Vimeo short about space whales to become a major motion picture about space whales

By Ignatiy Vishnevetsky | March 23, 2015 | 9:17pm

Aux Features Film

Vimeo—the video-sharing service for people who are really into three-axis gimbal stabilizers, anamorphic flares, and Voigtlander Nokton lenses—is about as close as filmmaking’s tech side has to a social media hub, a bottomless archive of music videos, tech demos, and wedding-videographer reels, annotated with lengthy comment threads about ProRes 422 workflow. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise, then, that one of the site’s recent hits, the the three-and-a-half-minute proof-of-concept video The Leviathan, is getting made into a Hollywood movie. What’s surprising is that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.

Admittedly, The Leviathan—essentially one effects-heavy scene about a spacecraft chasing a flying, whale-like creature—isn’t some kind of out-of-nowhere basement production. For one thing, it was directed by Ruairi Robinson (Last Days On Mars), with creature designs by Avatar’s Jordu Schell. For another, there’s already a full script by Jim Uhls (Fight Club, and some of Jumper).