Solo

Short Film 'Solo'

Starring - Cameron Moore, Roxanne Ebrahimi, Peter Dykstra, Fiona Edgington.
Written, Directed and Produced By Lee O'Connor.
Cinematography and Sound By Grant Pollard.
Music By LOC.

I loved making Solo. It turned out a lot different and better than I had planned.
I wanted to stay away from the cliche of short film rules. From my observation, for a filmmaker to get the viewers attention it must be fast paced and full of action and drama with no real story content. For me anyone can achieve this, why not reverse that cycle.
With Solo I slowed things down, did little or few angles and cut to's and really wanted the dialogue to be heard. I feel some audiences for film now only pay attention when there is action or drama and not really listening to the dialogue. So with Solo I wanted the audience to really watch and listen and to be engulfed by what was happening to Hendrik.
I wanted the audience to be immediately drawn in by Hendrik's (lead character) claustrophobic conditions.
I felt it was important to capture all of Hendrik's emotions as he watched the video messages sent from home. In this occasion, I felt that if I did not show the messages to the audience this would then leave us with the question whether the people he was talking to were real or not?
In pre-production I thought a lot about the look of the film and the mission itself. Firstly, I found that NASA intend to send a vessel to Saturn's moon, Titan, but whether or not that the vessel will be manned is a different story. Secondly, I thought a lot about the anti gravity and low lighting. The low lighting is energy saving which is necessary for deep space exploration. Now, in the back story, it is mentioned by Mike in a scene that thanks to Hendrik's success on the ISS he has started a new age of space exploration. Although defying the laws of gravity is not directly mentioned, we assume this is Hendrik's accomplishment.

The real challenge for this project was time and money. We had none! I managed to get a small sum of money from a fundraising campaign. This was about £1000, but by the time we had given out the gifts and packages for those who donated, we only had about £500 spare. I utilised the funds best we could, spending over half of it on a simulator which we had only three hours to shoot. We were faced with a few difficulties, space being one of them and camera propping, so we decided to focus the a shot hitting Cameron (Hendrik) dead on to capture all his emotions. Time was tight but Cam nailed every scene.

Myself and Grant were the only crew members, Grant was on sound, light and camera and I was directing and script supervising.
I can safely say that I was in control of my own project, I had written the script, produced, directed, edited, built the sets, costumes, composed the music, scouted all the locations, etc. It's amazing what two crew members can get done.

I was so fortunate to work with such a talented bunch. I couldn't of asked for more from the actors. They were all understanding when things were slow, I would love to work with them again.
I can't thank Grant enough on this, without him none of this would have been possible. This is our second film together and certainly will not be the last. I owe him everything!