However, this year was the first time Oceanus had the chance to be presented to a large viewership. Morris wrote the film’s screenplay in 2014 and completed the film in 2015, dedicating his masterpiece to the memory of iconic director Robert Wise, known for his work on films like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Run Silent Run Deep, and The Day the Earth Stood Still, as well as famous romances like West Side Story and The Sound of Music.
To find a way to bring that role to life, but in a futuristic context, I thought it would be more relatable to a a broader audience than the typical space stuff we see.” We’ve swam in it, scuba dived, or snorkeled. “Most of us haven't gone to space, but we’ve gone to the ocean. “Here's the thing - most of us have seen the ocean,” he notes. Out of those three, I thought The Abyss was the one that was just really cool and the idea of this near-future underwater environment.”Īlso a fan of submarine films like The Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide, Morris set out to create a story that would speak to a broader audience than the typical sci-fi theme. And then you had a trio of movies that happened in the mid to late 80s: The Abyss, Leviathan, and DeepStar Six. Then you had Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea from the 1960s. Obviously, back in the 1950s, you had 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The one place that I could think of that had not really been explored extensively was the ocean. “We’re familiar with the tropes of sci-fi. “There’s lots of space stuff, a fair amount of time travel, monsters, aliens, and robots,” says Morris. Morris first came up with the idea for Oceanus in 2011, borrowing inspiration from a slew of classic sci-fi films along with a desire to venture where few successful sci-fi films have dared to explore. We knew that, if we could make those scenes work and make those believable, then we could pull everything else off. When you combine that effect with the CG water, you believe what’s in the scene.
That's what created the shimmer that's on the characters in the sub, which made it look like they were underwater. He continues, “We had these big mylar reflectors, and we shined lights on them, and I had the crew members just shaking them.
We had to go through extensive previs and a lot of planning, and then we coordinated our previs with actual practical effects on the stage.”
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“And we knew we’d have to do lots of animation throughout the film, even incorporate it into scenes inside the sub, because I wanted these big windows on the submarine that look out into this ocean world. “Literally the only water in the entire film was a glass of water that the stagehand poured into the submarine when we opened the hatch,” says Morris. The short film is a hybrid of live-action, visual effects and animation live-action acting was captured inside the tangible submarine set, but everything outside the vessel - the water, schools of fish, meteor showers, sunken airplanes, humpback whales, and the city of Oceanus itself - is all computer generated using Maya. “I’m really thankful to Gunpowder & Sky and DUST giving us the chance to finally get this out to a broad audience.” “I thought, ‘What if we could take the kind of energy and thoughtfulness and character development that you'd seen in something like the original Star Trek, but then put it underwater?’” says Morris, who produced Oceanus alongside Anne Marie Gillen, who was also his producer on Parallel Man. Visit unknowns of the deep in Oceanus: Act One: The film is now available to watch on YouTube (we have it embedded below) and, over the last two weeks, has received over 1.2 million views. Erin Kendall (Megan Dodds) and her aquatic engineer husband Sam Jordan (Sharif Atkins) are caught in a catastrophic global disaster that separates them from each other and their spectacular underwater city, Oceanus.įollowing the successful premiere of Morris’ entirely animated short Parallel Man: Infinite Pursuit, Oceanus: Act One was showcased on Gunpowder & Sky’s sci-fi label, DUST, in April. Before the final experiment can be conducted, marine biologist Dr. Oceanus: Act One is a short film that takes place in the year 2029, when an amazing breakthrough in whale-to-human communication is at hand. But we're showing that it can be done on a really modest budget.” “There are people making sci-fi films right now by throwing tens of millions of dollars into visual effects. “It’s an exciting thing to pull off,” says Jeffrey Morris, founder of production company FutureDude Entertainment and the writer behind Oceanus: Act One. They had one film set, three actors, a budget of less than $700,000, and one glass of water to tell a 30-minute, futuristic sci-fi tale taking place almost entirely underwater.
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