Press

It Was Up There is featured in Durango Herald in the Preview of the Durango Independant Film Festival: Read Article @ Durango Herald

Production Timeline

The concept for “It Was Up There” began in the summer of 2021 when my brother, Jay, talked to me about making a drawing for my parents as an anniversary gift that year. He wanted me to create a drawing of the night our parents, Fred & Sarah, saw a UFO while making the 180 mile trip from their hometown of Aztec, in northern New Mexico, to the Albuquerque airport. To get all the details of the story, I decided to record my parents telling the whole story when they came up for the Thanksgiving holiday in November 2021



Over the years, my parents had shared the story in bits and pieces to my brothers and I, but it wasn’t until they sat down and recorded that I realized the story couldn’t just be a drawing, it was just too good. After the holiday, I listened to the recording a few times and decided the best way to tell the story was to create a stop motion animation. Previously, I had only created simple speed-drawing videos that I put on YouTube, but this was something that would need a little bit more planning.



I started out by creating a small magnetic stop motion stage that could fit on a tabletop in my apartment and built a custom iPhone camera mount to attach to the stage and did a few proof of concept videos. Once I saw that it would work I got down to the business of creating and sketching all the props and characters. Once the characters and props were settled on, I created them all by hand using Micron pens on watercolor paper, which I then mounted on simple frames attached to magnets that would keep everything in place on the customer built metal stage I created. By June 2022 all the the characters, text bubbles, UFOs, cars and adorable New Mexico wildlife were drawn, mounted and ready to shoot.



Over the course of two weeks starting in July 2022, I photographed all the frames for the animation and began the process of editing them together. This was the first time I saw the story my parents told began to come alive. By the end of July the first rough cut was completed and ready to be polished up. The first person i contacted was my friend, and musician, David Gould who created a wonderful a musical score to match the animation and bring the whole story to life. I also consulted with my another friend, Rich Sullivan, about what else would be necessary to really make my film the best it could be. He directed me to a wonderful sound engineer, Steve Rossiter, who helped me fix my amateur mistakes from my original recording back in November 2021. Rich also connected me with the post-production expert, Mark Gallay, who helped with the final color correction on the video and advised the final file preparation for the film. The finished film was completed in August 2022 and I can’t wait to show it to the world.

“It Was Up There” is truly a testament to the love and humor that Fred and Sarah Willmon have shown through out their lives which lives on in their children and grandchildren. While they are not sure what they saw in the sky, they know they saw something and “It Was Up There” is for them and for everyone who tells a unbelievable story that can’t be ignored, because it’s the truth.