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BEN BROWN'S FLYING MACHINE

By Michael THORP

Animation - Development 2022

When the first manned mission to Mars disappears and its crew explorer vehicle crashes onto the Brown's wheat farm, what Ben discovers leads him to build a flying machine that will change his final high school year and the world forever. It leads him on voyage to a world beyond our universe...

- Year of production
- 2022
- Genres
- Animation, Science-fiction, Action/Adventure
- Countries
- NEW ZEALAND
- Languages
- ENGLISH
- Budget
- 1 - 3 M$
- Duration
- 120 mn
- Director(s)
- Michael THORP
- Writer(s)
- Michael THORP
- Producer(s)
- Michael THORP
- Synopsis
- When the first manned mission to Mars disappears and its crew explorer vehicle crashes onto the Brown's wheat farm, Ben finds inside it an old man in white robes, bloodied and charred. He takes Ben’s hand and cries out to him, but then an explosion throws Ben from the spacecraft and lightning rains down upon it.
  
  At the crash site, the FBI interrogates Ben and dismisses his story as incredulous, but the world press gets wind of it and he is ridiculed at school. At home things are desperate with the family farm bankrupt and Ben still haunted by his father’s death three months earlier.
  
  He sits his SAT exams and three week later, the school principal calls him and his mother to his office, where a psychologist and a professor are also present. He tells Ben that he got perfect scores in his physics and math exams; the only one to do in the entire country, and the only one to have done his workings in ancient cuneiform script.
  
  Ben agrees to meet the psychologist, and after two sessions, he takes Ben to an astrophysicist at the University of Kansas to test his knowledge, which Ben says the old man has somehow imparted to him. However, after Ben completes a star map and a astrophysics question using cuneiform script, the astrophysicist concludes that while his use of cuneiform script is impressive, his knowledge is not especially extraordinary.
  
  However, in his parent’s barn, Ben experiments and develops a device that can fly. He bolts it to a platform and flies it high into the night sky and comes down and skims across top of the wheat fields but hits a wheel barrow and is catapulted into the wheat field. Maryann, his classmate and neighbour, sees him from her bedroom window. She comes running over, but he drives her away; jealous and angry about her boyfriend, who had insulted him a few weeks earlier.
  
  That night, he fixes the platform and flies out above the wheat fields to the place where his father had died in a tractor accident, and it suddenly lights up before him. He sees his father and himself standing beside the tractor moments before his death, and he sees his father telling “himself” to leave. Ben cries out to “himself” to stay, but then they fade away into the night. Tears in his eyes, he flies off and descends in front of his father’s grave, and then he races across the countryside at breakneck speed and disappears above the Gulf of Mexico.
  
  The next day, he tells the psychologist about his platform and his father’s death, saying it wasn’t an accident but suicide, and he blames himself for not stopping it.
  
  That night, he flies to Maryann’s window only to see her taking off her bra. She sees him and rushes indignantly to the window. He apologizes, and she softens. Then, they shoot off across the countryside and along a sea of translucent clouds.
  
  The next day, to his mother’s delight, Maryann visits him with a picnic hamper. And on a rug under a Giant Oak, she shows him a flyer....
- Partners & financing
- Seeking $100,000 to produce the 3.5 minute proof of concept trailer.