There’s a government conspiracy happening in Concord – and the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center is right in the thick of it.
Okay, it’s not a real conspiracy, but there is action happening at our local space center. Filming for First Signal, a 90-minute feature film written and directed by Mark Lund, has been taking place at the Discovery Center for the last few weeks and will continue through the end of the month.
The plot may be familiar to sci-fi fans: set in 2014 on an international stage, First Signal revolves around a government conspiracy being uncovered after “Air Force Space Command receives a signal from an alien satellite in Earth’s orbit,” according to film website IMDB.
Director Lund said the Discovery Center is serving as the film’s military base, a key location given its subject. Specifically, the museum’s conference and function rooms, the main gallery, the observatory and the iconic Mercury-Redstone rocket out front will feature heavily in the film’s locales. Lund said they might work with the planetarium, too.
If you’re having a hard time imagining our humble space museum turned into a government base, Lund said the Discovery Center’s intimate size is actually a selling point.
“It’s not one of those super-massive museums,” he said, noting he first scouted the museum a year ago. “...When people see the film they’ll go ‘Wow, they used almost everything.’ ”
Transforming the museum into a bunker will be mostly a matter of camera angles, color editing and props, Lund said. And, of course, special effects – expect overhead shots of the center to have the adjacent NHTI campus replaced with trees. There might be a tank or two “for gravitas” on the premises as well, Lund said.
So far, First Signal has been a mostly New England production – most of the filming has taken place at the center,Lund said, and he’s currently looking for a large field for a space ship in a pivotal moment in the story. All but two of the crew members are from New Hampshire, and most of the actors are from surrounding states.
There’s still a ways to go before the film hits theaters. Lund said it’ll take about eight months of post-production work to get the film ship-shape, and then he has to market it. He’ll be taking First Signal to the American Film Market in Santa Monica, Calif., in late fall to shop it around; from there, he’s anticipating an April 2020 drop.
Parking changesComing soon: an additional 258 parking meters in the downtown area.
The Concord City Council approved adding meters to 11 streets when it adopted the fiscal year 2020 budget as part of its efforts to overhaul and expand the city’s parking system. Streets affected will include: Center, Chesley, Court, Montgomery, North Main, North State, Pleasant, South, South Spring, South State and Wall Streets, according to city documents.
South State Street will be getting 64 meters, a quarter of the total expected expansion.
Meters installed south of Theatre Street are meant to encourage employees working at the Smile building to use their reserved parking spaces at their private surface lots rather than those on the streets.
It’s been “a chronic problem” for the area “ever since on-street parking was restored along this section of Storrs Street in March 2014,” wrote Matt Walsh, assistant city manager for economic development, in a May report.
“By metering these spaces, and thus encouraging Smile Building employees to use their reserved private spaces, the City will expand the general public’s access to on-street parking in this location,” he wrote.
Financially, it seems like the city’s various changes to the parking system have paid off. According to projections, the fund is expected to generate about $307,614 more revenue than budgeted by the end of the year.
(Caitlin Andrews can be reached at 369-3309, candrews@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @ActualCAndrews.)