San Jose State astronomy lecturer Ignacio Mosqueira is taking his talents to another world.
Mosqueira is directing a sci-fi movie about aliens called “Riddling Angels” that he hopes will be completed by next summer.
Mosqueira has a Ph.D. in astronomy from Cornell University and dabbled in theater.
“After graduate school I actually wrote plays and I acted in a few in San Francisco,” Mosqueira said.
He went back to astronomy and worked at SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence in Mountain View.
While at SETI, Mosqueira said, “[I] was associated with the institute that tries to listen into alien signals.”
After his time at SETI, he took advantage of his status as a lecturer at SJSU and sat in on film classes to hone in on the filmmaking side of his craft.
Mosqueira came up with the idea for his movie and wrote a script.
The movie centers around a young man named Lucas who is having trouble balancing his life after an other-worldly encounter.
“In the movie we’ll have things like wormholes being produced by aliens,” Mosqueira said. “We’ll see the effects of aliens without having green men running around.”
Lucas, played by screen actor Christopher Fung, met Mosqueira through a casting notice that was put online and became very interested in playing
the character.
“I guess you can describe Lucas as a socially disconnected, mildly autistic young man who doesn’t really connect well with people around him,” Fung said.
Lucas comes from a troubled family background in the film which compounds his problems after his alien encounter.
“It’s initially unclear whether it’s his own mental health and his own hallucination of events or whether he’s actually encountered something supernatural,” Fung said.
Because of the nature of the film, Fung was the only person in front of the camera for a lot of the shoots.
Fung said this was the most difficult part of the filming process.
“The biggest obstacle has been tuning out and being reclusive,” he said. “It’s been sort of a self-contained type of performance.”
The other creative force of the movie, along with Mosqueira, is director of photography Kennedy DeSousa.
DeSousa was in charge of the film’s aesthetics and tone.
“I made it dark,” DeSousa said. “It’s almost like a horror movie where the lighting is not perfect, it needed to have a creepy undertone to it.”
DeSousa said he enjoyed the raw style he was able to shoot in and the set pieces involved real locations.
“We shot in all these creative locations and I got to find creative ways to light it up, kind of MacGyver it,” DeSousa said.
Late last year on the film’s Facebook page, Mosqueira said he had enough for a short film. He made the decision to expand it and turn it into a feature-length production.
The choice of growing the film was made to inject more tension into some of the scenes.
“It’s more cinematic to have a little bit of mystery and suspense, so basically I was just trying to increase the level of suspense of the movie,” Mosqueira said.
As a first-time film director, Mosqueira is enjoying the whole process despite the sheer amount of work that goes into it.
“Some people like to just write the script and send it over to Hollywood, it’s more fun when you do everything,” Mosqueira said.
The “Riddling Angels” trailer is available to watch on YouTube.
