Dust is a short film that is one awesome example of how crowd-sourcing and Kickstarter can make amazing things happen.

This is the matte painting of the mine that's featured in the film. I wish I could draw with this kind of detail. What amazing talent some artists possess. I wonder how they do this? Photoshop? Click to Embiggen and really get an eyeful.

I watched this short film called "Dust" over the weekend (it's about 23 minutes long), and I thought it was really good. The story is pretty straight forward. Most of humanity lives in walled cities, and there are people called "Trackers" who are basically a kind of medieval "witch doctor"? At least that's what I got from it. The only one of note is of course the main character who has been studying a lifeform called a hydra which has the ability to basically evolve to cure anything. It cleaned up the streams of the world (making them non-toxic), and it appears to be able to neutralize diseases too. It's definitely an interesting concept.

Here's the official description of the movie from the Vimeo site:

A Sci-Fi/Fantasy inspired by anime and classic horror, Dust is set in a harsh and unpredictable natural environment where people have isolated themselves in an ancient city behind a massive wall. A socially marginalized tracker teams up with a black-market merchant to save the society that has rejected his way of life.

I kind of wonder if the dystopian world of "Dust" is some alternate Earth of the future or if this is a story of humans who have come to live on an alien world and essentially lost any technical advantage over the environment that they used to have. The alien life evolves rapidly, which is interesting to think about.

If you have the time, I highly suggest that you watch the embedded video. It's good to see a sci-fi story with a Japanese influence in it (was it filmed in Japan?), and it's really well done (I heard it was crowd-sourced). That and the dialogue is quite good (as is the acting).

Dust from Ember Lab on Vimeo.