...Outer Space

Had an interesting revelation when looking up the trailer on youtube.

When you search for "Getting Outer Space trailer" the other results that come up are for "Plan 9 From Outer Space," "It Came From Outer Space," "Teenagers From Outer Space," "I Married a Monster From Outer Space," and "Killer Clowns From Outer Space."

This is just awesome. And that's not sarcastic.

As many of you know, our title has been around well before the movie. It was one of the first things I came up with when I first wrote the short film back in 2005/2006. It's a great title. That's why I kept it. The idea behind it has always been the slight play on words with the first part being "Getting Out" which can then be sort of thought as "Getting Out to Space," which is what your motivation is when building a spaceship. Also, more straightforward is just thinking of "outer space" as an idea/goal/mindset that is obtained. In some ways the title is laying out the plot and that "outer space" is the end goal of the movie...whatever that may represent. This story has existed in probably 30 different conceptual forms in my head over the years, but it's always at its core been about someone building a spaceship as an emotional escape (because doing it for real is absurd...which is also what i like about it). So whether the ship literally takes off and the person literally "gets out" or not, the idea and process of building it is a distraction and escape from real world problems. The ship is both literally and metaphorically a vessel to escape the world.

In this iteration of the story it's also a theme with the father and Neil both leaving/trying to leave their current lives for something else. Escapism is a major theme.

But that's all to say why it's always been essential for me to spell out "Outer Space" rather than refer to more common shorthand of just "Space". The suggestion of "Out" is core to the whole title.

And apparently spelling out "Outer Space" in a title kind of puts you in this category of kitschy space movies. Particularly old fashioned black and white ones. Since most of the actual space references in the movie are inspired by retro sci-fi, this is really actually an awesome thing. It's the sort of thing you'd expect was intentional, but it actually never crossed my mind until now. But now when you search for movies with "outer space" in the title, our movie will be lumped in with these genre films which are the foundation for our visual/cultural interpretation of "space."

It's very cool to me.