Earth to Sky

Aimee is on a quest trying to find herself. Ray is a man living in a caravane, not knowing what to do with his life. When weather turns bad Aimee ends up warming up at Rays caravan. She stays for few days, and they open up about lives that have lead them there.

Earth to Sky- 23 min, fiction: Romantic Drama, NFTS, 2013
Cast: Georgina White, Geoffrey Newland, Richard Atwill, Helen Duff
Written & Directed by: Pekka Saari, Producer & Production manager: Tiago Petrica
Cinematographer: Sebastian Cort, Editor: Chiaki Suzuki

Reminisce

With earth to sky I wanted to make something simple and uncomplicated. Having just done surreal fantasy war film, I really wanted to do some “basic” drama. This film had to be written in a little more than a month and the budget would be unexisting. However sometimes limitations can work for you. For some reason at that time I was making all my films in organic natural locations, and I ended up with a scenario of two people spending three days in a caravan on a field.

This was also my second collaboration with actor Geoffrey Newland, who I worked on Reset before. Geoffrey is a great guy and a very generous actor. We were both interested in playing around with different kinds of tools and methods in finding the right performance, so it was great that he was available to work with us. With him and Georgina we were able to do lot of good performance research.

There are small scale dramas, like Lost in translation and Brothers McMullen, that show human existence in a very touching and uncomplicated way. In these films where just being a person is big enough thing to be a story. I wanted to do one of those stories. I also wanted to see if I could do it on my own, so this time it was gonna be just me screenwriting.

But I did get help from my cinematographer Sebastian Cort, who brought in his own experience as a traveler and was an absolute pleasure to work with. Together we drove around in Buckinhamshire in England to find our location, at the same time talking about the story, troubleshooting it and trying to nail down how we could shoot it.

After some tough e-baying production manager Tiago Petrica found our Embassador branded beauty of the road just for 200£. It had served as a home for traveling family of a reverend, and now it would spend it’s last moments as a film set. Although cheap and old, it was a very cosy caravan, and we actually ended up sleeping in it few nights around the shoot.

Snow came down right before our shoot, and then day after, melted away. This was no fun at all, because it was endangering our continuity. It also made everything wet and muddy, got our generator stuck in the mud and in general, didn’t make anybody too happy. Especially the people who had been working on my last film, that had similar circumstances, were not too happy. Our on set DIT Ram Tripathi then again had fun making his “Shoes in the mud” documentary.

Shooting inside a small community where locals know each others, can really work. We did lot of our set design in just one day, by walking in the neighborhood and talking with local businesses. Because our film was in a rural setting and we were in the rural area, we could very easily find what we needed, and mostly people were amazingly kind in helping us. Our unit base was at the local pub and whenever we needed to get local information or find something, somebody at the pub knew what to do. After shooting for 5 days, we had got everything we needed with just few hick ups in the way. We said good by to our lovely field and Rhona from the local community who had been such a big help and even made us blueberry muffins.