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Short 11Min 20Sec 2025 Experimental Sci Fi
1,001 years after we're all gone, two janitors debate if Earth ever existed. They're lost in space aboard a dying mothership. Religious orders watch their every move...
DIRECTORS NOTE
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We made Contract Generation as a defiant antithesis to a culture more unitarian than ever. Artificial intelligence and industrialized isolation in the past couple of years have created an anti-art world. The call to make something as an outlet has gone from a pretense for the privileged to a survival mechanic of the 2020s. We had to make something "out there", and discover something new in the process. So, there's no traditional story in Contract Generation, but traces of something great that may be around the corner. Evidently, our movie is a proof for a much larger film that MAY exist someday. The immediate future of DSME lies in 2 hour movies, that could never have been squeezed into the shorts we're known to do. In this small film we have here... we proved one thing. Nothing looks like a DSME movie, nothing talks like a DSME movie, and nothing feels like a DSME movie. And in a world where anything done before can be perfectly remade by a computer... doesn't that matter more than quality itself?
At the beginning of 2023, I formed an LLC for DSME Film and got an office on the first floor of a church in downtown Tacoma, Washington. This movie was shot in that church over weekend nights... unauthorized and undetected. Though finally a taxable event, filmmaking was in a slump for me and my cohort. I started an initiative called "Project Outlet". We were to force ourselves to film at least once a month for the entire year, no matter what. This is the only standalone project to come from those days.
I signed the lease to the original "DSME studios" with Robert Rostad, who would be the writer and co-producer of the film. The first of dozens of firsts; shared authorship. No longer was there a clear singular voice in making the film. Finally moviemaking could stop being a lonely club where only a single person authentically cared if a movie was even finished. Having another person on the project with equal stake - and leverage - is humbling. There's no rockstars on a production with a unified front of voices crying equally into the identity of a piece. But that's what needs to happen on large (real) movies. The new paradigm of processes going into Contract Generation prepared me for a higher level of filmmaking. When the art really counts and money has to be made, one person can never do it all. My dream is to only be 1% of a movie - surrounded by masters in separate fields that want the same thing in different ways. It's time to make features.
Additional credits: Synopsis/mission statement by Dulvlu Spa and Rob Rostad Opening DSME fanfare by Cameron Schmidt
Synopsis
Living entire lives inside giant septic pipes, the workers discuss their lives aboard a Noah's ark-like ship meant to colonize a new planet. But no one remembers where, why or when this should happen. The human adventure hasn’t changed much: We cook, we dance, and we sometimes bump when allowed. Clogged drains have to be addressed by quiet heroes better suited to lead than those who seek the offices of command; religious zealots who spy on every conversation. It's the first day of the job for one plumber - an idealist. In a totally rigid world, he ends up where he shouldn't and saying what he can't.
Contract Generation is the final production of the DSME short film era, and releases on the day of Dulvlu Spa's 30th birthday. It treats science and religion in equal measure to create a new kind of sci-fi in the detritus of a genre stagnated. The question from all this is: Can Science Fiction be religious? Where are we going, and what have we lost? Or was it burned as fuel…to stay warm.
A routine maintenance check turns into a dialectic that unravels ideas that science fiction normally ignores. The religion of the 31st century is built entirely outside of Earth; where the icons are rocket ships, the saints are pen pushers, and the angels are employee of the month. It's a cold theocracy, scientifically tuned by a perfect civilization to be the most effective and inescapable way of thinking. But does the ultimate utility make it true, or just convenient? 31st century ideals completely alien to us still have to do battle with the eternal human spirit. Or what amount of it survives us into the stars above.
Despite being a final project, this is my most experimental movie. In the literal sense. Every technique used was done for the sake of being done a first time. Holograms? Sure. Miniatures? Might as well. Baroque lighting? Bet. A project that closes one decade of a creator's life... and christens another.
All effects are done in camera.
300 sound effects made from scratch.
Sets built out of recycled toys and bottles.
Every old school camera trick put to the test to make it all believable.
Never had I needed to learn so much to do so little. It was like a penance.
Special Effects
Sets and Props
One mans Trash Another mans Treasure.
Estranged Design
Estranged Design
Premiere Day
Premiere Day
Premiere Day
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CONTRACT GENERATION SQUAD
Dulvlu Spa - Producer
Robert Rostad - Assistant Producer
Dulvlu Spa - Director
Robert Rostad - Writter
CAST
Beau Priser
Jackson Berry
Josiah Miller
CREW
Props Department - Robert Rostad
Production Design - Robert Rostad
Set Construction - Robert Rostad
Sound Engineer-
Gaffing -
Sound Effects - Dulvlu Spa
Sound Effects Assistant - Chrystal Kain
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