Filmmaker builds backyard space station in Footscray

Movie magic: Part-time filmmaker Chris Jacobs with cast on the set of his space station - a backyard garden shed transformed. Photo: Joe Armao

Chris Jacobs has a space station in his backyard. True, it's unlikely to fly anywhere it's a hotchpotch of MDF and flower pots and plastic bin lids and duct tape from Bunnings, and bits of computer junk salvaged from his day job as an IT consultant but at first glance it looks utterly convincing.

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It looks real enough for the camera, anyway, which is all that matters. Cobbled together in the shed at the back of his rental house in West Footscray (don't tell the landlord), the space station is a key set on the low-budget sci-fi film Jacobs and his friends have been making. Every weekend for three years and counting.

''When will this be over?'' asks his long-suffering girlfriend, Andrea Innocent, not entirely rhetorically.

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Not that she can claim she didn't know what she was in for. ''On one of our first dates he invited me back to do some papier mache work on a creature,'' she confesses. Amazingly, she said yes.

Bits of said creatures are scattered around the backyard; they probably won't win any Oscars for special effects, but like the space station they'll do the job. Or so Jacobs hopes.

His movie MK Outlier started as a simple story about a soldier played by the writer-director-producer-cinematographer's mate Warren Otteraa wandering about a deserted Earth, in communication only with a guy on a space station (another friend, David Leeming). Originally, the whole film was going to be made in six weeks. ''But then I thought, 'I wonder if I can do creatures cheap','' says Jacobs. ''I sit here three years later still wondering.''

He realised that in many movies you only ever see glimpses of the frighteners, which got him thinking again. ''If you're only going to see a few frames, what's wrong with papier mache?''' he asked himself.

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Filmmaker builds backyard space station in Footscray