Chernin Entertainment Picking Up Hot Sci-Fi Short 'Noon' (Exclusive)

3:52 PM PST 2/1/2013 by Borys Kit

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The 12-minute sci-fi short was written and directed by Kasra Farahani, a concept artist and art director on such movies as "Thor" and "Star Trek Into Darkness."

Chernin Entertainment, the production shingle behind Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is dipping into its discretionary fund to pick up the movie rights to Noon, a sci-fi short by Kasra Farahani.

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Farahani is a concept artist who has worked on movies such as Spider-Man 3, Hancock and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and as an art director on Thor, Men In Black 3 and the upcoming Star Trek Into Darkness.

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But harboring filmmaker dreams and working off a screenplay he wrote, Farahani created a short, translating one of his scenes to the screen.

Noon is set in two centuries in the future where, due to a shift in the Earth’s axis, the Arctic is one of the only inhabitable lands left, although it is in a perpetual state of day. The scene focuses on a man who facilitates the transfer of illegal immigrants in Noon, the city-state up there.

While many other sci-fi shorts attempt to impress with whiz-bang special-effects-laden action sequences or show off robots and aliens attacking cities, Farahani keeps the showy sci-fi elements in the background and instead focuses on not only his character work but also tension-building.

This is a guy who wants to show he is putting acting and story first.

Farahani (UTA, Management 360) is attached to direct the feature version of Noon, but Chernin will first develop the project internally and hire a scribe to work on the script before setting it up at a studio.

Chernin is producing a couple of movies that will be released later this year, including Universal's Tom Cruise sci-fi project Oblivion and the Sandra Bullock-Melissa McCarthy comedy The Heat.