Australian
Screen

Project Vlad is 3D animation made on the SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.) platform. SGI, known for its clean, untouched-by-human-hands look, is a perfect foil for the sterile spacecraft environment of this film (see also Has Beans, 1998). Writer, director and animator Aaron Rogers effectively contrasts the vast, steely-clean setting with Vlad’s human-like longing for contact.

In the monochrome, sterile interior of his spacecraft, Vlad attempts to make contact with earth and home. Coloured grids flicker and beep to no avail, the map of the world spreads on a huge screen at his console with his target, Russia, giving no response. Bereft and alone, Vlad writes yet another letter home and files it in his drawer. He tries to contact Mission Control, but his lips move wordlessly. The microphone, the huge letters CCCP (or USSR, the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and Lenin’s heroic profile are the only witnesses to Vlad’s lonely demise. His spacecraft recedes into bleak, infinite space.

The sound design (by Luke Dunn Gielmuda) is remarkable for its sensitivity and panache (see also Ward 13, 2003). ‘Sovietland’ (opening titles score by Frank Talley) introduces us to the heroic agenda of the Soviet mission, and is an ironic comment on what will follow. In the scene in his darkened room, when Vlad is writing a letter home, we hear Brahms’s ‘Lullaby’ (1868), a well-known tune associated with children, sleeping and the safety of home. Luke Dunn Gielmuda won the Australian Screen Music Award for Special Achievement in Sound Design, 1999, and was nominated for an AFI Award for Best Non-Feature Sound.

Project Vlad was distributed by the Australian Film Institute and screened at film festivals worldwide including the Festival of International Animated Film in Stuttgart, Germany; Valladolid International Film Festival, Spain; and the Toronto Digital Image Festival, Canada. It was a finalist at the Japan Digital Animation Festival and was nominated for Best Animation Film at the 1999 AFI Awards.