In 2024 I had the privilege to work as a matte painter for Liam Young's Emissary Film:
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/1047810049
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Satellites and probes are prosthetic extensions of ourselves, monuments to our achievements and ambitions. They are ambassadors, hurtling out beyond our reach encoded with a message about who the culture that launched them aspire to be. Its been almost 50 years since voyagers gold record was launched and today we are radically different to world that designed it. Faced with an increasingly dystopian present where economic crisis, climate collapse, the threat of nuclear war and recurrent pandemics loom, some place humanity's hopes in the possibility of finding and inhabiting other worlds. Following in the wake of Voyager 1, Emissary explores what message a society on the brink of its own extinction would send. In collaboration with engineers from NASA JPL and set to an original score composed by Space Afrika, The Emissary presents the journey of a fictional spacecraft, a construction engineered to last for eternity, what would become the last human made object in existence. The film captures the craft on its voyage through our solar system and the vast universe beyond, crossing extraterrestrial atmospheres and traversing strange new planetary alignments developed from real astronomical observations. The Emissary is a messenger, a robotic avatar, which after our possible extinction will travel into eternity to preserve and transmit the history of what we once were.
Director Liam Young
Production Design Liam Young
VFX Supervisor Alexey Marfin
Original Score Space Afrika
Matte Painter James Roha
3D Artist Aman Sheth
Cinematographer Jennifer Chen
Compositor Christian Pepper
Graphics Neasden Control Center
Space Archaeologist Alice Gorman
NASA JOL Consultants Tracy Drain, Tony Freeman, Steve Matousek,
With support from Telefonica Madrid
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For this project I created and rendered a series of high resolution/ speculative backdrops of vibrant other worlds for the short film.
