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Complete with Martian women, flying saucers and a typical 1950s doomsday weapon story line, everyone agrees: Destination Mars has the exact look and feel of an actual 1950s movie. Billed as a lost film that has recently been recovered and restored, Destination Mars opens with an ingenious mocumentary detailing the bizarre history of the film and explaining why Destination Mars was the only film ever seized and suppressed by the U.S. government.
While this ambitious project looks exactly like a multi-million dollar feature film, in reality it was made for half the budget of Blair Witch using digital video. People are astounded by the final results, said Director Richard Lowry who directed two Omega Entertainment films Hawk Jones and Jessica: A Ghost Story in the early 1990s. This film bears no resemblance to a shaky-cam, documentary style project. It?s an entirely different beast altogether a digital video that no one so far can tell apart from a feature film. continued Lowry.
Probably the single most amazing aspect of Destination Mars is that this film was not created by an army of special effects artists with years of training. In fact, Destination Mars, which includes over 260 visual effects shots, was created by just three people in seven months using consumer-level personal home computers and software such as Adobe After Effects, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere.
From Pool to Premiere
The film?s primary visual effects artist and writer, Tor Lowry, was a professional pool player for seven years before deciding to make a movie with his brother, Richard, and Producer Christopher Patton. Before Destination Mars, Tor Lowry had never used a computer in his life, yet within three months, he had mastered Adobe After Effects, Photoshop and Premiere. It all started because we needed a promotional poster, so I thought I would try Photoshop, said Tor Lowry. I learned Photoshop and then After Effects and Premiere were easy. Adobe software really is that user-friendly it turned out to be our answer for creating the complicated visual effects we needed for the film while keeping the budget under $10,000. Related Sites: Creative Mac , Digital Producer , Digital Video Editing , Digital Webcast , IBC News , Digital Animators , Animation Artist , Siggraph News , BN - Broadcast Newsroom , Digital Post Production , HD Issues , Oceania , MacAnimationPro , MacVideoPro
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Source:Digital Media Online.
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