eyeon spoke with Axel Mertes, CTO of Magna Mana, about Nydenion and how a 15 year old project drew his team together to complete one man's dream.

October, 2010...Magna Mana, a Frankfurt am Main/Germany based production and post production company is happy to announce the post production work on the independent science fiction feature Nydenion is almost completed. 





In the distant future, mankind has spread out into space. Over the course of centuries the early colonies have evolved into giant empires, battling for supremacy. The Sycon Empire is at war with the Confederation of Free Worlds. In the last 57 years, the death toll has risen to the billions. Peace is long forgotten and Earth is just a legend…

Rick Walker, former fighter pilot turned disillusioned freelance flyer, is hired to transport a mysterious woman to a place of secret peace negotiations. The woman, Cynthia Perkins, claims to be a special ambassador who was called upon, in secrecy, to bring the stalling negotiations back on track.

On their way, Walker and Perkins are ambushed by a group of attack fighters and Walker is forced to crash land on a remote planet called Nydenion. As they try to evade the search parties sent out to make sure that no one survived the crash, Perkins reveals the vital importance of their mission. Walkers and Perkins’ journey becomes a fight against time and an enemy that seems to come from within their own military ranks. An enemy that Walker knows all too well… 






With well over 1900 overall shots, more than 900 VFX compositings of which far more than 500 are pure VFX shots, more than 100 matte paintings, and over 47000 rotoscoped frames, this has been a hefty and heavy Fusion pipeline job orgy.

Simply every single shot went through eyeon Fusion 6.1. The tons of greenscreen footage, matte paintings, etc. had to be combined even on the non-VFX shots. There is still some way to go, but we already see the bright light at the end of the tunnel.

Please have a silent memorial moment for those who had to roto the thousands of frames of greenscreen footage for many months.



Jack Moik had the original idea in the early 1990's and began his preproduction work on the movie, mainly as a hobby. Later, he was working as a Miniature Model Maker for movies in the late 1990's and continued his private work after hours.

Nydenion started out as a mere non-budget independent movie more than 15 years ago with the help of a small group of students which Jack had managed to inspire and involve in this project.

Early tests had been shot using S-VHSC and Hi8 and were then replaced by DV. Actual shooting was started in 1997 on a trip to the island of Lanzarote. Most of the actual live action was shot using the legendary Sony VX9000 DV-CAM with interlaced letterboxed PAL, it was 'state of the art' for anyone doing independent movies with a digital camera.





The model team continued over the years with their enthusiastic and detailed work in an old warehouse in Marburg, Hessen, Germany. This was where most of the miniature models were built and shot. Also, many of the live action sets, including a 12 foot shuttle cockpit, space ship fuselage mockups, and space ship corridors were build and shot in that location. Real high-lights of the models where the giant canyon models with hangars, buildings, landing platforms etc., a real dream for any model maker.





All actors (except a few) are normal people, not professional actors. Many, if not most of the team, have cameos in the movie.

No one in the very early phase of the project was a professional film maker in any way, more hobbyists, film fans, and semi-professionals. All of them shared a big passion, especially for model making and 'space opera' science fictions like Blade Runner, Starship Troopers, Alien, Star Wars, Buck Rogers, Space 1999, and Star Trek. Some of these films gave inspiration to design, others to storylines and general film making.

While live action shooting was well on its way, among tons of greenscreen and miniature model shootings (with self-built cranes and dollies due to a limited budget) it turned out it wouldn't be possible to do the required compositing post production and VFX via the Internet, where Jack originally tried to put together an international team among a group of fans of the project.





As Jack joined us in 2003 at Magna Mana, he had the project with him and it was in more or less a limbo stage, frozen in some kind of inability to finish it as expected. A scenario well known to so many independent filmmakers out there. Additionally, this was a science fiction feature!



After a while, we learned about his private passion project and became involved, one after the other. Some of us (including me, ehm...) also acted in small roles and became addicted to this project.

As a logical result, we encouraged each other to try and finish the film. After so many years of on-going work, it would have been such an inglorious waste to give it all up. So, the editing and shooting was mainly finished 'after hours', additional digital sets and models had been build, VFX tests were made etc.



The DV resolution live action alone was one of the biggest questions and challenges for the team. How to use that footage and combine it with today's HD resolution effects and newly even RED 4K shootings to get it to match? We found a decent way to upscale the footage better than any standard scaling algorithms and the results are amazing, given we often had just 720x216y resolution as source, sometimes 720x432y on tripod shots where interlace wasn't an issue.



So the work was continued and a first teaser with a full pipeline test was released. It still turned out to be too much work to be finished on-the-go while we still had to run our daily business. Again, the whole project came to a halt.



After another couple of years, freelance producer Caspar Arnhold joined our team and also stumbled over those fantastic big space ship models standing in our office which were illuminated with fibre wires. He wanted to know more about it and learned the whole story. Then the idea was reborn to try to get funding to finally finish the project.



Again we started to reedit, calculate, plan, talk to distributors on festivals, and decided to apply for funding from the Hessen Invest Film (somewhat less than 200,000 Euros), a local funding bank.

The jury members got very excited about the long term independent production story that we were lucky enough to receive the funding!

In addition to own resources, deferred fees and auxiliary orders, plus our efforts here at Magna Mana providing the pipeline, we were now able to finish this independent science fiction opera in roughly 8 months with local talents and our own staff.

As it turned out...a small but very powerful, productive, and dynamic team... 

Now we are close to finish the post production and have the hope to release the movie soon for many science fiction fans to watch, which are starving for material like this, like we do ourselves.

Besides a teaser that was published previously, a new trailer is now online.

The trailer is currently in German, but you can have English subtitles on it on YouTube.

There is also an HD version online, for those who want to see a little more detail.

We will have a native English version soon, as Nydenion is released world wide by Lonely Seal Releasing.

See here:

Teaser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QimQSY9lcIQ

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffuWc91FK2A

Official Website: www.nydenion.com



Hopefully, you will give us your honest support for this feature and help us in increasing our fast growing fan base even more. If you like what we do...spread the word. We will continue producing features and stories that are 'out of this world'.

You can also subscribe to our mailing list, or follow us on RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. or in some forums, we will be showing off some of the material.

Look to the website for more details and especially the funny behind-the-scenes diaries.

Any feedback is highly welcomed!

We think this is probably one of the cheapest and possibly, at the same time, the most ambitious independent science fiction feature film ever made.

Best regards,
Axel Mertes
CTO, Magna Mana