Out of Orbit: Moxie Productions Wraps First Film

Natalie Phillips- City On A Hill Press

Armed with energy drinks, garlic bagels and the kind of optimism usually extinguished in Hollywood within a business week, Moxie Productions taped their first film over Memorial Day weekend. Three days after the first cry of “action!”, the student -run crew was left with an empty set and a handful of tapes that, when properly configured, will amount to a 15 minute film entitled Delta-V.

Set in the near future, Delta-V is the story of a crew who, because of climate shifts and limited resources on earth, is sent into space on a self-sustaining space station.

The mission begins smoothly enough, with characters bickering amongst themselves about space paste and the trials of growing vegetables in space. Complications arise however, when an unidentified object hits the station, sending the vessel and its inhabitants spiraling out of orbit.

Director Rob Rex, a third year film student and the co-founder of Moxie, described Delta-V, which means “change in velocity,” as a “science fiction dramedy.”

“There’s a theme throughout the [film] that when this impact happens there’s a change­—there’s a change in the mood, there’s a change in all the characters, there’s a change in the lighting,” Rex said. “So we’re playing off that- we can perfect our environment, which is what they’re trying to do, but you can’t take account for what humans are like and for what peoples’ characters are like.”

The script, written by Rex and Moxie co-founder Gene Maggio, was initially met with skepticism by some crew members who signed up for the project without being fully versed in the film’s details.

“When I first read [the script], I was like ‘a space station, are you kidding me? How are we going to pull that off?’” camera operator Peter Acosta said. “I was obviously concerned because I thought it would look really low budget, but actually…they did a good job.”

Moxie’s design team built the set for Delta-V on location, at the Digital Media Factory in downtown Santa Cruz.

Artistic director Antonia Gunnarson, a first-year theater student, received a significant portion of the film’s $5,000 budget to begin the daunting task of replicating the inside of a space station within a matter of months.

“Our budget when we went to Home Depot, just for set materials, was $1,700 and we actually didn’t spend it all,” Gunnarson said, who estimated spending more than 30 hours in construction the week before taping began. “We had some really long nights here this week, [but] it turned out to be an awesome looking set, better than anything I could’ve hoped for when we were designing it on paper.”

The set, with its curved white walls, homemade control panel and triangular window, harkens back to a more innocent era of science fiction, but fourth year theatre student and Delta-V actor Tom Lazur sees the actual content of the film as being much darker.

“[Delta V] is a flip of the first Star Trek, when the United Nations seemed like such a wonderful thing- all these people are going to be working together, no matter what the situation is, they’re going to work hard to make the world a better place,” Lazur said. “What I like about this is it’s the reverse—these trained people are going up into space, for commercial interests really, and then as soon as there’s a problem, within the first few minutes, it leads to murder.”

Delta-V is expected to reach completion in Fall 2006. Visit moxie.ucsc.edu for information about Delta-V and Moxie Productions.