A hybrid fiction-documentary-animation sci-fi film about a South Asian American astronaut named Rashida who discovers audio messages that people have sent back in time to their former selves. Featuring actual real-life audio messages people recorded for their past selves.
Director’s Vision for ‘On The Blue Table’
A few years ago, I hit a major career milestone. I wrote and directed my first feature film. It was a goal I’d been working toward for a long time. Hitting that goal got me thinking about what I had achieved, where I had started, etc. and in particular I found myself thinking a lot about the hopes and dreams I’d had when I was a teenager. I started to think about what I would tell myself from my current future vantage point. I was also trying to find ways to reach out and connect with people after spending a lot of time working on my own on the post-production of the film. So, without really knowing what would come of it, I put out a call online for people to send me “voicemails to their past selves” – if they could send a message back in time to themselves, what would they say? I received messages from friends, family, and complete strangers. At the same time, I had been going stir crazy because I couldn’t go out and immediately make my next feature film (the script wasn’t ready, I didn’t have the financing). My desire to make something, anything, found a rather strange fixation: the old blue plastic table from IKEA in my backyard. My kids had used it to paint pictures or play with toys and I’d never really given it much thought. But one day, playing with my kids out in the yard, I grabbed my camera and looked at the coarse weathered surface of that table through a macro adapter. It looked like the surface of a far-off planet! For reasons that I cannot explain other than to say it just occurred to me, I decided that this blue table planet and the voicemails to the past belonged together. And so, I crafted a fictional story about two astronauts on a blue table planet finding those real life voicemail messages that people had sent to their past selves. I taught myself how to animate on my computer at home and I cast two wonderful voice actors online, Hira Ismail and Nicholas Le, who I never actually met in person. The result is a hybrid fiction, documentary, animated, sci-fi short film – a project that I did not set out to make but that revealed itself to me and has taught me so much about the hopes and dreams we all have.
