Animated Sci-Fi Short Film
Budget: $6,000 ($336 LTX Studio, $400 Song Licensing, $1,000 Animator, $1,500 Editor, $1,500 Sound Editor, $1,264 Mainsheet Production, LLC business costs – song licensing if short film is sold)
Logline:
Working with a skeleton crew, the Meni Military are vastly outnumbered as their enemy, the Trethorians, approach in their spaceships, the Meni’s only hope of living is to wait until they can fight the Trethorians hand to hand and see who the victor will be.
Plot:
As the skeleton crew of the Meni Military orbit the planet of Neimai in their military space station, they can see the approaching Trethorians, their hated enemy, grow closer knowing that the Meni’s weapon’s system is no match for the Trethorians’ superior weapons technology. Lieutenant Commander Jaa Pavan warns Commander Rmaar Otan about the approaching ships. Commander Otan recommends trying to cause as much damage as possible to the enemy ships after hearing from Ensign Anei luTex that the Trethorians’ weapons are thermal rays. The Meni are able to destroy one spaceship but have no hope of destroying the others and their only option is to wait until the Trethorians board the Meni Military Station and try to fight them in hand-to-hand combat.
Lost in thought about the pending battle, the Meni wait and gather the courage to fight a hopeless battle, as the Trethorians board the Military space station. The Meni shoot the Trethorian subordinates with laser guns and race down the corridors to find the leaders, the dreaded uuKans who can only be killed with a sword. Lieutenant Jaa falls down as he’s searching for the uuKans, then fixes his sword so he can continue the search. In a moment of bravado, uuKan Denarius claims that power is theirs. As the Meni go to fight the uuKans, they find that the uuKans refuse to fight. Thinking incorrectly that the Meni have won, they hold watch over the uuKans until reinforcements can come to help the Meni.
The uuKans have a trick up their sleeves and they attack the minds of the Meni making it difficult for them to think. Then the uuKans and the Meni fight with swords in a final battle to see who will win in victory. The Meni fight valiantly but are no match for the uuKans. After a battle, the High Leader uuKan Kahnai tells the greatest Meni warrior, Lieutenant Tennai Udai, that it’s over and now Lieutenant Udai must yield to uuKan Kahnai. Lieutenant Udai refuses and the fight continues, but the Meni appear to be defeated. Just as Lieutenant Commander Jaa lifts his sword, the audience is left to wonder if the Meni will be able to win in the end.
Background:
This little film has taken on a life of its own. Originally it started out as an experiment to test out a new feature in LTX Studio where you write a screenplay and see what AI generates.
This is the original story concept for “The Meni Military Station in Neimai.” After entering this into LTX Studio, the AI generation created images which I used to create the middle third of the movie. The irony was that I needed to go back to the drawing board regarding story concept because the AI generation was nowhere near what I had scripted. Sorry folks! You can’t just cut paste into an AI generation program and expect it to produce a movie all on its own based upon the screenplay.
The next stage was to download the clips into Microsoft Clipchamp. I stopped working on the program when I ran into issues with copyright with the song “Violent Delights” by Cody Martin and Lucasfilms was not as excited as I was to have it be a Star Wars Fan film (they said, “no”). Unfortunately, it was too different to be considered a fan film.
The problem was that I had extra footage that I had generated with the fight scenes (the final third of the film) that I wanted to see what I could with it. So, I decided to put it all together, just for my own fun.
Then I entered into a writing contest on Filmfreeway and saw there were film festivals for AI. And I knew I had to finish it. So, a Zoom call later with Soundstripe to find out how much I needed to pay for the rights to use “Violent Delights” by Cody Martin in my short film and I’m in the process of submitting my film to the Artificial Intelligence Media Festival (AIMF) in Los Angeles, CA.
But I had to show my film to my Mother first and her comment was, “I don’t understand what is going on. But that’s not my type of film.” Hence, I created the first portion of the film, obviously, set up the storyline. I can’t believe I forgot it. The funny thing was that I started generating new images and I ended up with a completely random new character, that is absolutely amazing but does not fit with Meni at all.
With a completed short film, I entered it into the LA Independent Film Awards, the AI International Film Festival and that’s when it happened. I saw that the AI International Film Festival is Oscar qualifying, and I thought, oh yeah, I need to do more of that. Raindance Film Festival was next because it qualifies for the Oscar, BAFTA, and the Canadian Screen Awards.
And then I submitted my short film to Cannes, the Festival de Cannes (Palm d’Or) and I had to withdraw from the LA Independent Film Awards and the AI International Film Festival because the film would potentially premiere prior to Cannes and my animated short film would no longer qualify.
Luckily, I will submit it to the AI International Film Festival later in the year.
