MyState Film Festival: VOID

I briefly mentioned the MyState Film Festival in my last post, and here’s the official follow-up.

This year MyState Financial ran its student film festival again, I do believe it’s their 10th consecutive festival so far, but I could be wrong about that. Anyways, this year I started work on my entry, starting on it a bit later in the year than I should have.

Before you read any further in this post, I suggest you actually watch it, that way I won’t tell you anything about the story that will ruin it for you. =) Here it is:

Titled VOID, my film leaps into the empty space between parallel universes, a sci-fi theory about “Universal Bubbles.” This clear zone if you like, is said to contain absolutely nothing. Empty nothingness, referred to as the Void. Now that you’ve seen the video already you may even be thinking:

“Ben, there was dust and mist floating around outside in your video, did you make a mistake? Shouldn’t it just be pitch black?”

Technically yes, but since it’s sci-fi, anything’s possible. I like to think about the dust and mist as a transportational [made up word] side effect.

The Orb Explained

If you’re one of those science y people who for some reason want to know how a non-existent, fictional device works, well. I’ve written here my little blurb about what the orb is, and how it works.

The main idea with VOID is that the orb is an inter-universal transportation device, which teleports all lifeforms within the container of presence into the void, and from there you can teleport into any universe you like. The void essentially acts as a junction. The reason the students were still inside the classroom when transported into the void is because the orb sustains a “static image of the last container of presence,” basically the room is just a still hollow snapshot to ensure that the passengers don’t get too alarmed, keeping in mind that this device isn’t intended for use by the human race.

The orb has a few fail safes in place to ensure that the ‘flight remains safe.’ One of these safety features is the container lock down. Since the orb is sustaining the life of all passengers by emulating the previous container of presence (I bet you’re getting sick of that phrase), along with being the only way to actually exit the void, it has a built-in fail safe to prevent it from leaving the room. Should the orb pass more than 20cm beyond the container an energy field will kick into action, assuming the worst, the container fully locks up, preventing any exit from the container. Although this feature seems to be in development, as the orb was catastrophically propelled away from the barrier.

The orb emits an electronic current to keep the virtual room stable, and if touched by a life form with an electronic current of its own, the orb will quickly change its method of power to ensure that no harm comes to the life form holding it. As clever as this may be, depending on the life form the method of power the orb changes to might not be strong enough to sustain the container. Luckily this wasn’t the case for our universe travelling homo-sapiens.

There really is a lot of interesting things to spot in this video, (apart from the many glitches and cast members vanishing here and there) one of the things that many don’t notice at the end, is the change of cup. The reason Jake notices that they’re in the wrong universe, is because the teachers coffee cup changes, and although it didn’t really come through in the video, he also noticed that the teachers handwriting was a lot neater.

But apart from that the story-line is actually quite interesting if you can figure it out. I’ll probably do another post about the video after the film festival is over. Those that never noticed will probably go, “Oh yeah! I see!” . . . Who knows, maybe you’ll just yawn.

I really would like to revisit this project at some point and correct all of the errors that I couldn’t correct in time for the due date. But nonetheless, I hope you enjoy/enjoyed watching VOID, and good luck to everyone else entering the competition.

I personally don’t expect to get very far in the competition at all, yeah there’s a nice story line if you can pick it, and yeah there’s a decent effect or two, but it’s not consistent, some parts are so shabby and the sound quality is terrible . . .

Anyways, until next time readers.

Ben,

(P.S. This is what I was talking about in my last post, I really want my posts to be more interesting like this one, this is the direction this site is heading from now on)