Floaters
Short Film
Directed by Karl Poyzer & Joseph Roberts
Starring Rachel Stubbings, Daniel Hoffmann-Gill and Jake Yapp.
Designed and Animated by Karl Poyzer
Written by Joseph Roberts
Sound Design by Tom Pugh @ Grand Central Recording Studios
Music by Pete “Technicolour” Rogers
Read the interview on Directors Notes.
Joe Roberts and Karl Poyzer, are a Director and DOP respectively. Their previous dark comedy short “Kelly” was recently selected for Best Comedy at Palm Springs ShortsFest 2020 and has been selected to screen at Aesthetica and Encounters Film Festival later this year.
During the pandemic, while attending these virtual festivals and spending too much time on twitter, Karl was turning his light fixing, camera operating hand to animation using the open source software called Blender. Joe wrote a petty squabble of a script based around Karl's artistic penchant for spaceships and over Discord, they spent a lot longer than initially planned on making a 4 minute animation. They had absolutely no idea what they were doing. The result is Floaters.
The result is Floaters, a mundanely futuristic look at space travel in, or rather above, the UK in 2120. Karl Poyzer's Retro brutalist art style is inspired by the works of John Harris & Syd Mead. Joe's comedy stylings are rooted in banal observations and day to day eccentricities inspired by Armando Iannucci and Jesse Armstrong. Floaters is a conscious clashing of these styles, referred by Karl and Joe as “Kitchen Sink Sci-Fi”
Karl and Joe asked Rachel Stubbings (Whenever You’re Ready, GameFace), Daniel Hoffmann-Gill (Dolittle, Sherlock)and Jake Yapp (NewsWipe, The Now Show)to be voices of the floating ships. They all very kindly agreed and we set up a zoom call for the recording and then got them to record themselves into their iPhones. Rachel sat in her wardrobe and Daniel put a big blanket over his head. Jake is a podcaster so he had all the gear ready to go.
The intricate and distinctly futuristic yet retro soundscape was created and mixed by the very talented Tom Pugh out of Grand Central Recording Studios.