Nerds of Paradise Productions
Movies: "Requiem for Earth"
"Requiem for Earth"
by Evan Rosky
Introduction
"Requiem for Earth" is a mostly narrated movie from the point of view of John who is the leader of a mission for a company called GenCom. He begins by dictating the history and nature of Piel Seisner's, a researcher and statistician, initiative to launch a spacecraft that would take a small fraction of humanity to another planet, Procyon 4, that was named New Earth.
John's crew were sent on this mission from New Earth to return to the original Earth to meet with their ancestors, but John and his crew find that Earth had been destroyed. They then follow a radio trace from Saturn's moon Titan and upon arriving find an information archive that had been set up by Seisner, who was then working at another company, who wanted to preserve the information about humanity that would be lost if the people on Earth did destroy themselves.
History
"Requiem for Earth" began as my 11th grade American Author Project on Isaac Asimov. This project consisted of 2 portions: a written portion and a visual presentation. I wrote a small short story in which I could convey information about Asimov while attempting to write within Asimov's style. For the visual, I made a movie where I basically read the written portion and slapped video on top of it. This video's quality, however, was not very high as I had an extremely limited amount of time to complete it.
Later my dad, David, and I modified the short story to get rid of the dull documentary part of it and add in a viable ending. "Requiem for Earth" is the result of the modifications and additions.
Production
More than half of this movie is 3d-Animation. This was mainly because I really enjoy 3d-Animation, and this is one of the ways that I could join two of my interests into one project. There is still some amount of live video, but most of the work was in creating the animations.
I am an adamant open source software user and I believe I am very fortunate in this right. I was fortunate to find a program called Blender 3d that is open source and allows me to create visual art that I otherwise would have to pay thousands of dollars for. Another program, Cinelerra, is another free, open source program that I have come to rely on for movie related tasks. Also Linux has been very important as it is the operating system that I use.
In addition to these softwares, I wrote MatteLab to handle the blue screen matting because any other solution either didn't work very well or cost a large sum of money. Please check it out.
Other softwares used include The Gimp, an image manipulation program similar to Adobe's Photoshop; Audacity, a sound editor/recorder; dvdauthor, a command-line program for writing dvds; OpenOffice.Org, an office program similar to (but better than) Micro$oft Office; dvgrab, A command-line program for recording video from an ieee1394 firewire port; and a small program that David has been writing called JDvd which is a frontend to dvdauthor.
Credits
Script Writers: Evan and Dave Rosky
Director: Evan Rosky
Producer: Evan Rosky
Modeler and Animator: Evan Rosky
Video Editor: Dave Rosky
Cameraman: Dave Rosky
Voice actors (in order of audio appearance):
John (Narrator) -- Matt Kronzer
Astronauts -- Tim Lamphier
Live Actors (in order of appearance):
Piel Seisner -- Mike Fischer
Kayani -- Stephanie Bayne
Laura Simon -- Emily Switzer
Governor Sorensen -- Michael Platte
John -- Matt Kronzer
Robert P. Herve -- Dan Herve
Extras (in order of appearance):
Random guy at MKRA -- Evan Rosky
Meeting Extra 1 -- Dave Rosky
Meeting Extra 2 -- Wendy Rosky
Venues (again in order of appearance):
Seisner's Study -- Mike Fischer's office.
Seisner at HT Tech -- Steve Levy's office.
Meeting Room -- National Semiconductor meeting room
Status
This project is basically over. I could improve everything, but I have already learned a lot from this and feel it is time to move on.
Images
Sorry, maybe some images soon.
This movie, "Requiem for Earth", is Copyright (C) 2005 of Evan Rosky.
Website by Evan. Last Update: 8-04-05.