Kirill Kripak has made 40 short films in 15 years. All that hard work by the Dubai-based filmmaker paid off when his latest work, Project: Horizon, picked up the Best Location prize at My Røde Reel Awards, a competition sponsored by industry giant Røde, which attracted more than 1,000 entries from across the globe. The film was also a finalist in four other categories: Best Sci-Fi, Art Direction, Visual Effects and Behind the Scenes.
The judging panel for the awards featured industry stalwarts, including digital filmmaking pioneer Philip Bloom and Vincent Laforet, a three-time winner at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Kripak is hoping this success will help him raise funds to turn his three-minute film, which he wrote and directed, into a full-length feature.
Project: Horizon is a sci-fi shot entirely in Sharjah's desert environs of Jebel Maleiha (also known as Fossil Rock).
Kripak, who runs the Dubai media and production house Scope FZE, says he was taken by the UAE’s desert landscape.
“I’ve been in Dubai for seven years and I’ve always wanted to shoot something out in the desert, using the dunes,” he says. “Finally, I came up with this idea with a friend of mine from Toronto and we set out to make the best sci-fi that we possibly could.”
He says the script started as a 25-minute short, which was a finalist in a screenwriting competition at the Phoenix International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, the pair then began to develop it into a feature. However, Kripak realised that with the amount of special effects the project required, it was too ambitious for the means at his disposal: “We took a character from the longer version and just focused on his story instead,” he says.
Kripak explains how the movie very nearly failed to see the light of day at all.
“We had a lot of really unfortunate luck,” he says. “There are a lot of effects in the film, with one of the two characters entirely computer-generated. The 3-D specialist had to leave due to a family emergency, then my camera guy had an emergency, too, literally a day before shooting and he wasn’t able to do it either. I had to go out, buy a drone for the aerial shots, figure out how to operate it, get it all done and shoot the movie myself, while directing it.”
Kripak also had to rapidly brush-up on his CGI skills. “For my day job, I do some compositing and titles, but I’ve never done something on this scale,” he says.
“Myself and a colleague had to teach ourselves 3-D and do all the special effects in the span of two weeks.”
Production took about three months – from script writing to wrap – with a particularly intense two-day desert shoot in May marred by crew miscommunication and inclement weather.
“The first half of the first day was completely lost. I’d asked my producer to get me two trained 4x4 drivers, but instead he got two guys with SUVs, but they don’t do dune driving, so we got stuck,” says Kripak.
“I happened to know how to drive in the desert, so I had to ferry people back and forth while they tried to dig out, and then we got hit by a sandstorm. By the second day, about half the crew of 10 or so didn’t show up. I think they just hadn’t realised how hard it is to shoot in the desert.”
After such a challenging shoot, Kripak is satisfied that the choice of location has been singled out for praise. “It was very difficult. It was easily the hardest shoot we’ve ever been on, and thanks to the win, we’ll get a prize of various sound gear, Adobe subscriptions, I think it’s around US$2,000 [Dh7,350]-3,000 worth of equipment, so that’ll help.”
On raising money to turn Project: Horizon into a longer feature, Kripak says: "I can show investors what we made. Hopefully people will like it, want to know more and can have faith in my team, and then we can hopefully do a 90-minute version.
“I don’t have an exact budget in mind, but it’s not going to be cheap. Just for the CGI, it would take me around a year to do it, so we’d need a specialist there. I don’t know exactly how much I would budget for, but I’d say easily that a million dollars would be a good start.”
• Watch Project: Horizon at www.rode.com/myrodereel/watch/entry/1280
cnewbould@thenational.ae