Glory to the Conquerors of Space

Directed by: Ryan Suits
duration: 7:30

A lone cosmonaut, adrift in space on a long-forgotten mission, makes a strange discovery on Titan.

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email: atomiccheesecake@gmail.com
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Warstory

This film mixes live action footage with thousands of still photos animated for stop motion, hand-painted backgrounds, microphotography, hand-made models, and virtually no computer-generated graphics. And it was all shot in stereoscopic 3D. At the time I started production, I was a junior film student equipped only with a credit card and a vague theory on how this would work. I spent most of my summer leading up to that school year shooting 3D pictures to learn the process. In preproduction my professor tried for weeks to convince me not to make it, saying it wasn't possible. In production I nearly got the whole film shut down when I was reported for shooting nudes in a school studio without a teacher present (luckily I convinced the facilities manager I would stop, after I had wrapped all the shots with nudity). My set designer came in from out of state and slept on my couch for two weeks while we waited for the same facilities manager to let us assemble the spaceship set in the school's studio. In post-production, my old PC went up in smoke (motherboard literally fried and shot smoke out the back) while I was editing. I spent the next two months living in the school's computer labs, rendering scenes on six different computers at one point, while still learning the basics of the software. The film was produced by an all volunteer crew and is truly a labor of love. I finished a cut on time for school (two hours before it was set to screen in front of all the professors). Two years after I started I was still tweaking the effects on my home computer to produce the film you see today... and I still have purple stains on all my clothes from the body paint.

Bio - Ryan Suits

Ryan Suits is a short filmmaker based in Philadelphia, PA. He produced Glory to the Conquerors of Space while earning his BFA in Film/Animation from Rochester Institute of Technology. His body of work explores the potential to re-appropriate the aesthetics and archetypes of "exploitation cinema" to confront audiences with socially conscious messages. He is currently developing other stereoscopic 3D shorts.