Death in Space: Thomas Lucas Interview
Death in Space, an animated short film directed by Thomas Lucas, has been released to universal success.
Created in a year’s worth of lunchbreaks, Death in Space debuted at the Cardiff Independent Film Festival in April, where it was nominated for Best Animation Award. It was released online shortly afterwards and quickly went viral, popping up on the Reddit front page, Sploid and Show Me the Animation (among others), and gathering nearly 5 million views on Imgur.
Death in Space follows the quirky, colourful ways unfortunate souls meet their maker while exploring outer space, often a case of ‘curiosity kills the cat’ – or, in this case, the astronaut. Plenty of dark humour comes from the sheer inventiveness of the cosmic calamities, and the speed with which each person is snuffed out (in two seconds or less!)
Skwigly caught up with Thomas Lucas to find out more about the film.
How did the idea for Death in Space come about?
It wasn’t an idea for a film really! It started off as me wanting to do something hand-drawn because I was feeling a little rusty at the time, so I just decided to draw these really short skits in Flash. It was inspired by the Animade’s Full Secs videos, which are just one second animations. The ones I did for that were space and death related so I decided to carry it on!
Could you tell me a bit about the creative process during the film, and how you went about making it?
Um, there really wasn’t a creative process! (laughs) Especially for the first few – I just drew images until I found a staging I liked and a character I liked and then I just went straight ahead with it. No storyboarding or anything. I did a little bit more progression on the later ones when I actually realised it was going to be a film.
So there was an ‘Ooh, this is going to be a film’ type moment?
Yeah! I got to five or six of them, and I thought, ‘I should probably just make more of these and put them together…’
For each ‘death’ you use a different artistic style – to the point where some people have assumed that different artists have worked on the film. What made you decide to do that?
It was just me playing around to explore my style, really – seeing what I like the look of and what I like to do. When I look at it, I don’t feel each one is massively different, but other people have told me it is! (laughs)
Do you have a favourite one?
Yeah, I really like the one where the woman pulls the rock out of the ground and her head pops… off-camera!
You say in your video descriptions that you created Death in Space in your spare time around your day job as an animator?
Yep, during lunchtimes, and then I would stay an hour or two after work most nights for about a year.
How did you find that? What kept you motivated?
I didn’t mind working in my spare time as it felt like fun rather than work most of the time. There were definitely days where I didn’t want to work on it but I think working on 2 second chunks helped as I was never too far from a fully finished piece of animation. Usually I would come up with an idea for the next death while working and that would push me to finish and move on.
Also, my wife Hannah helped me out when I was stuck. The very last death was entirely her idea!
Could you tell me a bit about your role at Cloth Cat Animation and the role the studio played in the making of your film?
I’m a generalist so I do a bit of everything – animating, rigging, designing, a bit of development. For the film, I was able to stay in the studio in my spare time and use a lot of Cloth Cat’s equipment, namely the Cintiqs and computers, which was great. I’d originally done a version of the film using free sound effects, and there was also music at one point – I was in talks with someone to get the rights to a particular piece of classical music – but then Cloth Cat put me in touch with a sound designer at Gorilla, which is our parent company and just upstairs from us in the GloWorks building. I briefed the sound designer, Alice Knipping, and then she, in one draft, created the sound effects for it, and it was great!
Since you released the film online, it’s been shared all over the internet. How did you first find out that Death in Space had gone viral?
Someone commented on the Vimeo page saying ‘It’s had nearly a million views on Imgur!’ And when I looked it was over a million. I think it’s had nearly 5 million on there now!
Have there been any comments or feedback from it being online that you’ve found particularly interesting? I’ve seen one that compared it to No Man’s Sky.
Yeah, there was a lot of No Man’s Sky references, and quite a few people are comparing it to Dumb Ways to Die! There was one guy who posted the link to Dumb Ways to Die and said someone should cover the song and put it to Death in Space! That was quite interesting.
Do you have any plans for future animated deaths?
I do! The working title at the moment is Death in the Wilderness so it’s going to involve a lot of explorers (and maybe some scouts!) being murdered by creatures and the wilderness itself.
You can follow Thomas’ work on Twitter, Vimeo and his website.