The Planet - Now on Blinkbox

Those lovely folk at Raindance TV have released our first movie, "The Planet," online. It is being hosted by the movie/TV site Blinkbox, for rent or download.

The Planet was released in 2007 and is available on DVD in the USA and Japan, this new online release is licensed to UK only. So apologies to anyone overseas still waiting to see it.

The Planet, stars our mate Mike 'Mr Universe' Mitchell, as the beleaguered captain of a shipwrecked crew in space. The movie has space battles, monsters, ghosts and beefy chaps in t-shirts; all on a budget of £4.50 and some sandwiches. In our minds it's much better than Avatar.

Poster Update for One Day Removals

I've done a few little changes to the main poster for One Day Removals, to reflect the award nomination and festival attendance. I look forward to filling all the blank space with little laurels.

I'd also like to bring your attention to the intended cover for the Japanese release of our last movie, The Planet. The design team for the Japanese distribution company have came up with a totally mad design that looks way better than the one I did, nice to see Kerwin's ship on the front again though it is a smart ship.

And finally, as I've noticed the heaviest hits on the blog have been as the result of posting photos of girls, (what a surprise) here is a photo from 'One Day Removals' of a very talented Irish actress called Josie Walsh. Josie plays a tv reporter in the movie, a small role for just now, but I'm sure we'll see more of her in the future.

The Planet - Aftermath

Well, the movie has been out in the States for about 2 weeks now and we're finding a total split amongst the people who have seen it.

There's the indi film fan or people who know a bit about what it takes to make a movie and there's folk who were expecting Star Trek. We've had reviews from 'fantastic invention and story,' to 'what's happening, why have they got a tent, why are they speaking funny?'

I think The Planet leaves a lot to the imagination of the viewer, the script is intentionally vague to put you into the position of the squaddies on the screen - a group of guys that don't even have half a clue. The people that work this out enjoy it, the people that don't - don't. It's not even an intelligence thing, some smart reviewers can't buy into it either, so it may be an empathy thing.

Star Trek it ain't, there's no explanation for things apart from your own conclusions and that's too much for some people. It's also a very cheap film with CG done by beginners, that's also a bit scary. But if you can get past that it's quite fun. Remember, it was made for the price of a second (or third hand) car. In Hollywood that buys you a microphone (without boom). But it's also got distribution in several countries, so it must be checking enough boxes to get sold.

The new movie, One Day Removals, is in the DVD production phase now. We all have high hopes for the movie and will be sending it out to agents and distributors soon. It is a much more assessable movie for an audience, as it deals with 2 guys having a bad day, no monsters, no guns, no bloody sand.

The Planet - Unleashed

Our last film 'The Planet,' is now for sale in north America. It's also available online from that Amazon shop here.

Here's a pic of the cast - the roughest band of space mercs since that load in Wild Geese.

The Planet - The Beast

A blog dealing with giant movie monsters got in contact with us recently. They wanted to feature a big spanky image of the main 'god' monster from the film. Mark Stirton, director bloke, asked me to fluff up an image of the beast for inclusion in the site - so I did.

I won't post it here as it's a bit spoilery, but if you really want to look it's on this site Undead Backbrain. The beast is rendered from the original model Mark animated in the movie, this version was rendered in Vue 6, as was the background. The wee chaps are purely for scale - or comedy effect.

The Planet - The Planet

I've put quite a few bits of design work for the movie up recently, so I thought is was about time to feature the star of the film - the planet, himself (I'm sure it's a bloke).

The design work for the planet came very early on, literally as soon as Mark had the title I started hammering out various planets - some were comically wrong. All of the designs were created in photoshop then mapped on spheres in Cinema 4D (planet, clouds, atmosphere). The final photoshop files were created mainly from satellite photos of south western Australia, taken from this site here. Final file size came to about 280meg for the 4 maps making up the planet (image, diffusion, speculative, bump), with a further 70meg for the 3 cloud maps.

The detail was necessary as it meant the planet could be viewed from all angles and could stand up in close up work. As the movie was done at PAL resolution (720x576 pixels) there was a bit of lee way with the shots, but the detail was there if we needed poster work and publicity shots.

For anyone that has seen the film you'll know how far off the mark the original design was: even though the survivors may be thousands of miles from the sea, the audience will wonder why they're moaning about no water. Best to make it a sandy hell-hole.

The Planet - Unseen Design Work

As The Planet is going to be released soon in the US, I thought I'd put up some of the concept artwork that went into the design of the film. Attached are a few of the designs and visuals that never made it to the finished movie and a nice shot of the hero ship too.

I'm responsible for the comically huge battleship, Kerwin Robertson designed and built the actual ship used and the e-pod. Tech info. Most of the modelling and rendering was done using Maxon Cinema 4D, with post work in photoshop. Kerwin used Autocad for modelling the main ship model with later additions and texturing in Cinema 4. Other design work from the movie can be found using the links on the sidebar, under 'The Planet.'

I'll track down some more of the less seen or unused work for the next post.

The Planet - US Release Update

Fun news this week from the company releasing 'The Planet,' in the US. MTI Home Video have set the date of June 10th, for the DVD release day.

They have produced a spanky Hollywood type poster for the release: at the moment the artwork still has to be finalised, but hopefully they will keep the elements we sent over. The new dvd has the original making of feature and also some new bios and Spanish subtitles. Scorchio! A press release can be downloaded from the MTI publicity page.

It will hopefully be for sale on Amazon, so we'll get that linked up to the IMDB page soon. CEO of Stirton Towers, Mark Stirton, has more on his blog, here.

The Japanese release info should be with us soon, so keep checking for updates.

Interview Time

A recent review of "The Planet" by M.J. Simpson, of SFX magazine etc., led a few of the Stirton Towers crew to get in touch with him. The review was sort of good but we thought it had missed the mark (pardon the pun) a bit in it's criticism of the movie's vagueness and lack of explanation of events - for those who haven't seen the movie, that was the point: lots of things happen to normal folk and they can't explain them. Star Trek it ain't.

The reviewer didn't however tell us to 'sod off' when we got in touch, and even asked if we (Mark and I, sorry Kerwin) would be willing to do a short interview. So here are links to the interviews about the movie, from 2 different points of view.

Original movie review.

Mark Stirton (Director) Interview

Michael Clark (Producer) Interview

Festival Fun

Last weekend (31st August - 2nd September) the The Festival of Fantastic Films was held in Manchester (England). Our last movie 'The Planet,' was shown and received a pretty involved review by MJ Simpson of Brit SF mag 'SFX.'

One fun thing about the festival is the guests they had, mostly stars of older cult hits like Dr Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde and Cannibal Ferox, but also one of my first screen crushes Caroline Munro (Starcrash, The Spy Who Loved Me and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad to name a few). The fact that she could have saw my big stupid face on screen made me laugh and may have also given me 'a special feeling,' as they used to say in 'living and growing.'

For those of you who don't know of Caroline Munro (you poor fools) here's a publicity shot, possibly from The Spy Who Loved me. Also a shot of 'The Planet,' cast. I'm the dodger on the far left (as seen by Caroline Munro).

The Planet - Premiere Night


Well, 6th of September saw the whole cast and crew milling around the Belmont Cinema to a 'sell out' screening of our movie, The Planet. It was the first time all the cast and crew had met up in the two years since filming and the premiere had pretty good party atmosphere going even before the film started.

As comedy producer and show off I was hosting the show, which sounds really easy until you stare back at a cinema full of people expecting you to say something interesting - I did and all went well. The only hitch during the screening was with the magic lantern the movie was being projected from, the fast action and jump cuts seemed to upset the glow worm inside the apparatus and there were occasional flickers. Nothing too bad and everybody enjoyed the show.

Afterwards a question and answer session was held, which was fun and not too serious, Then everybody vanished off to the bar in the cinema for a pish up. It was, all in all, pretty fun and a nice evening for the cast and crew. I'll post some photos at the end of this blogglet and let you see them all, anybody wishing to find out who the people are will have to check out the cast page on the Stirton Productions web link in me profile.

There is another showing on 4th October at the Belmont Cinema, Aberdeen. Tickets can be bought from the cinema or online here

Also at the premiere Mark Stirton (writer/director) made the announcement that he had secured a six figure budget for the next movie, a black comedy/drama set in Aberdeen. So far details are being kept pretty vague during the development phase, but the movie will involve several cast from 'The Planet and a large Viking longship. I'll be production designer again so I'm going to have some fun with the longship, I will post some production artwork when I can - we're in pre production at the moment and its all hands on deck!

Main cast from the movie, don't we all look just great!

Former multiple Mr. Universe, Mike Mitchell, and director of Stirton Productions, Mark Stirton.

Stirton Productons, 'The Planet' - Design Work

Before I post these I'd like to point out that we made this movie on a tiny budget and that none of us are trained 3d animators, we are film makers. Unlike many recent movies made by groups of modellers, this film has a plot and acting. What a novel idea!

Below are some early renders of the main spacecraft used in the movie. The attack craft and views of the main transporter ship. Both the main models were made by Kerwin Robertson, an architect and cg modeller, using autocad and Cinema 4D. The design was initiated by Kerwin and modifications made during the production process by the team. I retro fitted the suicide craft with some barrels of 'explodium' and pipe bombs; the baddies in the movie are a bit on the poor side.

I did the texturing and modification to the attack ships and some of the transporter craft, the main challenge was making the cannons work the way we wanted. I devised a series of particle emitters for the lasers and muzzle flash which work well when the ship is static but have to be adjusted for velocity of the craft: The faster the ship moves the faster the rate of emission for the lasers, or they start trailing behind and flying out of the ship's arse (comical, but wrong).

After a few months of r&d the firing system was worked for the attack craft and later applied to the gun turrets on the main ship. The rate of fire was adjustable so we had a lot of fun going mental with the space battles. The director, editor, digital effects chief, Mark Stirton, put all the work together and laid on the explosions etc. The results can be seen on the trailer, or on the movie if anyone is willing to buy it (www.stirtonproductions.com).

There are other bits of design and physical props from the movie but I'll leave those till later, way too much for one blog. I'm currently working on the production artwork for the next project which features a Viking longship, so I'll put those up soon.