credit Photo: Mahalo Bay Films
Far From Home
description Director Alan Chan imagines what it’ll take for humans to colonize space with his epic short film Postcards from the Future. An effects artist for Sony Pictures Imageworks supervisor, Chan has worked on eye candy, including Polar Express, Titanic, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and the forthcoming Beowulf. He hopes the indie Postcards, which premiers at the International Space Development Conference in Dallas, May 25 to 28, will be available for audiences soon. Left: Robb Hughes plays an electrical engineer assigned to build the lunar power grid in Alan Chan’s DIY space-exploration flick, Postcards from the Future. 
credit Photo: Mahalo Bay Films
The Light Side of the Moon
description FX whiz Alan Chan, who helped design the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the upcoming Beowulf, imagines what it would take to build an infrastructure on the moon in his epic short film Postcards from the Future. "The fatalist part of me says that we need to do this, to spread out before something happens," said Chan, who hopes his film will inspire more support of space exploration. "It’s better than having all your money in one bank, the bank goes under and you lose everything." 
credit Photo: Mahalo Bay Films
Doing It Digitally
description For a film constructed in part in a spare bedroom, Alan Chan’s Postcards from the Future contains some pretty nifty imagery. Here, a Mars lander module heads towards touchdown. "We are much more self-centered than we were in the 1960s," said Chan, comparing today’s dwindling support for NASA with the excitement Americans felt about the Apollo Mission. "A lot of what we have to do is fight against that and bring back the feeling of, ’Hey we can do that.’" 
credit Photo: Mahalo Bay Films
Planet Hopper
description Cori Bright plays a scientist who attempts the first Mars landing in Alan Chan’s short Postcards from the Future. 
credit Photo: Dan Katzenberger
From the studio to the Stars
description Alan Chan shot most of action for Postcards on an L.A. soundstage, and then dropped the highly tweaked outer-space backdrops behind the actors. 
credit Photo: Dan Katzenberger
Just Pretend It’s the Moon! Alan Chan gives direction to his lead actor Robb Hughes on the set of Postcards.
credit Photo: Dan Katzenberger
Reentry
description The crew shoots Cori Bright’s most intense scene. 
credit Photo: Dan Katzenberger
Digital Master
description Director of photography Eric Adkins (in the orange shirt) brought green-screen experience from shooting Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to the set of the indie short Postcards from the Future. 
credit Photo: Mahalo Bay Films
Looky Looky!
description This spectacular scene appears in Postcards from the Future, which he hopes will inspire viewers to support expanded space missions. "I get up at 5 a.m. and spend a couple of hours preparing scenes for render, hit the render button, go to work, come back and check it," said Chan, who has built the film’s 140 special effects shots over the course of two years. 
credit Photo: Mahalo Bay Films
Space Tech in the Near Future
description In addition to writing the script for Postcards from the Future, Chan and his crew researched the technologies that would be necessary to colonize the Moon, and then created highly detailed visualizations of them. "The core of the technologies described and shown on Postcards is theoretically possible," Chan said. "Here, the lunar transport vehicle is a "workhorse designed to shuttle cargo and supplies, and the occasional replacement-crew personnel to the moon. The LTV’s modular design consists of a command cockpit, an interchangeable cargo midsection and a propulsion system with lander legs designed for moon landings." 
credit Photo: Mahalo Bay Films
From the Moon to the Stars
description Using the moon as a hopping-off point, humans get further into space. At least that’s the theory put forth in Postcards from the Future, which imagined a detailed moon base, Armstrong Station, pictured here in a concept sketch. At one of the poles of the moon, the base will receive constant sunlight, allowing for perpetual solar power. 
credit Photo: Mahalo Bay Films
Mission Control
description In this concept sketch, the creators of Postcards from the Future imagined the nerve center of a lunar base from which new moon cities could be built. 
credit Photo: Mahalo Bay Films
Power to the people
description How will you charge your cell phone on the moon? Using the electric infrastructure that could look something like what Postcards from the Future imagines in this concept sketch, which depicts a lunar power grid spreading outward from Armstrong Station. The grid would be able to expand in modular fashion, the filmmakers write, with each "incremental expansion of the power grid bring(ing) with it new facilities and structures, as companies and corporations invest in moon-based R&D." 
credit Photo: Mahalo Bay Films
Moon Utility Vehicle
description Postcards creators spun a Carnegie Mellon Institute design into a new-form lunar rover, one better equipped to haul materials than what the Apollo astronauts bounced around in the late 1960s and early ’70s 
credit Photo: Mahalo Bay Films
Elevator Going Up!
description Once we figure out how to build a space elevator, like the one imagined in Postcards from the Future, we’ll be able to send up equipment, materials, cold beer and hot pizzas to the guys working hard to colonize the moon. Alan Chan, before directing Postcards, created a concept video demonstrating the space elevator, and he used that idea in his own film.
