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BAdASS SPACE MURDERERS

When shooting started it was a constant battle to get the motion graphics and monitor footage ready for the next day. For the first three weeks or so of shooting both VFX Editor Barrett Heathcote and myself would be up until 3 or 4 in the morning rendering sequences that were needed for the monitors and burning them onto DVDs for the next day. All the monitor screens were shot in-camera to give us that old-school feel (plus our VFX budget wouldn't stretch to 400-odd composited monitor shots). I had to get the motion graphics sequences ready for Baz to get the disks burnt and we were in this horrible cycle of only being ready around 4am which is only a couple of hours before we had to set off for the studio for the next days shooting. This fatigue got really bad, whilst driving in one morning I actually fell asleep whilst waiting in a queue at some traffic lights on the road down to Shepperton. Woke up with someone behind me beeping their horn. Scared the shit out of me.

One of the nice things about making a film with such tight resources is that a lot of people that work on the film tend to end up being in it. One example of this is the Eliza "Rescue Crew" manifest pictures you see on Sam’s' monitor screen when he gets the message that he is being "rescued". This is of course a corporate euphemism for "chloroformed and thrown in the incinerator". Here's a still from the motion graphics sequence that shows the crew manifest.

There's me on the left as the captain, and we have 1st Assistant Director Mick Ward in the middle and Director of Photography Gary Shaw on the right. Besides being a great DoP and the greatest blagger I've ever met he's also known as "the Reverend Cheesy Loaf". He got himself ordained to marry one of his best friends and bought the official paperwork from the Internet, so Moon was actually shot by an ordained Priest. If you have a look around on the screen you'll see all sorts of bits and pieces of writing and numbers. This is essentially a form of lorem ipsum but most of it features little jokes about my friends. If you look at the top you'll see references to jokes from "Bottom", the UK TV show starring Ade Edmonson and Rick Mayall, albeit slightly twisted around. The numbers under our mug shots are also actual things. The RAP14 under mine is my paintball call sign (The team's called the Raptors and I'm number 14). Micks is a reference to Man United football team as he's from Manchester and he likes his footy. The Cheesy Loafs' is a reference to his jeep, which he calls "the Beast". He got the personalised number plate of DOP1 which we couldn't help taking the piss out of a little bit I've always found the term "DP" to be funny when it's said on film sets because of the porn connotations. He was trying to persuade me to get VFX1 on mine but I think that might have made me look like a bit of a cock driving round the studio with that on my car.

When I was getting the monitor graphics together I was trying to grab people for ten minutes wherever I cold to get them in an orange boiler suit and stick some paper badges or a cap on them to take some mugshots that would work on film. Originally I wanted to put Duncan on this crew manifest but he went all shy so ended up not being in the film. I also took pictures of Nicky Moss who was an assistant producer on Moon. As neither of these two made it into the film you won’t have seen their Eliza crew pics so here you are: Duncan Jones and Nicky Moss (Now Bentham) as a pair of murdering space bastards.

See how tired Duncan looks? Poor little monkey. That's what making a film does to you, we were both in this weird state that's very hard to describe but after a couple of weeks of shooting you could perhaps have labeled us as super-focused zombies. Don't worry though; he's all better now. And on the back end of everything I'm super-delighted that as Eliza Captain I actually get my own spaceship in a Sci-Fi film. Shit yeah.

This is my picture as originally taken. Full disclosure: My mum absolutely hates this picture of my. She says it makes me look like I’m an absolute arse-hole. Cheers Mum, I was actually going for that though.

Update from the future: This blog post was originally written way back in 2010. It’s now current year 2024 and I have a kid named Eliza. Not a co-incidence.