FX pro Alan Chan has made Hollywood films look great. Now, he's trying to add the same appeal to space exploration. View Slideshow 
As a visual-effects artist, Alan Chan has sent the Titanic to the bottom of the sea for James Cameron and made the North Pole merry in Polar Express. He has also spiced up movies, including Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and the upcoming 3-D extravaganza Beowulf.
But in his spare time, Chan has been working on an even bigger blockbuster: space exploration. For the past two years, Chan has transformed an extra bedroom in his Long Beach, California, house into a staging area for his Postcards From the Future, a 35-minute mini-epic that he hopes will rally Americans to support manned space missions.
The story of a lonely, moon-bound engineer who builds power grids for the first lunar city, Postcards was made independently, without participation from NASA.
The heavy lifting that individuals like Chan and corporations are doing to promote space travel is sure to be a hot topic at the International Space Development Conference, or ISDC, an annual confab for industry professionals. Postcards will premiere at the conference, which takes place May 25 to 28 in Dallas.
Chan says his project was motivated by the increasing ambivalence Americans have about space travel. In a recent poll, American taxpayers ranked NASA programs 21st on a list of 22 priorities. Many, including insiders, consider NASA a risk-averse, bloated bureaucracy.
Having spent 12 years designing big-budget Hollywood films, Chan has plenty of experience manufacturing wonder. He was able to enlist help from cinematographer Eric Adkins (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) and a crew of FX pros. He also called in favors from cutting-edge camera and software companies.
The result is an ambitious indie film, with 140 effects shots, including detailed, convincing footage of the surfaces of the moon and Mars and of astronauts doing their zero-G work.
While the Malaysian-born Chan shares the same hopes all indie filmmakers do -- that his film will be picked up by a distributor, find a wide audience and land him a three-picture deal -- he said he's mainly driven by concern for our shared future, personified by his three kids, aged 9, 7 and 2.
"I wanted to be an astronaut," he said during a phone interview. "I guess everyone did. I used to think, 'When I grow up, lots of stuff will be happening out there.' But here we are, 35 years later, and we aren't out in space yet. I've resigned myself to the fact that I won't get to go up there, but I want to make it possible for my children to."
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