WANDERERS - Discarded Scenes

These are a selection of 4 shots that I made for and subsequently discarded from my short film "Wanderers", which can be seen in full here: https://vimeo.com/108650530



Please note that these shots are all more or less incomplete and not color graded - which makes them look quite different in quality from the finished film.



For detailed descriptions of the shots, please read below:



1. MERCURY SUNRISE

This shot is a time lapse sequence of the Sun rising over the plains of a crater floor on Mercury, with the camera sequentially decreasing it's exposure time as the light dramatically increases. A procession of trains are transporting people to safety in the shade.

Mercury is the planet closest to the Sun, orbiting at an average distance of about 58 million kilometers. While Mercury does have a quite significant magnetic field, exposure to Solar radiation on its surface would be highly lethal for a human, and anyone visiting there would be wise to stay in the shade, if not only to stay out of the scorching daytime temperatures reaching above 400 degrees Celsius at the equator. Staying in the shade would however be quite easy on Mercury as it rotates very slowly, a full day on Mercury being equal to a little more than 58 days on Earth. This means you could actually walk away from the sunrise (which is, again, highly recommended).

As with so many other scenes in "Wanderers", inspiration for this comes from author Kim Stanley Robinson. While somewhat different from what I made here, he has written about some fantastic concepts about humans on Mercury, both in his novels "Blue Mars" and - even more elaborate - in "2312".

The reason for discarding this shot is simply that I never got it quite finished and wasn't too happy about the smaller landscape details nor many aspects about the appearance of the Sun, which is still very temporary here (based on a sequence of photos by NASA/GSFC's Solar Dynamics Observatory). At the time I got around to be working with this again, I felt that I didn't really need this shot in the film (guess it was some inner laziness that did part of the arguing there).



2. ALTERNATE RINGSURF

This is an additional shot to the Ringsurf scene that ended up in the final version of the film. Here we are looking straight "down" at the plane of the rings from a close distance, with two people floating some 20 or so meters above it.

Originally this scene was going to be two shots, starting with this one, but I found they didn't go very well together and that the other shot worked fine by itself. On their own, I think each shot looks nice, but since I eventually only needed one, and this didn't have Saturn in it, this is the one I decided to discard.

This is also from quite early in the process, before I had shot any live action footage, so the people here are done in CG. When I eventually shot the live action elements I decided to only use one person in the second shot.



3. PALE BLUE DOT

This is the shot I originally planned on ending the film with. It is a digital recreation of this famous photo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot) from Voyager 1, taken in 1990, looking back at the Earth from beyond the orbit of Neptune, at a distance of about 6 billion kilometers.

I was very happy with this shot - it was a tedious process of getting all of those diffuse lens artifacts to match the shape and color of the original photo, and also to get them to move in a satisfying way. So, it was quite a mental effort to decide to discard it. However, I knew perfectly well that no one would care the least of whatever amount of work I had put into it, or even notice it, and that a human face would be a much more satisfying way to end the film. Also, this shot doesn't mean very much to anyone not familiar with the original photo. I am happy to be able to show it off here by itself though.



4. ALTERNATE IAPETUS RIDGE

This is the same environment from the scene in the film, but seen from a somewhat different perspective. The idea here is a shot taken from a camera mounted on a rocket taking off from Iapetus' surface. I think it turned out pretty OK by itself, but when I put it in the film I found this shaky motion too aggressive and that the scene lost some sense of scale with this rapid ascent, so I went for a more slowly moving shot in the final film.