Last month, Spanish animator Jesús Orellana premiered his animated short Rosa on the interwebs, with the express purposed of interesting investors in backing a live-action, feature-length version of his project, which he describes as “an epic sci-fi short film that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where all natural life has disappeared. From the destruction awakes Rosa, a cyborg deployed from the Kernel project, mankind’s last attempt to restore the earth’s ecosystem. Rosa will soon learn that she is not the only entity that has awakened and must fight for her survival.”
It turned out to be a good plan: it got immediate notice all the way up and down the media, from Yahoo! To USA TODAY, and the short played (and often won awards) at a wide range of film festivals, from Seattle to Toronto, from SITGES to Screamfest. And now Fox has given Jesus Orellana what he wanted all along: a chance to direct his first feature film, based on the same post-apocalyptic premise. And all that is something less than thirty days (the short appeared on the internet in mid-November.)
You can watch the YouTube trailer here, or enjoy the entire short here at Orellana’s own web site. Or, of course, you can wait a couple of years and stroll down to your local cinema to enjoy it as a full-length film. In any event: pretty fast and furious, and congrats to Jesús!
