Ha ha, Chris, that's great! Glad you can relate, that high/low technology look is what I was initially aiming for, I thought it might have been lost in the translation from page to screen. Bit of trivia for you, he's not actually turning the bulb. Tried that the first day of shooting, but after deciding to reshoot everything with some more lighting, I ended up using the rheostat--what I'd called a transformer before is actually AC all the way through--to control the level of light, and when it needed to turn off (and later on, blow out) I just flipped the power switch.

Those interested in learning more would do well to look at this behind the scenes photo I took during a break: http://www.gyroshot.com/images/cube.jpg

Everything is arranged exactly as it was when shooting, except for the camera and the door. The small light you see on that little rolling gray table provided the "night" illumination, and was pointed backward to bounce off of the roll-up door, which as you can see is painted white. Gave a nice effect, I think.

As for the gauges, we velcroed some water pressure gauges to the wall, screwed in a couple of half inch copper straps, and hand-labeled the plastic covers (to give it that low-tech look). To make it change, we opened the cover, and my dad held it as close as possible while pushing the back of the needle with a pencil. You can't see it so well with the widescreen cropping I've done (and even less so with the updated versions I'm preparing for release after judging takes place), but the actual 4:3 recording reveals the trick. Worked out nicely.

wow, that was a tight fit. I hope it was a cool night with all those lights and so little space.

Night? We shot that from about eleven in the morning 'til three or four o'clock in the afternoon. It was just after that heat wave had broken, though, and it wasn't so bad, especially with a fan to help move the air around. Plenty of water to stay hydrated, not to mention that most of the shooting took place with the major light (I only used one head of the worklight on the stand) turned off or dimmed.

I just watched it again after you explained the story. I get it, it's all there. I think if you did a star trek log naration that you could have gotten the whole story in, or something like that. It's a lot of story for 3 min. The music is fantastic and I can see how that inspired the short.

I had to do a Star Wars story scroll. The first viewing to a couple of friends resulted in blank faces.