Films suggest that our future is full of fantastically large spacecraft in galaxies far, far away. But the reality is that our ambitions in space are small – and seemingly getting smaller – says Quentin Cooper.
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is.
Spaceships are really big too.
The first few lines, as you probably recognised, are from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The other line about spaceships? That’s from pretty much every other off-world sci-fi movie of the last few decades. But it’s beginning to look like – at least for the foreseeable future – it’s wrong.
It’s tempting to blame the error on something that happened a long time ago in a cinema far, far away – the overwhelming opening shot of the first Star Wars film. That’s first as in the first one made and the first good one in the finished sequence. After the backstory has crawled by, Princess Leia’s (fairly sizeable) spaceship zips across the screen. Then behind it, with the speakers shaking the seats, comes the Imperial Star Destroyer which takes a full 12 seconds to rumble over our point of view. Twelve seconds – we’re into a whole new galactic scale of bigness.
Signe Olynyk is President/CEO of Protagonist Pictures Inc. in Los Angeles, and Twilight Pictures, Inc. in Canada. She has associate produced two feature films, as well as written/produced several documentaries, one hour specials, tv pilots, and a six part series. Her work has been seen on the CBC, Discovery Channel, FOX, the BBC, and she has professional credits on more than 120 productions. 
Robert McKee is a lecturer, creative writing instructor, and author of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. He is widely known for his popular ‘Story Seminar‘, which he developed when he was a professor at the University of Southern California. 
The Black Card is expensive and anyone who decides to use it must be scrutinized. They have to be held responsible. How many white folks get up one morning and form the White Association of Film Critics? So just because he looks black and thinks black – sometimes only 10 percent of the time – and his association has Black or African American in the name does not mean he actually gives a damn about black folk. I see these associations springing up here and there, every now and then, and they don’t do shit. If they had two fucks in their pocket, they wouldn’t even give black people a fuck!
Tutorial Expert: Alexander Markowski, CAS.
Angela Robinson completed a B.A. in theatre at Brown University and an MFA at New York University. She’s probably best known for her 2004 film D.E.B.S., which starred Meagan Good, about a group of high school girls groomed to become secret agents. Robinson’s 2005 G-rated film Herbie Fully Loaded starring Lindsay Lohan and Michael Keaton is the highest grossing film directed by a black woman, grossing over $144 million at the box office worldwide. 
After winning six awards at 
Making an ultra low-budget film before playing with an investor’s money is good practice. In these video clips, new media specialist Christopher Rokosz gives advice on the production side of low-budget filmmaking, including:
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