The young kid adventure film "Earth to Echo" leads audiences through an emotional and chaotic last night for a group of children who find an alien.
During a press conference on June 13 the young cast of the film Teo Halm, Astro, Reese Hartwig and Ella Wahlestedt, the writer Henry Gayden, Director Dave Green and Producer Andrew Panay talked about the joy they had making this film, the positive message they wanted the film to portray and the homage to 80s adventure films.
"What we are excited about, in this movies, is I don't think, I don't know about you guys, but as an adult heartbreak stinks, saying goodbye is awful, getting into an argument with a friend is terrible and then when you're 12, heartbreak stinks, having a girl say she doesn't like you is terrible, having a friend make fun of you is the worst," Panay said. "The difference now is that as an adult you can process it a little better," he said.
That's just what they wanted the movie to be, they wanted it to feel real and treat the kids in the movie as people with real issues and that's just what made the movie relatable.
The chemistry on screen was helped by having the cast rehearse together for a week prior to the film.
"We are really close now, we are good buds," Wahlestedt said.The friends all go on an adventure throughout the film which gets to be exciting.
There's not much more exciting than saving an alien, running from a secret branch of the government and keeping the night's activities from your unsuspecting parents, but the cast seems to like adventure.
"Ella is an adrenaline junkie, she wants to go sky diving and stuff. I guess the boys were good," Halm said.Working with a CGI alien which wasn't fully there only made
"I'm good on the adventure stuff," Astro said.
"Being in a movie is a big adventure," Wahlestedt said.
"My biggest adventure is happening right now," Hartwig said.
"Pretending something is there, when it really isn't, just because it is left to the imagination, it makes our jobs as actors harder," Wahlestedt said. "It is over all our job and we try to have as authentic a reaction as possible," she said.An actual model was provided for the cast, but still much of who echo is still came from the CGI.
"What's good about the film is, look at how far technology has come, look at how effective it can be, look what has happened to the generation," Panay said.Even with the model the cast still had an added issue to worry about. Since the size of echo is so small, they had to handle it with extra care.
"We had to be careful. Legacy Effects, the crew who made it, they would have to have him (echo) harnessed in," Halm said. "If we dropped him, I was the one who held him most of the time when we used the animatronic one, and I'm very clumsy myself, and they were like 'Teo if you drop that...' And the same thing with the camera," he said.The size was an issue with how fragile the small model was but even with that the mechanics of it seemed to be another issue with the small cute echo.
"The challenge of echo, since you want him to be this big (small) instead of this big (larger), the challenge is how do we pack all those robotics in," Green said.
