MARS EXPRESS: Roundup

We’ve talked about Mars Express so much, we though it’d be handy (see what we did there . . .) to put them all in one place!

Staging and Blocking

We look at how this scene reblocks and resets the ‘camera’ as its characters move through the room.

Five Shots

Our favourite five shots include establishing shots with steeply canted sidewalks and bisected robot brains, all things which you could design and build in real life . . . but that are much, much more expensive and implausible.

Vertigo Effects and Rack Focuses

This sequence uses the ‘rule of three’ to continually return us to the crowd, finally culminating with consequences.

First it gives us Aline Ruby's stomach-dropping POV (0:07-0:11), which it uses to transition to a crowd shot (0:12-0:16).

Then another shot involving Ruby's close call (0:21-0:22) reminds us of the stakes, before a robot falling through the background racks to the angry crowd in the foreground (0:24-0:26).

A compact, effective, stomach-lurching scene!