One small shed for man, one giant leap for mankind ... Backyard to the future: IT consultant Chris Jacobs has built a replica space station in his garden shed as part of a film he's working on in his spare time. Chris Jacobs has a space station in his backyard. True, it's unlikely to fly anywhere - it's actually a hodge-podge of MDF, flower pots, plastic bin lids, duct tape from Bunnings and bits of computer junk salvaged from his day job as an IT consultant - but at first glance it looks convincing. Real enough for the camera, anyway, which is all that matters. Cobbled together in the shed at the back of his rental house in West Footscray (don't tell the landlord), the space station is a key set on the low-budget sci-fi film Jacobs and his friends have been making. Every weekend for three years. And counting. "When will this be over?" his girlfriend Andrea Innocent asks, not entirely rhetorically. Not that she can claim she didn't know what she was in for. "On one of our first dates he invited me back to do some papier mache work on a creature," she confesses. Amazingly, she said yes. Bits of said creatures are scattered around the backyard; they probably won't win any Oscars for special effects, but like the space station, they will probably do the job. Or so Jacobs hopes. His movie MK Outlier started as a simple story about a soldier - played by the writer-director-producer-cinematographer's mate Warren Otteraa - wandering about a deserted Earth, in communication only with a guy on a space station (another friend, David Leeming). Originally, the whole film was going to be made in six weeks. "But then I thought, 'I wonder if I can do creatures cheap,' " Jacobs says. I sit here three years later still wondering. He realised in many movies you only ever see glimpses of the frighteners. "If you're only going to see a few frames, what's wrong with papier mache?' " he asked. "Rain," his girlfriend says. "Rain," Jacobs agrees. Rain is the problem with papier mache. It gets a bit droopy. The elements have, in fact, been a constant foe. There was the cold of winter shooting in a tin shed; the 40-degree days of summer that Otteraa spent running through bush, dressed in military fatigues and loaded up with weaponry, for six hours at a stretch. "There are shots that involve no acting at all," Otteraa says. It's just pure anger from me about the brutal working conditions. If he's asked a lot of his friends, Jacobs has not been easy on himself either. He's poured his heart and soul into this project, his second stab at making a movie. "I started making a feature in 1999 and it was so horrendous I turned it into a short film, which is still unwatchable," he says. But that's OK, I learnt a lot. He's poured his savings into this one, too. How much, exactly? "It's under a million," he says. Probably getting up to around $60,000. To finish it, he estimates he needs another $25,000, and he has turned to crowd-funding site indiegogo.com in a bid to get there. A $50 donation will get you a copy of the movie on DVD; a $5000 contribution will get you the space station itself. If you ever finish this movie, I start ... "We will finish it," Jacobs says determinedly. Will you go again? "Oh yeah," he says. I can't wait, but I can't move on until this one is done. His next project is already ready to go. He says he's written a "cracker of a script." "It's a World War Two time-travel movie," he says. You can't fault a man for dreaming. To contribute visit http://igg.me/at/mkoutlier