Stranded – a short movie

This post describes very briefly the “making of” my short Instagram reel which you can find here.

Motivation

The story was inspired by a reel from Charlie Reynolds and his brave astronaut riding a motorbike in Bolivia… I wanted to achieve something with footage I had available.

Source material

I traveled in the north-western desert of Saudi Arabia recently; see my instagram posts about that trip. Most of the used snippets in this reel originate from there, especially from around Al-Ula.

• You see short videos of Dadan (also called Lihyan) and Hegra.
• The final “mirrored cube” is the Maraya concert hall, the largest mirror building in the world, located in the middle of a stunning desert scenery.

The spoken text is actually an AI voice provided by ElevenLabs, based on a text I wrote with the help of ChatGPT. I used the Eleven Multilingual V2 speech model with the “Tino” voice.

Most of the used video snippets and sound bites which I did not create myself originate from Pixabay:

• The incoming request sound bite was created by SageTyrtle.
• The intro astronaut video which I use as overlay on the landscape was provided by Paul Jean.
• The video with the military codes is here.
• The data transmission sound was created by GameramPC.
• The distress signal was created by EdgeofOctober.
• The rocket launch sound effect was designed by SonixFXSounds.
• I created the video clip of launching rockets from Maraya with a photo I took on site, and a prompt to the Perplexity Pro AI. Similar for the walking soldier.

Used tools

I filmed my videos on location in Saudi Arabia with an Osmopocket 3.

Everything was mixed together into a video with DaVinci Resolve 19. I did some colour adjusting (with LUT “SLog3SGamut3.CineToSLog2-709.cube”) and further changes, mainly sound effects and overlays such as glitches.