My name is James Gray on the co writer and director of the movie ad Astra.

Hi, I'm Kevin Thompson.

I'm the production designer and this is notes on the scene Way have looked like not identify Rovers approaching our position.

Possible Myron activity.

I think working with you is great for a designer because you have a vision.

You are taking any visual.

Me?

No, I say do what you do and then you do something.

You have that you really?

But you really care about what it looks like in the case of Bad Astra.

Like, what's the science behind that look?

And are we being accurate?

And then let's twist it and make it appeal to us visually.

Also, we have we have a similar, I think way we find a lot of the same things appealing, attractive.

When I heard that James was doing a science fiction movie that was out in outer space, I thought, I have to see what he's gonna D'oh, You'd be little.

I found it remarkable, and it's always been interesting for me to do kind of near future, like not to scifi futuristic looking and that mess in really well with your idea of of vision, of the future.

This is the best future ever.

Or this is the worst future if we don't want either of those we wanted.

Like, Wait.

This is sort of the future right way.

Having trouble with pirates Since September, some countries been giving them safe haven.

They'll take hostages or go for our rovers.

I like to say that Ad Astra is the first movie ever shot in part on location on the moon and on Mars.

So in this frame you can see this part of the frame.

That's all, really.

That's lunar photography taken, I think, by Apollo eight.

So this part of the frame Israel and of course, this our friend CG computer generated.

And what's very funny to me always, and people look at this sometimes say to me that part of the shot does not look really, and they're like, Well, that's the only part of the shot that Israel So it tells you that riel is not always, really.

It's relative.

Obviously you'll see all these like brand names or Atlantic Applebee's Yoshinoya Beef Bowl, Emirates Air.

This was our idea, which was that part of the moon would be taken over by a lot of chains and a lot of processed food chains.

Frankly, because that's what you're gonna be ableto ship to the moon with any kind of safety, and you not be able to grow much food on 1/6 gravity on the moon.

I think there was something nice also about how we wanted to throw in little bits of familiarity and nostalgia that their stations that are still going to be around and absolute that are the same product placement.

Absolutely.

Because when you come up with a fake company like burgers, stud or whatever, people automatically know that it's fake, right?

But when you see like Applebee's, it always gets a laugh.

People know what that is.

They know what that means.

But this part of the frame appear This is mostly rial from lunar photography.

Again, I'd like to mention that the form of the colony being like a big, huge disk right inside the creator.

The form was taken somewhat from the central, fickle science of how to deal with gravity shifts on the moon.

This I was supposed to be like kind of banal, familiar jet right like commercial travel.

You just had a pretty awful flight.

The coffee wasn't very good.

The blanket was expensive, like it was too costly.

The familiarity of it actually was, we thought quite helpful.

So you see that kind of ridiculous jetway?

It kind of looks a little familiar, even though the rest of it's very weird.

And of course, you have these things They'd have to be fully automated because walking around out there, there's no environment.

The shape of this pod was informed by the design of the interior that we wanted for the commercial travel, but also the shape of this.

This whole thing is based on what's called the Orion capsule, which they're currently building now as part of the Artemus program, which will send us back to the moon in 2024.

So there is actual science.

So now we're arriving on the moon.

One of my favorite things you did in the picture.

So when you land at L.

A X, the Los Angeles airport, it says, welcome to Los Angeles.

And I said, Kevin, that's what I want when you get to the moon and you went okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I got it.

You took a picture and you copy it.

Exactly.

Except instead of Los Angeles.

The move.

All of this, This little ridiculous Logan, including may I say, the perfect use or misuse maybe of the cold holding is entirely from welcome to Los Angeles, and it says Los Angeles Colon, where the world comes together.

So it was changing Earth run, including this ridiculous seal, which, of course, in L.

A.

Is the seal for Los Angeles.

So it's basically welcome to Los Ames except the moon, right?

So jokes it just for us.

And we talked a great detail about the casting and also the military person that was welcoming you.

Like the woman next door.

Very page.

If she's watching that, she's hopefully amused.

Now there is something else to talk about.

It not such a joke.

You have a wonderful I obviously thank you.

He does.

What about this color?

Why this great?

Well, it's the color of the moon.

It's the color of what you would imagine, the underground of the particles that make up the moon's surface and also where we are, which is about to be seen.

The lunar station where they arrive, which was the underground station of the Empty A in Los Angeles under Union Square.

That's right, Union Station in states such a New Yorker Mt.

A Union Square, all the wrong terminology.

Union Station.

I think one of your early references was Penn Station, which is mundane.

It feels like it's falling apart a little bit.

It has a lot of commercialization again, with the subway sign and the D.

H L reference.

And right here we actually did lunar photographs that were from the same series that was at the Science Museum here in New York.

It's a very subtle detail there, almost like they're having a little art show photography.

I just wanted a little shout out because I'm very excited about this.

My Children have their cameo.

They are in There are the kids who scream.

Moon's got talent.

My kids.

I'm very excited.

One other thing.

You notice the extras.

We wanted a total mix of everybody from around the world because we wanted to say this would be some kind of weird, totally globalized multi polar world with tons of different types of people from all over the planet coming to the moon for one reason or another, and then you'll see, of course, the attack dog ready to keep order.

The idea of mixing people coming to the moon in the mix of nations visiting was to make it feels as though it was a colony that had commercialization contractors, but also had the same problems that we have here on Earth.

Absolute security, which will lead into the problems that they have in the lunar chase.

It's like the Wild West, first time in a war zone, three years over the Arctic Circle.

All right, and a heck of a lot of Army Navy games.

Albert Volsky, the great legendary costume designer, did The movie did a brilliant job for us, he said.

I would like to put bride in moon camouflage.

Did you digitally printed perfect, digitally printed moon California?

That's what Brad Pitt's wearing wound camouflage proud is very cool about that.

I mean, just whatever you design, he's like, I defer to you in a great way.

Yeah, but then he'll have.

He'll have suggestions.

You know about props.

You know things and his wristwatch or something.

Thinks about things about for character.

But he has a keen eye, and I was very flattered.

Always, we've come to set and go and look around you go.

I like it.

I like it.

Lunar Rover set for departure to the far side Launch complex Look big Blue marble, Vegas Vic Vegas, Vic at the Consulate, New Hudson News and Nathan's.

It's not on screen long, but we tried to get that in, and then just the scale of them going off solar shields gate numbers to an airport again.

We tried to base all of this on as much as we kind of game gather, because in 2024 we're going to start to build this sort of thing.

Solar panels, of course, because of the unfiltered sunlight will probably be the source of power if you notice for the images themselves.

We really tried to make.

The contrast is bright as we could in these bright spots right here and up here and then, actually, in the movies that even looks a little darker in the darker areas is quite dark because that's the moon, you know, in the bright areas, it's hundreds of degrees in the dark areas go 100 degrees below zero.

That's the contrast.

Really?

All this is actual lunar regular.

I'm gonna give my man Kevin is shot out here.

I love what you did with the Rovers.

I think they look great.

Thank you.

I'm very happy.

There are certain things that we look at.

We have a kind of media informed memory if you want to call it that one of which is this color, this copper color and how it contrasts with the gray and the jet black of the sky.

This is a very this color palette and this bright, overexposed wide of the suits.

This does tell us Moon, along with the little dabs of gold gold foil the parts of the rover that were covered in gold foil.

The material was purchased from NASA on its actual material that they used on the space missions.

And there's a little bit of a cheat here, which is the earth.

It's a bit too big.

The scale is not quite right.

If the scale right, the earth would probably be like that size.

But we had to enlarge it because you really couldn't see it, couldn't you couldn't.

You couldn't look beautiful.

So I want to be able to see that the earth is kind of magnificent in the sky.

This is a great frame to talk about how, when you are on the bright side of the moon, the sky does not have stars in it.

It's pitch pitch black.

We shot this in the Mojave Desert, and basically what we did was we used to camera Rig gets a technical here, but to camera rig, with an infrared digital camera and a film camera basically shooting the same image, the film camera would get the color in the grain.

Infrared would render the blue sky block, and it would allow for the horizon line.

This thing you see here to be very crisp and clean now, why do you want that?

You want that the visual effects people to actually be able to do what's called rotoscoping much easier.

It makes their job much easier.

This surface, you say.

That's the desert.

You just took the color out.

No, because the desert has a lot more vegetation in life than you think.

This shrubbery and all kinds of life, and it doesn't look like the moon.

So we had to replace digitally all of this surface all this area, this whole area.

This is all from lunar photographs that were taken over the last 22 50 years.

We decided a lot of subjectivity in the sequence sequence to be totally from Brad Pitt's point of view, and you'll notice this area right here with this weird copper reflection.

It's indicate Brad's point of view, and you also hear his breathing and stuff.

That's why that sound and sequences what he sound in the sequence is what he would hear inside the suit.

Some of these guys are digitally placed in there.

We built two Rovers, one pirate and one hero, right.

And then we multiplied the pirate overs because one pirate rover wouldn't be too scared to throw some of the big crash way Looks like.

Don't identify Rovers approaching our position.

Possible Myron activity.

All right, now, this lunar regular kicking up right over here, all this stuff that was real dirt that we then had to replace with other dirt because the real dirt didn't look like lunar dirt, so it wound up.

Being replaced was also the moon has 1/6 gravity, So the motion has to be very different.

So as a consequence.

Dan Bradley shot all this stuff in the desert for us, these wides, and we told him to shoot it at 30 between 32 36 frames per second.

The standard is 24 frames per second.

So it has a slightly slow dream.

Equality.

That was the thing that we looked at.

We tested a bunch of different frame rates, and we looked is no sand that looked most accurate from the lunar, the lunar foot film that was shot by the Apollo missions.

Way too down, I think this was shot on a soundstage with the brightest light you could imagine shining down.

And you can see what we were trying to get was this kind of overexposed look?

Okay, so here you see this.

That's the brightest white again.

No atmosphere on the moon.

So the bright, the brightest areas are totally overexposed.

The darkest areas are totally underexposed.

And the film's response had to had to mimic that.

So it was quite a challenge.

Very unpleasant for the actors to be in the spacesuits, being in space.

It's in the desert all day long on sheer bravery.