The Mercury Men - interview with Chris Preksta

A WHILE ago I blogged about the deliciously retro web serial the Mercury Men.

Evoking memories of the Buster Crabbe era Flash Gordon series, it follows Edward Borman, a lowly government office drone, who is trapped in his office building when it is seized by the glowing and deadly Mercury Men.

Borman must help the mysterious and dashing Jack Yaeger to stop the invaders and their doomsday device, the Gravity Engine.

The MM's creator Christopher Preksta took time out of working night and day finishing the post production work ahead of the autumn release to answer some Scyfilove questions....

How did the Mercury Men come about?

The Mercury Men started out as a short film we shot in October 2007. I really just wanted to make something with ray guns. So in one ridiculously long day we shot a short little black and white adventure with this office employee fending of glowing invaders. The whole thing cost around 300 bucks.

It ended up screening at dozen or so film festivals, including San Diego Comic Con, and even picked up a few awards. Somewhere in that process I knew the idea could grow into something bigger.

What were your influences on The Mercury Men? It looks beautifully retro.

We of course are influenced heavily by the old serials, but the films with the greatest impact on TMM is the Indiana Jones series. I'm almost certain that we talked about Indiana Jones EVERY single day of production.

When doing something born out of vintage or retro storytelling it'd be easy to copy the style down to the smallest detail. Retro posters, cheesy announcers, corny dialogue, etc.

What Spielberg and Lucas did with Indy, and what we hope to emulate, is taking that old style of storytelling, the adventure, the mystery, the cliffhangers, and do it in modern way. And without Shia LaBeouf swinging with CGI monkeys.

How long did it take to film and produce, and how many people were involved?

Pre-production began in the spring of 2008. We filmed for three weeks in October of that year with a week of pick-ups in the summer of 2009. Post production, including a lot of VFX work, has been going on since filming wrapped. We've got roughly the same amount of VFX shots as the first Star Wars film!

All in all there's been roughly 15 - 20 people involved and of those roughly 3 or 4 (including myself) are behind the continuing day to day work.

Who are the team behind it - is it just you and some friends, or a bit more serious?

Definitely more serious than just a group of friends, although I do try to make opportunities available to filmmaker friends whenever possible. We posted notices and brought on cast and crew from Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and even Ohio.

About a third of us had worked together on our first series, Captain Blasto, another third was the crew from the original TMM short, and the rest were all new to the team.

How did you get into this type of work, and what made you start making web films for yourself?

I've been making short films since high school, and oddly enough nearly all of them were serialized. We'd come up with goofy characters or ideas and tell the story in chapters. Even my first feature length film Captain Blasto, which we later adapted into a web series, was broken up into chapters in the screenplay and final film.

So when the web series medium really took off with shows like The Guild, I'd realized that our abilities and my style of storytelling where already really well suited for it.



It looks incredibly polished, with solid special effects, despite what must be a tight budget. How do you pull that off?

Everything we've ever made has been micro-budget. We've learned over time how to turn a handful of cash into something that looks much more valuable. We've got it down to a science or an art form at this point. That comes from a couple things.

One, we have an incredibly dedicated and talented cast/crew. Two, I spend A LOT of time making sure the production is ridiculously organized, including storyboarding EVERY single shot.

And lastly, rather than just writing a story and then trying to go find money to make it happen, I look at how much money I know I can get and then write a story I feel I'm capable of telling for that amount.

Does making a web series give you greater freedom, as you call all the shots?

Absolutely. If we're successful enough to make a living from the series, I'll gladly stick with it.

Did your past success put you under any more pressure to deliver this time around?

Not at all. My biggest success was with Captain Blasto and I was practically a kid when I made it. Didn't have a clue what I was doing. I've felt much better about this project every step of the way.

After Joss Whedon's web series, do you think people are paying more attention to them?

Yes and no. A lot of people that never watched a web series before saw Dr. Horrible. But did they watch anything else? Or are they just waiting for the next chapter of Dr. Horrible?

Any Mercury Men singalongs planned?

No sing-a-longs in our future, but we've got plenty of other great things planned for the series.

This first set of episodes really is the tip of the iceberg. I'm really hoping it's successful enough to warrant the flood of ideas we have planned.

What does the future hold? A MM sequel? New films altogether? Moving into the mainstream production world?

I would love to continue the TMM story, and I'm committed to it, whether that's a web series or another medium. I've already got plans for the sequel and beyond. On top of that we have things we'd like to do outside of the actual episodes, including our digital props series and a role playing game based on the TMM universe.

When will it be released and what reaction are you hoping for?

It will be released this fall, hopefully late September or early October. Like any film or series, I'm just hoping people connect with the story, characters, and world.

I've been calling this series a "knothole" because you're really only getting to peek at the much larger world behind the fence. And I'm hoping we attract enough people that we're given the opportunity to start tearing that fence down.

..... Good stuff eh! Thanks to Chris for having a chat with me for you Scyfilovers and here's hoping the Mercury Men takes off this autumn.

Find out more by having a look at its official website.

Is intelligent science fiction making a return? Guest post by Chris Brown

Here's Chris's second guest blog, this time about intelligent sci fi. Enjoy!

RECENTLY it has been television that has been the trail-blazer for intelligent sci-fi.

Battlestar Galactica, the first season of Heroes, even that last series of Torchwood seemed to show that there was something still worth saying with the genre.

Films on the other hand seem to have gone in the opposite direction. When the Terminator series finally came around again the last strips of intellect seem to have been torn away in favour of huge explosions.

Even a film like Cloverfield, effectively a shakey-cam homage to Godzilla, managed to tell the same story but with none of director Ishiro Honda's dark undertones of the concerns about the nuclear age.

This summer things might be changing, first up is Duncan Jones's Moon, a low budget ode to the 70s sci-fi he grew up with such as Silent Runnings and Dark Star. The trailer may make the film look like a Twilight Zone episode but the movie itself deals with loneliness, responsibility and regret.

Next month we're also getting Neill Bloomkamp's District 9. On the face of it an alien invasion movie with a snazzy viral marketing campaign and Peter Jackson as Executive Producer on the poster.

But there are themes of racism and distrust running through here as well.

Are these an indication of a change for sci-fi?

Well, considering Transformers 2 made $200m in its first weekend I think we can safely say that explosions and mayhem will be on the cards for a while yet.

But the fact that the fringes see fit to actually shoe-horn in some relevant themes is a reminder that there are a lot more legs in the genre than just nostalgia.

Moon review - Guest blog by Chris Brown

Chris Brown - aka Orange Monkey on Twitter - has written a guest blog for me on Moon. There's another one to follow too, you lucky people!

There's a moment about 30 minutes in to Moon that you'll realise that this isn't the film that you thought it was going to be.

Watch the trailer and it looks like you are going to watch a mystery, and worse, one that's got a pretty obvious twist.

But director Duncan Jones has something better in mind and suddenly the rug's pulled from under you. When the reveal does come, and if you really want to know there are are a ton of spoiler-ific reviews knocking about, it's so early on that you wonder where it can go.

Go with it though and it's hugely rewarding.

In fact, in a year that's contained some disappointing blockbusters this is a film that impresses with just how much its got to say, Sam Rockwell plays an astronaut stuck on the other side of the moon doing a humdrum job of caretaker working on his own at a mining facility.

With two weeks left of his three year contract all he wants to do is go home to his wife and child and have some human contact. But then he starts to hallucinate and wonders if his computer helper GERTY, voiced by Kevin Spacey, is trying to aide him or not.

Referencing movies such as 2001, Silent Running and Dark Star this is as much a story about loneliness, responsibility and personal identity as it is cool effects.

That said this British film milks the last penny out of its £2.5m budget and using some great old school SFX, including some cool model work and optical tricks.

But what really makes this stand out is the human aspect, Rockwell manages to hold the film despite this, basically, being a one man show for large part. It's an incredibly charismatic performance and roots the entire thing.

For something that is so white and clean in its aesthetic this has plenty of heart.

If you're reading this blog - which interviewed Duncan Jones a while back - that pretty much guarantees this movie's for you. Appearing from nowhere, as if it was a lost classic from the 70s, you need to see this.

It's one of the best in the sci-fi genre for years.

Torchwood: Children of Earth review - a terrible perfection (SPOILERS)

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

That quote perfectly sums up Torchwood: Children of Earth for me, as Russell T Davies tore down what he had lovingly nourished, on almost every level.

At every stage, when you expected the story to take an upward swing, to head back into the positive worldview RTD made his trademark during his time in charge of Doctor Who, it took the opposite path.

The NHS doctor shot Jack! The Hub is destroyed! Jack's buried in concrete! The 456 want the kids! Jack gave up the children! The government is discussing a final solution for 325,000 kids! The kids are drugs! They'd kill us all if they benefited! Ianto is dead! Frobisher shot his own family! Jack killed his own grandchild!

By the end my jaw was hanging open and the tone of the comments on the Scyfilove live blog had changed from amused and entertained to shocked and stunned.

It meant CoE was very difficult to watch at times, but RTD and his team of writers showed an unflinching determination to carry this dark story through to its painful and harrowing conclusion.

Because of them, Torchwood finally became a truly adult drama and - I would say - one of the greatest television events of the past 10 years - a terrible perfection even.

If for nothing else, I would put Torchwood into that class for the way it treated the show's central character, Captain Jack Harkness. First introduced as a shallow con man in Who, he had developed into a charismatic and decisive leader, Torchwood's Han Solo, who we thought would always do the right thing.

By the end of episode five, he was a broken man whose compromised heroism in the face of the 456 alien threat cost him his lover, his grandchild's life at his own hand and ultimately his own sense of who he was.

A hero? Not any longer. A leader? Of what - his team is dead or gone, their base destroyed. Immortal? Undoubtedly, but that means having to live forever with the terrible things he had done and seen, things which he was left running away from.

To undermine your leading man to such a degree was an incredibly courageous thing to do, and John Barrowman rose to the challenge with a committed performance of a character he clearly cares deeply about.

He was not alone in the acting stakes, with everyone involved turning in top class work under director Euros Lyn's sensitive and skilled direction.

Special mention though goes to Peter Capaldi, who must be in the running for a Bafta as John Frobisher. At first he was a buttoned up civil servant, absolutely sure of the bureaucracy and his role in it.

But like Jack, he lost his place when faced with an impossible choice. Capaldi's subtle and nuanced acting perfectly captured a man losing his grip.

His final scene - calmly climbing the stairs, gun in hand, to the room where his family waited..... even now it gives me pause, because the closing of the door and four gunshots were easily the darkest moment in the Whoniverse.

The result of all this was the highest viewing figures in the show's history, but ironically Davies's scorched earth approach means it will be very difficult for it to return and if it does, to reach the same standards CoE reached.

I hope it does, because we have see what this show can achieve now. But also because I think I would find it hard to watch Children of Earth again.

Some things should only be watched once, and having glimpsed that terrible perfection, once was enough for me.