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The Trailer You Were Never Meant To See

I've been digging through my hard drives and came across something that you might like if you're interested in the process we went through getting this film made. It's a trailer that we cut for Moon before we'd finished making it. We ran out of money before we could get into post-production, and so we had to get some interest from investors so we could keep going and get finished. The Cannes film festival proved a great opportunity for this and so we cut a trailer to take over there and generally tried to get things looking as nice as possible in an attempt to give an impression of the film we intended to put out. We got it cut by a company called "Zealot" based in London's Soho, and as we had no VFX shots even started at the time, I took the footage and did what I could over a long weekend to try and give it a bit of scope and feel more like what we intended. Please don't judge me too harshly for the quality of these VFX shots - it was, as happened so often on this production, an emergency situation and it was pretty much just me in my bedroom, staying up all night, getting on with it.

As this was done so early on, there are quite a few differences in here than ended up in the final film. You can see there's a greenish grade to the whole thing that I was never really keen on which we cooled off for the final grade on the released feature. We had a hard time with this as we used quite a lot of cheap fluorescent lights on the film and they were at different colour temperatures in different parts of the set and at different times of the day. When saw the first runs of footage in the cut, the colour temperatures of the lights were jumping around from green, to pinkish, yellow, blues; there were little shifts in hue all over the place. You may also notice the crappy looking "Big Boards". These were place-holders and were essentially light-boxes with graphic acetate strips that were replaced later with CG overlays I put together to bring them to life. They were originally supposed to be real displays but the quote for the build came in at £36,000. Goodbye Big Boards!

We used some of Clint Mansell's other music as a place-holder as we were wanting to get him in to do the score and fortunately everything went according to plan. Just shows how perfect he was for the job that his other score's fit right over Moon. Having said that, this piece of music as about as perfect film trailer music as you could ever hope to find.

I think one of my favourite things about this is that Duncan is the voice of Gerty. The weird thing is that his voice is also in the final trailer put out by Sony. There's a shot where Sam is driving the rover away from the base and we hear an automated female voice informing him that he's leaving the Sarang base perimiter. This is actually Duncan's voice too - pitch-shifted to make him sound like a woman. That’s show-business!