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KORETH
Building a Sci-Fi Film the Old Way
So here’s what I’m doing.
I’m building a short film. Sci-fi. No CGI, no Blender renders, no Unreal Engine. A physical miniature of a moonbase, lit with real tungsten Fresnel lamps, filmed with a real camera, with real fog rolling across the set. The way ILM did it in 1977. The way Ridley Scott did it for Alien.
The moon is called Koreth. Volcanic, seismically active, no sunlight worth mentioning. A world of black rock and lava that never stops moving. There’s a station on this moon, a mining outpost, small crew, far from everything. The kind of place where people go because they’re paid well and stay because they forgot how to leave.
I’m not gonna spoil the story. But I’ll say this much: there are no aliens. No explosions. No space battles. The tension comes from something much quieter than that. Think Alien, but without the alien. What’s left when you take the monster away? People. Isolation. And a question nobody can answer.
Why practical effects?
Because CGI looks like CGI. I don’t care how good the renderer is, when every indie sci-fi short uses the same tools, they all end up looking the same. Clean, smooth, perfect. And your brain checks out because something feels off even if you can’t say what.
Real light on real materials is different. Fog doesn’t behave the same way twice. Dust catches a beam and scatters it in a way no shader replicates. Metal reflects light with a texture that feels alive. That’s not nostalgia talking, that’s physics, and physics hasn’t changed since the original Star Wars models were shot on a stage in 1976.
I have 2.5kW and 1kW tungsten Fresnel lamps in my workshop. Same type of lights they used at ILM. Hard light, single point source, parallel shadows that trick your brain into reading a tiny model as something massive. Nine square meters of black Molton curtain for backgrounds. A Fujifilm X-S20 with the 16-55mm f/2.8. And I’m building a motion control rig for repeatable camera passes.
The worldbuilding
Every design decision on Koreth Station comes from first principles. The station is dome-shaped because a curved surface distributes internal pressure evenly, same reason submarines are round and not square. The reactor runs on geothermal energy because there’s no sun to collect. The radiator panels are flat and wide because in a near-vacuum you can’t use cooling towers, you dump waste heat as infrared radiation into space.
The station sits on pylons above the surface so lava flows can pass underneath. The crew breathes recycled air supplemented by filtered volcanic gases. The structure is cast basalt made on-site, with imported titanium-aluminum alloy for the pressure-critical sections.
None of this gets explained in the film. But it shapes everything, how the station looks, how it sounds, how it feels. When the world makes sense underneath, the audience feels it without knowing why.
Where I’m at
Day 1. Base plate is cut. Station mount goes off-center for better camera angles and more terrain to work with. I’ll be documenting the whole build here, the miniature, the lighting tests, the set construction, the sound design, and eventually the shoot.
If you’re into practical filmmaking, model building, or sci-fi that actually thinks about its own world, this is the place.
More soon.
Andi
(“Everything here is a living process, details, plans, and designs will evolve as the build progresses.“)
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