind of, she's also conflicted in a way, as well.
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  I remember when I first saw it, my first reaction was, the story's not over.
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  It's just, in a way, it's just beginning, really, so it's like, what happens next? Maybe pirates attack the ship,
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  and he gets loose, I don't know. What's really great is, and that's an amazing thing, but the characters,
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  like Omari Newton playing in the film, and Robert Mallet, the characters made, you can see that
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  there's a different life coming from that, so Omari played it so well, that you can almost see
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  where he came from, and see if, you know, the lead character will explore that, because it was such a
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  resonating character, and Robert, so I love the fact that there was these little pops of people
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  that you could actually think about, and follow their story also, and again, it's a testament to
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  the casting, and great performers. I mean, it's a short film, that's a lot for a 12-minute film,
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  to have all of that, all those layers in it, so that's, you know, that part of what resonated to me,
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  it didn't seem like it was rushed, it didn't seem like... 27 minutes. Yes, but it felt like 27, right?
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  It felt short, it felt right by. I thought it was 27 minutes. It really resonated, and I just, like I said earlier,
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  you just strip away the sci-fi element, it's just a father trying to do right for his daughter.
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  Yeah, and like George Lucas said, when he made Star Wars, it was about family, that's really what
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  Star Wars is about, it's not about lightsabers and all these battle sequences, that's the,
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  everything was just supplementary to the family story, and that's how I wanted to
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  portray this, too, the family story was first, and all the visual effects and everything, it's just secondary.
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  And I'm glad you picked up on the, it's a bit of an unsettling ending. Yeah. It's almost bittersweet.
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  Yes. We had an original writer who was pushing for the father and daughter to stay together at the
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  end, but we thought, no, that's not how we want them, we want the audience to feel
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  conflicted, that sometimes there are consequences to our decisions, if you're faced with a bad choice
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  and an even worse choice, you're still going to have to live with one of those bad choices,
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  and so I thought it was great that Bobby stuck with it and said, no, the father and daughter
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  have to get separated in the end. And we just became parents, we have a six-month-old, and one of the
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  things that we're understanding, that we did understand when he was in the story, is that as a
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  parent, you never win. There's no winning, you can do the best you can, but I mean, everything-
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  That's a prominent head shake right there. Oh, man.
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  Yeah, there is no such thing, but there is such thing as you do the best you can,
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  and if it's well portrayed and emotionally explored, then the audience recognizes that
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  and says, yeah, no, they're separated, but he did the best he could, and she will do the best she
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  can to make up for that. Well, congratulations. It's probably going to be the best adventure of
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  your life, I think. It is already started pretty fast and hard. It's an adventure. It's a marathon.
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  But then, what's that one? A father said to his kid, just when you're getting interesting,
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  you have to leave the house. But it's true, but it's just true. Oh, God, I just got a headache.
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  So, what's next? Obviously, Van Helsing, another season. Yeah, we got another season. I'm producing
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  a film while we're finishing up Van Helsing, so I'm going back and forth with that, and a big
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  project that I'm doing right now is opening up a multi-million dollar film studio in Winnipeg,
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  Manitoba, which is my hometown, and we're doing an educational facility along with a state-of-the-art
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  facility, so we're really excited about that. Oh, all right. Good for you, man. That's great.
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  What about it? Is it the sequel you're working on? No, right now, I'm just taking it easy,
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  just trying to recover from the show. I'm just enjoying my time off right now, but yeah,
• 24:44
  no, I've been starting to kind of dabble and think about what the next project could be. I'm just kind
• 24:50
  of leaf blowing in the wind, getting to see where it lands and whatever kind of happens, and so
• 24:55
  there seems to be a couple of opportunities, but nothing is finalized yet, but it's just the
• 25:02
  beginning of the festival, so hopefully, yeah. Any producing projects? Yeah, we're embarking on a
• 25:08
  feature film. It's a post-apocalyptic feature film, very different from, we're like ending
• 25:14
  the world here on this one, and we have another series that we're working on as well. We've got
• 25:21
  our pitch deck ready, got our first pilot script ready, so we're just looking to make the next
• 25:26
  move and see where it takes us. All their stories. Any interesting makeup coming up? I'm actually
• 25:31
  working with Alex on Rand Helsing. Oh, you are? Yeah, so I'm doing that. I build all the prosthetics
• 25:35
  for season four, and yeah, we'll see that. Wow, you do some good work on that too, that's for sure.
• 25:42
  Thank you very much. There's going to be some real fun stuff coming up. There always is,
• 25:47
  that's why it's Rand Helsing. Six hours being touched and poofed, and she's cracking jokes,
• 25:55
  smiling, so that's a good thing that I wanted to add. She's fun at four in the morning when she
• 26:01
  arrives, and then it's down from there. At 11 p.m., after being there all day, she still had
• 26:12
  that vibrant energy, and it was just so lovely. She was leading the entire team
• 26:18
  from the beginning of the day. This is our cinematographer, Naeem Chaudhary.
• 26:29
  Bobby, how are you? Nice to see you. Alex, good morning. Hey, guys. Tell me to come out and
• 26:35
  ask you what you love. Have a seat. So, since you're here, thank you for coming. For really
• 26:42
  both of you, what kind of color palette were you looking for? I think one thing that's really
• 26:46
  important for me is color contrast. I always want to find a cold color and a warm color that can
• 26:51
  complement one another, something that I think is just important to me. I do it quite a bit in my
• 26:57
  work, and we talked a lot about our influences for this movie, and I think Empire Strikes Back
• 27:04
  was something that came up early on. Yes. The color contrast that you talk about, they did that
• 27:13
  really well with the warm oranges and the cold blues and everything like that, but in color
• 27:19
  correction, in the end, we kind of went a little bit more towards a minority report,
• 27:28
  a little bit of a wash, would you call it? Yeah, we did a little bit of maybe a slight
• 27:34
  bleach bypass. I think what we did is we took our warm and cold color contrast base and kind of
• 27:42
  added bleakness. I think, you know, ultimately this movie was edited and
• 27:47
  so the performances and everything, it felt important, especially on the ship,
• 27:51
  to find a little more bleakness, a little more desperation, and a little more contrast between
• 27:58
  the ship and the end sequence, I think, is what we tried to dial out. Yeah, and what's also
• 28:04
  remarkable is how closely he shot it compared to the previous. If you watch the previous,
• 28:09
  it's actually fairly similar, and that was tough to do because Bobby had some pretty interesting
• 28:14
  shots, and we're like, oh, we're going to do this, but Naeem was still able to pull it off
• 28:18
  and take that vision on this animated sequence. And I think he could probably explain, he has
• 28:23
  definitely mixed emotions about previous, that it can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing for
• 28:28
  DOP. Yeah, I mean, one thing that was great about the previous in this movie is being able to
• 28:32
  participate, so I was actually hired in like fall 2014, is that right? Yeah. And we worked on
• 28:42
  generating a previous sequence, so we actually shot reference angles when we did the motion
• 28:50
  capture, which ended up as part of the previous, so it was a collaborative process all the way
• 28:54
  through. Yeah, it was great, great to be able to see it. I think it was really important for a
• 28:59
  movie that had few practical elements. Yeah, I think it's fair, any filmmaker, I think it's
• 29:04
  the sooner you can bring in your DOP into the process, the better, you know, as early as you
• 29:08
  can, then it's more of a collaborative process, because you're going to be working together, right,
• 29:13
  on the film, so then you get more aligned. So would you say, kind of a technical thing,
• 29:23
  but it used to be they would use more gels on set and stuff, now because of color correction,
• 29:29
  is that kind of a dying art a little bit? No, I, well, I think it's, I think it's probably up to
• 29:33
  the individual. I still use a lot of color on set, I still use glass filters in my camera,
• 29:38
  which people look at me funny when I go to the rental house and say, do you have this
• 29:42
  obscure filter, and they pull out a box and blow the dust off of it. For me, it's always both,
• 29:48
  I like generating an image in camera that's, you know, in line with what I want. You know,
• 29:55
  in this movie, for instance, we used vintage lenses, we used lenses that were made in the 1960s.
• 30:02
  You know, I couldn't use filtration in this movie because of the green screen, but I still wanted a
• 30:06
  little bit of a look in camera, and we did color, we did use colored lights and gels on the day,
• 30:12
  yeah. And he was pretty specific, because he, they imagined the world, they thought, okay,
• 30:17
  there's going to be a light up here, it's going to be a bit of a color, an orange color on their
• 30:21
  face, and there'll be a blue light over there, and we set that up all in camera just so it would
• 30:25
  be captured on the, on the faces of our performers as well, very specific. In fact, in fact, it wasn't
• 30:30
  one specific gel, the gaffer called it a cocktail, because it was a couple of different, you know,
• 30:35
  I couldn't find the exact one, so I combined a few different oranges, and then it was, you know,
• 30:40
  needed a little yellow in there, needed this, needed that, so it ended up being kind of three gels
• 30:43
  together. And even when I was creating the previous, that's one thing I could have done
• 30:48
  to even enhance it a little bit more, because we were, I didn't specifically set up lights
• 30:52
  and define the lights where they were going to be in the previous, but that's something that
• 30:57
  I could possibly do in the future that would help, because in a 3D,
• 31:02
  a 3D software package, you know exactly where you set up the lights, so you can actually
• 31:07
  reference that, and I think that would have helped even more.
• 31:11
  That's amazing. I mean, Previz has changed the industry so much.
• 31:14
  His Previz could have entered any short film festival. It was pretty great.
• 31:19
  After the, after this festival, what's the future for the film? Where is it going to be shown? Is it
• 31:25
  going to go to DVD or VOD? Yeah, that's a lot of, I think this festival is going to really
• 31:32
  determine kind of what happens, so like I said, there's a couple of different people we're talking
• 31:38
  to here already right now, and we'll see what happens, but it's great because there's four
• 31:41
  screenings, so there's four opportunities for people soon. Yeah, and the President's pre-screening
• 31:46
  is on Sunday, so we'll see what happens. Yeah, talk to Dust if you haven't already.
• 31:52
  They've already reached out to us. Yeah, they're really good about that. They do a lot of short
• 31:57
  films. They just reached out to me about a new one they just have out. That's good to know, thanks.
• 32:03
  Yeah, they're really good, and I actually had the President on my podcast talking about what they
• 32:08
  were trying to do, and they're fans. I mean, they're just fans. Yeah, we got that feeling
• 32:13
  from their emails that they, how excited they were for this. Yeah, they just reached out to me about
• 32:18
  a new one they just have out. That's good to know. Well, this is a really a little general
• 32:24
  movie that I really enjoy. Thank you. It really hit, because I'm a father. My daughter's not
• 32:30
  young anymore. She's 35, so she's an adult, but I mean, it brought me back a little bit,
• 32:37
  and the decisions you have to make, and I was a single dad for a while, so I kind of, you know,
• 32:42
  it was just, you know, I was just seeing her every other weekend, and you know, you try to parent
• 32:48
  that way. That's not easy, so I kind of related to what he was going through, obviously, and
• 32:53
  so that's an immense compliment. Thank you. No, it was, it was cool, but yeah, that's resonated
• 33:00
  with me, and the other stuff was, I just like, you built a really nice, cool little world,
• 33:06
  and that's why after it ended, I go, hey, I want to, what's going on? I want to see more.
• 33:11
  All right, well, thank you all.
• 33:18
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• 33:58
  This is Tony Talato. Thanks for listening.