At fxphd, we love hearing about how postgrads have taken skills they’ve learnt in our courses and applied them in the real world. One such story comes from Stuart Bender in Perth, Australia who has made a short film called Excursion.

Above: watch the trailer for Excursion.

Excursion has been filmed, but Bender and co-producer Mick Broderick have also launched a crowd funding drive on Pozible to raise A$5,000 to help finalise post-production, create promotional materials, organise a screening in Perth and submit the film to local and international film festivals.

And, they’ve nearly reached their goal. With 15 days to go the pledge is currently at A$4,706.

The project is an 18 minute short filmed in Perth and deals with high school students trapped in a university library while two killers roam the corridors. Excursion was inspired by tragic school shooting rampages around the world. “By making the film we intended to create an intervention into the way that mainstream media coverage and public discussions of these events are dominated by a kind of obsessive attention to the killers’ motives and context,” says Bender, who currently teaches visual effects and screen production at Curtin University in Perth.

Excursion was shot on the RED Scarlet at 4K resolution with a base frame rate of 23.978fps. The film was edited in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 and exported as 2K TIFF files for compositing and finishing in After Effects CS6. Bender says he’s drawn on skills picked up in several fxphd courses, including “sound prep for the mixing guys using techniques from AUD205 (Audition), grading (GRD202) and a bunch of Mocha stuff (MOC211).”

For the crowd sourcing pledge, several rewards are being offered such as a digital download and DVD of the film, tickets to the screening in Perth, school resource packs and producer credits. In addition, and something we think is quite unique, the filmmakers are offering contributors the chance to vote on their choice of two alternate endings.

Check out Excursion’s Pozible page for more details – www.pozible.com/excursion.

We certainly wish Stuart and his team the best with Excursion and look forward to seeing the film.