Austen Moret’s side project away from Midnight Divide sprang up as a creative outlet for a quirkier, more niche approach to synth-pop bangers. Inspired by everything from Andy Warhol to Wes Anderson, the 80’s New Wave-tinged project needed a complimentary amount of thought put into a video concept. Never one to shy away from larger-than-life creative briefs, Austen hit me with the idea of a concept EP (and companion visuals) telling the story of an astronaut in dire straits… but we reverse-engineer how he got there, learning a little bit more about his past and motivations as we go. A bitter romance coupled with childhood dreams of spaceflight sent him into the stratosphere to find himself. Most people just settle for backpacking through Europe. This beast of a production swelled considerably as we went, in what people often call a “learning experience”, whenever the phrase “kicked my ass” is too harsh. Shooting started in July 2018, and delivered September 2019.

We went in knowing there would be green screen replacements and camera-tracked VFX compositing, but due to a scheduling conflict we lost our VFX artist with no time or budget to recover, which meant I had to dust off those tools. Add into the mix the fact that our go-to cinematographer Will Hellmuth was shooting on pre-release beta software courtesy of Blackmagic to test their new Blackmagic Raw format, and you’ve got yourself a very unique pipeline. We snagged a massive green screen cyclorama studio, a killer stuntman/rigger who just came off Westworld, and a skeleton crew who wanted to be part of the project. Our young star, Noah, was the son of an actor I’d worked with before, and how could we say no to that face? This kid was a pro. Between the green screen, the childhood stuff, and the shots inside Austen’s home on earth, it was 3 shooting days across 6 weeks, followed by about a year in postproduction round-tripping revisions.