Horizon is a grounded take on an epic premise that explores how ordinary people may react to an alien invasion. Created by Simon Pearce and Paul Dudbridge, the 10 part series is an hour-to-hour journey that follows a troubled family coming to terms with their complicated history whilst trying to come to grips with the fact that a mysterious alien ship is hovering over-head.
The series makes good use of visual effects to tell the story, how empowering was that from a production standpoint?
Visual Effects are an amazing tool, and definitely a good skill for aspiring film-makers to learn because it can help you out with so many issues. Obviously you shouldn’t rely on them, but it’s good to know what they can do so if you have to change your plans quickly on set you’ll know where VFX might be able to help you out with something you can’t correct on the day – such as an over-exposed sky. For example, yes we have lots of obvious FX in this such as space-ships and fighter jets, but there’s also a lot of hidden and more subtle FX – from phone screens, to sky replacement and a subtle layer of smoke on some shots… All of this helps add to the production value and story-telling in ways we might otherwise not be able to afford. A lot of people complain that there’s too much CGI in films these days, but there’s a lot that goes unnoticed too outside of the obvious summer blockbusters. Robert Zemeckis is a good example of a film-maker who often uses VFX elements in a way that is completely invisible to the audience.
Was there anything you weren’t able to do in a production sense that you would have liked to do?
I think perhaps just have more time! Because of budget restrictions we had to try and shoot each episode in a day, sometimes upwards of 6 pages, which is a lot! This might include lengthy action or FX sequences, or scenes with multiple extras, and those take time to co-ordinate! Two of the episodes we actually shot on the same day because we couldn’t afford to go back to the location a second time! I think a lot of what we look back at now and want to change are things we just didn’t have time to properly address on the day.
How did you finance Horizon?
Horizon was entirely self-funded by the two of us (Simon and Paul). It was made as a passion project by all those involved and a lot of people kindly gave their time and services for free simply because they loved the project and just love making films, like us. We’re lucky to have a great network here in Bristol (UK) that we can call upon for something like this. We also often wrote with our existing contacts in mind, such as actors or locations we’d used before and knew we could go back to. This helped keep costs down.
What was your favourite thing about making Horizon?
To be honest – a lot of it! Writing it was huge fun, that’s often a very solitary part of the process but here we were throwing ideas around between 3 of us (Simon Pearce, Paul Dudbridge & Chris Marshfield). Plus the things we were talking about like supermarkets being looted, fighter jets over the city – it’s hard not to get excited about that stuff! I’d say the shoot as well because even though it was a lot to do and quite stressful at times – the buzz you get from being around some of those scenes, with upturned cars or extras rioting, that’s hard to beat. We had so many friends amongst the cast and crew too. It was a real bonding experience.
What’s your background as a content creator? And how did you approach this project differently to previous projects
We’ve both worked on a number of formats – music videos, short films, features, corporates and so on – but this was very different simply because of the format of it. We were creating a much bigger story with multiple cast, crew and locations. It was in many ways a culmination of everything we’d done before. As we mentioned before the writing process, between 3 of us, was straight away very different – and also working with a story that was going to be broken up in this way. It was fun coming up with the cliffhangers we thought would bring people back each night – we’re big fans of TV Dramas like Lost, 24, The Walking Dead etc… so we were all very excited to make our own version of that.
Because we were distributing it ourselves there was quite a sense of freedom to it – we just kept asking what would we want to see?
What was the most difficult challenge you had to overcome in production, and how did you go about it?
I would say the VFX. There was a huge amount to do in post, and of course this often meant we couldn’t lock the edits properly until we’d seen what the final effect looked like… We always had in our minds that it would likely take longer than we thought to finish, so we allowed say 9 months instead of 6, but it then ended up taking 18! It was a slog at times – as we said before there was a lot of little shots that we didn’t really take into account but of course it still all takes time to do! Just rendering a shot sometimes took up to 42 hours! And we were all doing this between other paid work.
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