Trying not to freeze our butts off with the Leopard 2 tank Credit: Stephanie Blaquera
We had the awesome opportunity to interview director, writer, and producer Sara Martins on her short film, THE VAULT, that will premiere at the 2019 FirstGlance Film Festival in Los Angeles on March 14-17th. THE VAULT is a post-apocalyptic series that follows a group of survivors, who are forced to live together in an underground bunker known as the Vault. It is believed nothing can survive outside in the nuclear winter wasteland…until one day when a surveying mission discovers an unconscious survivor.
Hi, Sara! Thank you for granting the interview. Congrats on your new short film THE VAULT. Tell us what inspired the script.
Thanks so much! We’re really excited about it. The idea for the script has actually been around for a while, but it had to take the backburner for a bit. My writing partner, Dave Aliry, and I were kicking around ideas back in 2011 about writing something post-apocalyptic with aliens since there weren’t that many things out there at that time. We both really enjoyed sci-fi movies and had been inspired by the Aliens and Terminator films. We wanted to create that kind of a world.
Anyhow, we kept on writing and putting ideas together, building backstories for our characters, trying to really imagine the world they came from, and trying to outline a script. I think we ended up with something like 30-page backgrounds for all of the main characters!
We could have probably made six films by the end of it, and writing such detailed character backgrounds probably was not necessary . . . However, it really did allow us to know exactly who these characters are and how they would react to different situations that would come up in the Vault.
Your short is an official selection for FirstGlance Film Festival. Any special plans for the film festival, such as a separate premiere or screening during the festival?
Yeah, our web series is an Official Selection at the FirstGlance Film Festival. And it’s been nominated for 6 awards there including Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Ensemble and Best Special Effects! We’re really excited about all the attention that it’s getting.
We’re still trying to iron out our plans and we’re hoping that maybe some of the cast or crew could go down to Los Angeles…it’d be great to make it out there. We’ll be screening on March 15 at the Laemmle in North Hollywood, CA.
What are your expectations for THE VAULT on the festival circuit?
So far we’ve been really lucky with our festival strategy and have gotten into every single festival that we’ve applied to. I know that’s not always the case and we’ve got plenty of “Your series was great but unfortunately….” type letters in the past. You apply and hope to get into the different fests, but you just never know what the programmers have in mind and whether or not they feel that your project fits with their vision.
So far we’ve gotten into eight international festivals! The Blood in the Snow Canadian Film Festival and the Canada Independent Film Festival; the Bloodstained Indie Film Festival in Japan where we were nominated for Best Web Series; the upcoming Buenos Aires Web Fest in Argentina; and several US festivals – the Winter Film Awards where we won Best Web Series, the upcoming Philip K. Dick Science Fiction and Supernatural Festival in New York City, HollyWeb, and of course the FirstGlance Film Festival taking place in Los Angeles mid-March, where we’ve already been nominated in six categories!
We’ve applied to some others that we’re still waiting to hear back from…so hoping that 2019 will add a couple more to that list.
Was it a challenge to direct the film?
This was definitely an experience that taught me a lot. I’d say that we had two major challenges to overcome…the first one being the weather and the second being the genre itself.
Because we were doing a series that was set in a post-apocalyptic world we knew that all our outdoor visuals had to be shot during the winter months to capture a desolate world in the aftermath of a nuclear winter. The problem is that Canadian winters are just so unpredictable and we ended up having to shoot our first scenes during the worst snowstorm of the year! So all that snow in the first two episodes was real!
Visually it looks great, but technically it makes everything ten times harder. You want to put a lens filter down, it’s going to get wet. You want to put a camera case away, you have to trudge through the snow… and you better not walk through the set or you’ll leave your footprints! It’s hard to see, it’s hard to touch buttons, you’re freezing, you’re wet… it’s just miserable conditions, and you have to fight as your life depended on it to get the shot you want. To top it off, the camera wasn’t recording during the shooting of the first episode in the middle of the storm. We only realized it a couple of hours in, so we had to re-shoot all those outdoor scenes before the sun went down at 5 pm. It was one of the most stressful days of the entire shoot.
Having never shot anything sci-fi before, taking a leap into the genre was a bit of a challenge as well. We had to keep in mind the VFX for the different scenes and how we could make our vision come alive on a micro-budget without making it look hokey.
What are you most proud of in making THE VAULT.
I think I’m most proud of the fact that we were able to just get to a point where we were able to bring this project to life and launch this great web series after years of being on hold.
Being sci-fi, this was one of those projects that seemed a little too ambitious, slightly out of reach and out of our comfort zone. In our experience, sci-fi is hard… really hard, often times you need to create everything from scratch. Some of the sets we needed didn’t exist at all and had to be built. It is one thing to set a scene in a kitchen… you can find those… but what about behind a giant vault door? Or in a war room?
Even with a micro-budget, I think we were able to assemble an awesome team and come together to create what we hope others will agree is a great sci-fi series. I think the cinematography is great, I think the sound design really works, and I’m really proud of all our cast members who were just terrific and such a pleasure to work with.
Tell us what a typical day on the set was like.
Well, every day started with thinking okay… how many more days of torture before I’m free. Then, once we got to set, and got started, especially on our studio days, everything was fun and really collaborative.
We had this awesome army of PA’s who just finished film school at Mohawk College in Hamilton, and everyone would pitch in with ideas on how to improve the set design, how we could improve the shot etc,… it was pretty great actually. Even on days, they weren’t scheduled, they would come and help out on set! I’m not sure we would have survived those days without them.
Pretty much every day started with going over the call sheet with my production manager Julia Beney and discussing the schedule and plan for the day. As you know, time is always the enemy, so we would quickly discuss potential problems, create quick backup plans, that sort of thing.
Then I would talk to my DOP Tyson Burger and First AD Ozgur Aytac, walking through the days set, figuring out each setup, and how we would approach the day.
Mostly we were able to tackle everything as planned and as expected. I’m convinced the amount of prep you do in pre-production makes all the difference at the end of the day.
What is going to surprise people about the film?
I think the things that might surprise people the most about our web series are the visuals and the production value that we were able to achieve through our locations, especially for being on such a small budget.
I mean we were able to find real Leopard tanks and have them drive around in the snow!
And our gem of a location, the Diefenbunker Cold Car bunker…what are the odds that we’d be able to find a real bunker? And then to be able to film in it? We’re so thankful to the folks over there…they were just so great to deal with. We found out that Neil Bloomkamp actually filmed a short there as well, called Zygote with Dakota Fanning, so it made it super cool to be filming our web series at the same place where the guy who made District 9 had filmed his short!
Also, the coordinates they enter into the holographic computer are actually GPS coordinates to the Roswell UFO crash haha! Our PM thought of that one, which we thought would be a fun Easter egg.
Without giving anything away, what’s your favorite line of dialogue from the film and why?
My favorite line from the web series was one that was said by Dr. Isaac in episode 3, Time Bomb: “Well, putting maybe’s aside, let’s stick to the facts…and the fact is radiation affects all life forms.”
I’m a bit of a science nerd so I really love delving into the scientific aspect of the genre and incorporating factoids that not everyone might know in their day to day life.
We’re basically teasing the audience here, letting them know something is off about this new survivor they found. It’s the mystery aspect that I hope engages audiences and makes viewers stick with the series.
When looking at back on the production, what resonated with you the most and why?
Looking back, I think that what resonated with me the most is that filmmaking will test you to your limits like nothing else I know. But if you really really want to get that shot, and create that scene, that visual, then with a lot of hard work and dedication, and collaboration, it can and will be done.
Some of those scenes, like the soldiers approaching the field hospital, the armored vehicles they drive, the overall tone and conflict between The General and Hale, it’s just so great to know that what you put on the page is now on the screen. Not exactly how you envisioned it, and not that it couldn’t always be better, but to see it come to life, that’s what it’s all about.
In your opinion, what scene in the film is going to blow people away and why?
What’s going to blow people away from our web series? Probably our visuals and sets. I think the locations we were able to secure provided incredible production value.
For starters, I think our opening scene with the tanks coming down the road in nuclear winter is really impressive. And the snow is all real…no VFX needed there. Later we even get to see the tank commander and the tank gunner inside the tank. It was a pretty unique experience.
The other really cool thing that will blow people away has got to be the Diefenbunker Museum in Ottawa. I mean, it’s not every day that you get to see a real Cold War bunker that was actually active at one time. That blast tunnel alone was just amazing. Those are real atomic blast tunnels they are walking through.
What did you enjoy most about the characters in the film?
The part that I enjoyed the most about the characters in our web series The Vault was the fact that they felt so complete. Having created such extensive backstories for them really helped us feel like we knew them inside out and that they really existed on paper.
We thought about who their parents were, when they first had sex, who their friends were, what they feared, what they dreamt about…
Then, we were so lucky to find such an extraordinary cast, who were able to bring these figures to life.
After a couple of episodes of the series, the audience starts to get glimpses of who these characters are who have been forced to live together in this underground bunker. They all have their story and it was fun getting to reveal their conflicting personalities in little bits and chunks.
Do you have anything else you would like to share about the film?
THE VAULT was the first time I delved into the science fiction genre. It was scary and exhilarating all at the same time.
We’re just past the halfway mark and getting to the final home stretch in terms of getting it out there…we’ve got four more episodes to debut. They are all available for free on YouTube and on our official website.
The bigger question that we’re still trying to navigate is how do we break out and secure funding for consecutive seasons. We want to make sure that the right people are seeing our work and that they see the full potential that the series has to offer.
Do you have anything else you would like to share about your career?
Note: Use this section to close the interview. Share your social links!
I started out working on short films and documentaries after film school. I later produced and directed several music videos for some local Canadian artists.
In 2016 I released my feature documentary Never the Bride, about the declining rate of marriage in North America among women over the age of 30. It got picked up by a US distributor.
Recently, I was working as a production manager on various digital series including one that starred notable cast members such as Vivica A. Fox.
Thank you for chatting with us about your career. I hope we can catch up in the future for another interview.
Thanks so much for your interest in The Vault and we hope you enjoy it. We’d love to catch up again in the future. You can find the first six episodes on YouTube or on our website:
Connect with The Vault:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thevaultwebseries
Official Website: http://thevaultwebseries.com
IMDB: https://imdb.to/2E8sSBX
And you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates on upcoming episodes:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/VaultWebseries
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thevaultwebseries
Featured Image Credit: Trying not to freeze our butts off with the Leopard 2 tank. Credit: Stephanie Blaquera.
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