What do the Star Wars seriesThe Mandalorian and this Canberra short film have in common?
Aside from both being set in space, they both use the same technology to create a virtual set.
The Girl on the Moon - a short film developed and filmed by Canberra company By George Studios - tells the story of an Indigenous girl called Luna (Kiva Simon), who has only ever known a life living on the moon with her mum (Sandy Greenwood).
"The concept of being disconnected from country is taken to the extreme here, because it's disconnected from the whole earth," writer and producer Georgina Jenkins says.
"Both of the themes we're exploring here is disconnection, and what it is that makes us human. What is it that gives us our humanity? And what does it mean here, where the person is the only human who's never been to Earth?"
Just like The Mandalorian, The Girl on the Moon is filmed using a virtual set. Unlike a green screen - where the background is added in post-production - or a projected screen - which relies on images being played on a screen behind the actors, the virtual set is more like a video game. As well as being designed and created on a computer, it also changes perspective depending on where the camera is.
It's similar to the effect video games such as Fortnite have, where the scene continues to adjust as the character moves through. And it's no surprise that the virtual set is similar to that of Fortnite. It was developed by the same company, Epic Games.
The Girl on the Moon was one of 16 Australian films selected to use and help showcase the technology, called Unreal Engine, using a $20,000 grant.
"We were funded to make a five-minute film, which is quite daunting because you've got to compress everything into five minutes which is challenging," Jenkins says.
Aside from creating a custom world for The Girl On The Moon to play out in, the technology also meant that the short film could be filmed entirely in a 7.5-metre by 7.5m space at The Studio in Mitchell.
"There we built two sets. One set was the room on the space colony on the moon looking down Earth. There was a view, obviously of Earth, from her window. And the other was a beach set because she does this simulation where she's on Earth," Jenkins says.
"It was challenging working with technology we've never worked with before. We had these young techno-geeks doing the virtual environment for us and they'd never done it before. So it's all a learning experience for us all, a big experiment. And we had to do all of this as well in six weeks."
The Girl on the Moon has already been shown in film festivals across the world, including in New York, Paris and Los Angeles. However, the plan forthe project does not stop here. The short film is also a proof of concept for a TV series. Jenkins originally developed the idea in a Screen Canberra program, where she was mentored by SeaChange writer and producer Deb Cox. The next step - with the help of more grants - is to hold a writers room where the idea will be developed into a TV script.
