I Built a Spaceship!

So after the epically long Heavenquest saga of making a low budget feature, I felt ready to keep creating. I decided upon a sci fi short, my favorite genre!

Mike Tang, a writer in LA, and I crafted a little story called "Arbitrium" which takes place on a small spacecraft. So because I'm insane and ambitious, I decided to build one! It took 6 weeks and about $800. I set it up in a friend's small airplane hangar and we shot the film in 3 days. This also included a couple other locations but predominantly in the built set. The set was made mostly of 1x3's and masonite. I then painted it a matte blackish blue and finished it by drybrushing metallics. My dad helped me with some of the pipe work and panels. I love gritty detail, so I added stickers, working screens, cargo, doohickys and thingys, etc...

Below is a screengrab from the short. (Slightly color graded)

Even though I do some VFX work, I really wanted to do rear projection for the front window, so after some YouTube research, I built a PVC frame, and used a frosted shower curtain as a screen. Borrowed a friend's projector and viola' it worked really well! It literally felt like a Disney ride!

I found some moving space graphics, again on YouTube, and projected from about 12 feet in front of the ship.

Everything else you see in this set was CRAZY cheap. The most expensive was probably the front control panel. It had all sorts of old switches, buttons, and some working screens.

I used two old Amazon Fire 7 tablets (that really sucked) and an old computer monitor to get the desired look. If you look too long and hard you can tell things are wood, but for that budget and the time I had, it worked. I did almost all this myself in my garage on really hot days! My dad did help with the finish work as he's a pretty skilled woodworker.

I then built "Story" graphics to propel the narrative. Since the actors gain more information as the story goes on, I created about 9 custom and animated graphics. You can see these on my YouTube Channel "Matt Bilen Films."

Here is another shot of the old train shoot day. This was shot on a 1959 Chicago Metro car at a nearby museum. We used green screen to allow for compositing of backgrounds later on. This is a quick comp I did but gives the general idea of what it will look like.

The Tech Stuff...

We shot the film on a Black Magic Pocket Cinema Cam 4K with a Metabones speed booster and couple Canon L lenses. We didn't have to, but my DP, Randy, really wanted to try it to see what it could do. It wasn't the most ergonomic camera, and Randy is 6'9" with big hands, but he made it work and did a great job! We recorded ProRes HQ, 4K. We used a Tascam DR60D to record, Sennheiser Lapels and shotgun mic for audio, and we had a nice contingent of professional lighting due to our gaffer (lighting tech), Kevin, who is a professional photographer and had the goods. (I will say I used under cabinet lighting for the main ship lighting, but it wasn't dimmable, so we had to mess with that a lot.)

Total budget as of now on this film is about $1100 with food and coffee. I was able to get some friends in LA (who are sitting around due to the pandemic) to help me out which is so amazing! Professional editing, sound design, and score. It will make all the difference.

Thanks for reading! Don't let pandemics, logistics, or know-how stop you. Go create something!