26d • General discussion
A great philosophical concept will not build a 12-room spaceship set.
In 2009, while taking classes to earn my fifth college degree, I read Jack London’s The Sea Wolf. It is a brilliant, brutal philosophical experiment about a nihilistic sea captain torturing his crew while debating a rescued castaway. I was completely captivated and immediately decided to adapt its core themes into a sci-fi feature film.
But high-level philosophy doesn't build sets, and it doesn't feed a crew. Execution does.
On January 1, 2010, I held the finished script, written by Jed Payne, in my hands. We targeted a 14-day shoot around the July 4th break. That gave us exactly six months to do all the pre-production, cast an ensemble, build the physical world, and find the money to pull it off. At the time, I was the Program Chair of the Video Department at the Minnesota School of Business, teaching full-time, making my own short films, and doing my own coursework.
Going into my second feature film, I knew I couldn't just think like a director. I had to operate with a producer's mindset.
During the week, between teaching classes, it was meticulous script breakdowns, scheduling, and hunting for free junk to build our sets. I worked with an IP Lawyer to lock down our contracts—he agreed to help us out as long as we kept the production value as high as my previous World War I short, The Nihilist. On the weekends, I sat down with my good friend Les Watters (a Pixar and Disney animator) to storyboard the entire film.
I built a crew of over 30 people by aligning every individual with the exact skill they wanted to master. Students jumped at the opportunity, volunteering their nights and weekends to prep. A cinematographer friend saw the physical sets we were constructing and lent us his HD digital camera for free.
And those sets required massive, mechanical effort. We built a practical 12-room interior spaceship set with working sliding doors and integrated lighting. We constructed a secondary green screen soundstage to key all the space VFX. We scoured Goodwill to design costumes for our 15-person ensemble. I had a dedicated SFX makeup team to handle the blood and gore as the cast was systematically killed off. One crew member even baked actual hardtack so the actors could eat it authentically on camera.
When we finally rolled cameras in early July, we shot for 14 grueling days. I directed, produced, handled the catering, and executed whatever was strictly necessary to keep the machine moving.
You do not get a feature film across the finish line on passion alone. You get there through relentless, mechanical execution, structured planning, and putting the right people in the right seats.
That massive effort—formerly titled Into the Void—is now officially streaming on Tubi as Dark Galaxy.
This is exactly why we focus so heavily on the Execution pillar in this community. A grand vision is only the first step. The true craft is in the delivery. Let's get to work.
— Notes from the Director
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A great philosophical concept will not build a 12-room spaceship set.
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