LUX

A stargazer from another planet named LUX dreams about her mysterious interstellar origins until one day she awakens to the crash of NASA’s Voyager 1 probe which carries onboard a truly out of this world golden mixtape.

CAST

LUX
Jordan Kerslake

Juno
Violet Bruno

Luna
McKenna Donahue

CREW

Producer
Alexis French

Story Consultant:
Alexander Xavier James

Assistant Director:
Nicole Radar

Naitrai Iriumi
Jonah Neuss
Maisie Harrington
Eli Gallagher
Emily Fortuna
Matthew Grega
Parker Singh
Brian Liu

Visual Effects:

Lead Compositor
Blake Rizzo

Modeler
Kyra Bautista

Additional Animation
Diana Wang

Additional Keying Work
Brian Liu

Art Department

Costume + Hair + Makeup
Lindsey Nelson

Hair + Makeup
Sommer Weeks

Story Boards
Alaina Kwan

Makeup:
Daniel Twitchel

Golden Record
Cindy Chen

Sound

Darra Bunkasem
Blake Rizzo
Paul Stovall

Music

Composed by Kris James

Additional Songs:

In the Field
Kris James
Paul Stovall

Lantern Dream
Paul Stovall

Head in The Stars:
Vocals and Lyrics by Hannah Flores
Composed by Paul Stovall
Guitar by Naitra Iriumi

Footage Used

Nasa
Daniel Simon
Jeffry Beach
Encyclopedia Britannica
Gordon McDowell
A Trip to The Moon by George Melies
Universal News

Indiegogo Sponsors

Navid Azodi, Ryan Kim, Maya Geddes, Neda Gallagher
Tam Dang, Jeff Hendricks, Arina Wu, Carol-Ann Lucas
Elizabeth Marshall, Lindsey Nelson, Kyle Knies, Janet King
Mike and Lily Sweet, Christine Wolf, Gavin, and Lisa Upton
Lily Ann French, Mark French, Dev Sen, Jennifer Dye,
Lynn Davis, Jason Snow, Meghan Cowen

Special Thanks

Hannah Palin
Bedia Olsen (My Grandma)
Deschutes National Forest
Suzzallo Libraries
UW League of Astronomers
Oliver Fraser
Mom and Dad for supporting me!
All friends and family
LUX: Film Production Club
Animation Capstone
Barbara Mones
Cinema and Media Studies
Jennifer Bean

https://www.blakerizzofilm.com/projects#/luxfilm/

Hey everyone! My name is Blake Rizzo and I wrote/directed/edited/VFX’d for this short film LUX! LUX was inspired by two different core elements. The first one was the location! Ever since I started making films I have always wanted to shoot something in the mountain landscape of central Oregon, we had gone on road trips through that area and spent a lot of time there growing up. At night the skies are clear and the stargazing is absolutely gorgeous. This fueled my early curiosity for space, the unknown, and how absurdly large the universe is. Something about the light there has this hazy quality that feels like it glows with adventure. So it was a dream to bring a group of friends down there and shoot a film! The second core element of this film is the story of the discovery of the Voyager Record. In 1977 Nasa Launched two probes named the Voyager 1 + 2. Each carried a golden vinyl record representing all of humanity. The record contains sounds, music, and images of Earth! My thought was to create a film that shows the discovery of the voyager record and how it inspires someone who lives on a faraway planet to get over feeling that they are insignificant. One culture inspires another!

We created LUX during my four years in College. I truly feel like I grew up through making this film. We shot it the Summer after my Sophmore year of College and post-production and visual effects and music would take the next two years to create. In total LUX has 124 Visual Effect shots all of which I composited. So it was a large and challenging task! I had help from my friends, Alaina Kwan, on preview Storyboards for CG sequences (https://www.instagram.com/aeyeonarts/)  and Kyra Bautista (https://www.instagram.com/kakaimonique3D/) who modeled “the Lantern” and helped with the Observatory models.

Shooting this film was an adventure. We shot through extreme temperatures, late nights, and early mornings, coyotes, props shattering on set, all kinds of challenges. The Day-for-Night look of the film actually stemmed from us being chased by coyotes after filming at night. None of the actors felt comfortable filming at night after that so we decided to switch all of our night scenes to day scenes and use the powers of Visual Effects to create a Mad Max: Fury Road day for night effect. I did not know how to do this effect coming into the film but we had to shoot first, learn later! Thanks to Nicole Radar (Assistant Director) and Alexis French (Producer) for being wonderful in helping organize the shoot days of the film.

This whole project was one of the largest learning experiences of my college filmmaking career and it challenged every part of me as a filmmaker and physically as a person. There are so many other individuals that contributed their work to different parts of the film! The music process had several different musicians. Paul Stovall, Hannah Flores, and Naitrai Iriumi worked on the music for the first year of post-production. The song that you hear on the first record “Head in the Stars” is an original lyrical song sung by Hannah Flores! Later on, in post-production Kris James (https://soundcloud.com/user-513178100) would come onto the project and do a total overhaul of the music. Most of the music in the film was created by him! Full breakdown in the credits. Also, that poster still for the film was created by Cassandra Skanes!!! She’s fantastic. Her Instagram is here https://www.instagram.com/kindsh/

Anyways, that’s a bit of the story behind the film! Feel free to reach out and ask any questions!
–
Blake Rizzo
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RizzoBlake