While I await to get some of the finishing touches filmed in Orlando in 2 weeks, I figured I’d get some of the detailed work going to keep me motivated.
I started toying with the cover art for a DVD case. It’s the first try – I tried to model after the latest Star Wars DVD covers just for the hell of it:
I tired to use some of Photoshops Artistic filters to get sort of a painted picutre look. Kinda worked on Chirs Gregg and Karen, not so much on me and Dave. It’s the first try, I’m sure with some tweeking I can get something pretty cool.
Well, here’s the start of the series of post I mentioned last week regarding my take on Fan Films, and maybe some explanation of led me to write “Fan Film The Series” in the first place.
Let’s start with the one that started this whole mess. The mess meaning the ever growing monster called “fan films”.
Regardless of popular opinion, I don’t consider “Troops” to be that “one.” Don’t get me wrong – Troops is incredible, and probably single handedly ignited the explosion of fan films that exist today. But before Troops, there was another.
I present for your consideration as “the one that started it all”:
Hardware Wars
Where are currently in the 30th Anniversary of the release of Star Wars and fan films are still just beginning on paper, “Hardware Wars” was released 7 months after Star Wars!
It was written and directed by Ernie Fosselius, and produced by Ernie Fosselius and Michael Wiese.
The parody character names include:
Chewchilla the Wookie Monster
Ham Salad
Darph Nader
Fluke Starbucker
Augie Ben Doggie
Princess Anne-Droid
4Q2
Arty Deco
George Lucas has been quoted as saying “Hardware Wars is my favorite Star Wars parody.”
Which pretty much explains what’s happened to Star Wars since 1999.
I don’t know what else to say about this one. Other than – it’s the first.
So instead of trying to explain it, let’s just take a look:
For those that aren’t a regular reader of the NeoZAZ blog, you may have missed an article about my hard drive crashing.
Long story short, my hard drive crashed. Luckily, I had a spare and a back of the drive and was up and functional fairly quickly.
My first order of business was to get back to work on a client’s project, then check the state of affairs on everything else later.
Well, that time came this evening and I was in for an initial shock. When I opened the Fan Film project files, Premiere couldn’t find any of the footage!
I didn’t panic because I have the footage on an external drive, the raw footage backed up, and the original tapes. But still, not finding the footage was pretty stressful since there are about 30 to 50 files per project I’d have to track down and re-direct per project.
Well, I got about 5 files redirected when I noticed a pattern. All the files what were “missing” were supposed to be on the “H” drive.
Hmmm (no “H” pun intended). Maybe there’s something to this.
Low and behold, when I hooked up the damaged drive to try to retrieve some of the data, it through a half of my disc letter out of whack. So into the Disk Manager – reassign drive letters to the appropriate drives, and bam – everything’s back to normal.
So, that was a pretty boring post, I know. Truth is I put it here as a reminder to myself and something I can reference again in the future when this inevitably happens again. And it will happen again because 1 – I have the kind of luck and 2 – I use windoze.
David Smith met up with Dave Fox and Chris Irons to film the one last remaining elusive Pennsylvania scene.
The reason behind its elusiveness was due to the fact that I was running the camera the first time we “shot” that scene in August. Apparently the large green circle with the word “REC” and the large red circle with the word “STOPPED” is not large nor green or red enough for me to notice if the camera is actually recording or not. So yes, I didn’t hit record the first time. I did manage to film the moments before and after that didn’t have anything to do with the movie or series if that counts for anything.
This is the primary reason I write and rough cut the projects. I leave the things that need the attention span longer than that of a gnat to David.
So once again, thanks to Everyone – David, Dave, Chris, Karen, Gregg, John, Sunday, Steve, and my Parents Bill and Jackie for finally making the PA portion of “Fan Film the Series” and “Fan Film the Movie” a 100%, no doubt, in the can, send it to print, wrap!
As we wait for the final filming in Orlando, the final editing of the PA footage, and the final rendering of the post production effects, I was planning to take this time to start a short series of posts regarding Fan Films in general since those are what pretty much inspired me to create this series in the first place.
So, not that the preface is set up, let me change gears and tell a whole other story, though related, that leads to this post.
I was searching youtube.com looking for footage of the fan films I was planning to write about. While watching the trailer for what I consider to be my personal favorite fan film (to be revealed in a post later) the youtube “related videos” column listed something interesting.
“Boba Fett Vs. Predator”.
Okay, I could hear the collective “guish” of everyone rolling their eyes, but hear me out.
The Boba Fett costume looks great, the Predator – well, not so much. But it’s a difficult costume, and considering the typical fan film budget, it’s pretty damn impressive.
However, that’s not what intrigued me about this idea. More, it was the feasibility of the story it’s self.
Consider this – there’s never been, at least to my knowledge, a pin-point location named for the Predator’s home world. In fact, I theorized the Predators were most likely nomads until that steaming pile of celluloid “AVP-R” came out and it gave us a glimpse of the Predator home world. Regardless, the location of said planet was not disclosed. So it could easily be in our galaxy, or in a galaxy far, far away. Even more likely, somewhere in between.
Okay, so the question of location is out of the way. “But what about ‘A long time ago’” you may ask.
Ah, let me give you my take on that. We’ll just throw out the idea that the events of Star Wars happen really, really, long ago. Like, millions of years ago. So long that we couldn’t possibly benchmark those events with anything in the regards to the history of the earth that we know about.
So, Predator history. First, in AVP (the first, less steaming one) the premise of the whole film starts with the discovery of a Mayan / Incan / Aztec hybrid temple that was constructed tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years ago. As we learn, this temple is a hunting/training ground for Predators. Good start. So, that doesn’t make up for the each few million years yet. Ah, but one thing to help support that idea is the shoulder canons. The shoulder cans are stored in the temple. They may have been sitting there for thousands of years, yet they are pretty dang technologically advanced which demonstrates a very, very long time of technological evolution.
Now, the further point could be made that “Hey, for all we know, some Predator lackey put those canons in the temple the day before the hunt.”
My response is, though less compelling, “No one knows how old the Predators are so it’s entirely possibly they existed a long time ago, so nah!”.
At this point of the post, I realize my original intention was to just embed this youtube video and say, “Hey ya’ll check this out”. So, here it is:
Well, I guess that’s a misleading headline, since this post is actually the announcement. So I guess it should have said “Release Date to be announced in the next few sentences.” Or I guess it could have said “Release Date Announced, see below”. Or, just “Release Date” now that I think of it.
What was I saying again?
Oh, right – the release date.
The release as of this post for the first episode of “Fan Film The Series” is December 19th, 2008.
Everything’s on track to hit that date, and actually currently on track to be done before then, knock on wood.
There may even be time to a new trailer between now and then with the new footage and re-shoots, but time will tell on that one.
When the release happens, which should be December 19th as earlier stated, this blog will re-direct to its new home at www.fanfilmtheseries.com. Feel free to visit it now if you’d like, it has the trailer if you haven’t seen it already. We’re also toying with some QuickTime H264 codec encoding. The current trailer is our first attempt so the files a bit large. We have high hopes of improving the quality/size ratio soon.
After yet another extremely productive weekend in PA, the Pennsylvania re-shoots are in the can (oh, okay, there’s 2 teeny tiny scenes yet to be done, but they’ll be filmed and forwarded before I’m done editing what I brought back, so let’s not count those).
Re-writing these scenes thanks to my broken ankle went down to the wire. I wrote one scene on a note pad in the airport, David Smith came up with one scene while we were viewing the edited footage from the last shoot, and David, Chris Irons, and Dave Fox wondered into the woods on Saturday and improvised a scene that came out better than anything that could have been scripted.
Now all that leaves is the final Florida filming. Previously, we were awaiting my wife’s schedule to clear to shoot. As Murphy’s law would have it, her schedule is back to normal, and now we’re patiently waiting for my ankle to heal.
While I wait, it gives me time to figure out exactly what to do and what not to do in terms of releasing this monster project that’s starting to take on a life of its own.
Right, here’s the plan – though I expect it to change in the near future if not by the end of the day:
Fan Film: The Movie – edited and released and submitted to…
Fan Film: The Series – Edited and release a new episode each week for 6 weeks on this site (which there is a new site waiting on deck for these release, BTW)… These episodes will have additional scenes, extended footage, and episode specific special effects scenes that won’t be in the movie version. Each week we hope to have one of the actors from the project as a guest on the our podCast “The D-1-3 Show” to talk about that busy weekend.
Steve Bost’s Inside the Actor’s Cabin – Edited and released on this site.
Last but not least, in the ream of “Deleted Magic”, “Building Empire”, and “Return to Jedi”, I may put together a “Fan Film – Way Too Much Information Edition” DVD image with alternate takes, cut scenes, comments, etc and host a bit torrent for download.
But before the “Too Much Info” DVD, and after the series release, David and I will be back to concentrating on his solo project “Thacos Last Stand”.
We may even possibly film a sequel to 2:40 next month, but don’t hold your breath.
Actor, Playwright, and Stand-up Comic Steven Bost lent his time and talent this weekend in filming an impromptu “Inside the Actor’s Studio” parody with the “Fan Film The Series” actors.
Chris Irons, Matt Hunsworth, Dave Fox, and Karen Hunsworth were in the audience as the actors while David Smith stood behind the camera capturing it all for a future featurette following the release of Fan Film.
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