Local sci-fi movie 'The Emissary' to premiere at DCA

Aliens interrupting meditation walks in Door County! Generators washing up on the shores of the Peninsula with latent bombs about to explode!

Sound like something out of a science fiction movie? It's "The Emissary," a feature-length movie, written produced and directed by Sister Bay resident Tim Erskine that was filmed mostly in Door County and will have its world premiere Feb. 27 at Door Community Auditorium in Fish Creek.

The movie tells the story of Koyper (played by Peter Ciesla), a spaceman who lands his ship in Newport State Park and runs into Jim (played by Erskine), a local resident taking a mediation walk. The two join forces to disarm an alien power generator, lost during the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald that washes up on the shore of the Peninsula and is slated to blow up. Mark Moede, Pat Palmer, Kay Allmand and Paul Erskine are among the other cast members.

While the sci-fi genre typically screams bad special effects and B-movie mania, Erskine departs from the norm, going somewhere no sci-fi director has gone before by approaching the film in a more realistic manner.

"I was interested in depicting science fiction in a realistic sense," Erskine said. "The genre has gotten very cliché and very influenced by 'Star Wars,' which I love, but that's a fantasy. They all have hyperspace, that's all aliens — none of these things could happen in reality, so why not tell other stories based in real physics."

A physicist himself, Erskine had no trouble mapping out the time it would actually take for Koyper to travel to Earth from his ancient alien colony, or creating the physical details of the colony itself, including how many of the 30,000 residents reside in each of the 29 "arms" that exist on the colony.

A fan of the classic sci-fi film "The Day the Earth Stood Still," Erskine said he knew he wanted to have his main character arrive from a galaxy far, far away.

"I knew I wanted to bring a character down from outer space," he said. "It sets up the sort of 'fish out of water' story, which is good for humor, and allows the character to see, with fresh eyes, what we see down here."

Speaking of a fish out of water, while Erskine had experience directing movies — he made a 20-minute short film titled "The Case of the Tainted Cheese Curds" which appeared at the Green Bay Film Festival in 2010 — he admitted he had no idea of the time it would take to complete his first full-length feature film.

"It's been almost a four-year commitment. When I started I didn't know how long it was going to take, but I'm famous for living in a distorted time zone of my own," he joked.

The first footage for "The Emissary" came out of a visit to the Palomar Observatory in California, where Erskine was sitting with his brother Dave, who is also a physicist, at the observation deck.

"It was kind of coincidence that we were there," Erskine said. "We were sitting in the control room and I had my movie camera with me, and I said while were here, let's just shoot this scene real quick. So I wrote a couple lines of dialogue and shot the first scene."

Erskine also chose to incorporate the Edmund Fitzgerald into the story, knowing its story would fit well into the plot.

"We knew we wanted to start the movie off with a bang, so we wanted to include something memorable," he said. "The notion of using a historical event like the Edmund Fitzgerald and the Gordon Lightfoot song 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' is a thing to sort of get the drama going, even though (the film) is a comedy."

However, it was the wreck of that seemed to sink Erskine's timetable in terms of filming, with that particular footage being incredibly difficult to capture.

"The biggest challenge has been creating the visual effects of sinking the Edmund Fitzgerald. To get the water effects, it's far more challenging because there aren't a lot of computerized tools to create water synchronization," Erskine said. "It was a steep learning curve (for me)."

Erskine said he only recently completed filming the final water shots, noting it was a lot of trial and error.

Besides water, he had to contend with weather while filming the movie. The final scenes are shot on Sturgeon Bay's Michigan Street Bridge, and, while Erskine notes how much fun he had filming those final scenes, the weather was a bit of a beast to contend with.

"That was the most memorable part of the movie (to film) for sure," Erskine said. "We were filming from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. It was December and there was a 35 mph crosswind and it was extremely challenging to get the footage. A wind whooshed through my car blowing all the pages of my shooting script over the bridge and into the water below … But somehow we made it work."

Despite the challenges, Erskine stayed true to his realistic vision, noting that you won't find any cheesy special effects or fantasy figures in his film.

"Quite intentionally, we don't actually show an alien in the movie," Erskine said. "They're called an emissary because they're somewhere between humans and the aliens. I personally don't believe aliens have ever visited the earth, despite the film."

He wants the story to be the showcase of the piece, saying he hopes "it will captivate sci-fi fans."

His wife, Holly, who helped Tim produce the movie and write the script, is also novelizing the movie, saying "it's quite a switch for me, as I'm used to science writing. But I'm having a ball with it, though it's slow going."

FYI

The world premiere of Tim Erskine's "The Emissary" is at 7 p.m. Feb. 27 at Door Community Auditorium, 3926 Wisconsin 42, Fish Creek, as part of DCA's Movies at the Door series. Tickets are $5 and part of the proceeds go to Friends of Gibraltar, the Door County Humane Society and the Door County YMCA. For tickets or more information, visit the DCA box office, call (920) 868-2728 or go to www.dcauditorium.org. "The Emissary" also will open the Green Bay Film Festival at 7 p.m. March 6 at the Radisson Hotel and Conference Center; for more, go to www.gbfilmfestival.org.