Written By: Ken Hulsey Sources: Twitch / GODAIZER Web Site / Avery Guerra
If you have actually taken the time to read many of my articles here at MIN, you have undoubtedly noticed my tendency to bitch and moan about copy-cat films, the fact that film makers seem to all make the same type of film at the same time, i.e. Bigfoot films and giant shark flicks, and the use of CGI animation over old-school stop-motion effects. That being said, you will probably be surprised to learn that there is one genre out there that no matter how many films get produced, I won't complain about it, that is, the giant robot genre, and I am actually thankful that the latest improvements in CGI effects have given film makers the tools to produce quality work on a small budget.
I know, you just fell out of your chair.
True, many of these films are either homages, or based on existing robot franchises, which I suppose makes them copy-cats, none the less, but I love them anyway.
Today's film, "GODAIZER", is an homage, it is CGI, it's story seems to be based (heavily) on "Tetsujin 28-go", some of the mecha looks exactly like the ones in "Macross" and the monster looks kinda like the one from "Ultraman: The Next." In fact some of the story looks like it may have been inspired by "Ultraman: The Next" or possibly "WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3", which to me doesn't matter, because it looks like one hell of a cool short film.
"GODAIZER" has been a three year project for film maker Hillary Yeo who has poured both heart and soul into creating a visually stunning tribute to the great giant robot anime of the 1970s and 80s.
When I say stunning, I mean stunning. Though the animation in "GODAIZER" is computer generated, I has all the qualities of hand-painted art.
Truly beautiful.
No word yet on any release info on this one, so we'll just have to wait and see what develops.
Until then, here is the trailer plus a few stills:
Written By: Ken Hulsey Sources: Robert Hood / Avery Guerra
For the last couple of years American independent film makers have caught a major case of the 'Bigfoot Movie Crazies' with at least a dozen movies about the legendary beast being put into production. Now, it seems that the trend has spread across the Pacific to Australia, where low-budget movie maker Cole Bayford has decided to feature the countries own version of Sasquatch in his short film entitled "Yowie".
The film itself is actually a graduate project for the Griffith University Film School: Bachelor of Film and Screen Media Production Program in which Bayford is currently enrolled and is being filmed in actual Yowie country, Springbrook, NSW, a location where the creature has been sighted numerous times over the years.
Bayford had this to say about the project, "The themes in Yowie are of young love, jealousy and the ‘what if’. What would you do if you witnessed a death in the bush? Yowie explores the reality of basic human instincts and reactions. The film showcases the strength of relationships and the importance of communication between people in terror. The story delves into the speed of emotional change and rising paranoia’s effect on decisions.'
Sounds like some pretty well thought out stuff.
Here is the official synopsis:
Deep in the Australian bush, a legend lies dormant. In an effort to rekindle their relationship a couple drives into the hills for a romantic retreat. James and Vivian find themselves caught between a breakdown in their relationship and a fight for survival against a mysterious beast. What seemed like a new beginning is now a terrible encounter with the unknown. After James mistakes Angus, a harmless bushman, for the Yowie, he shoots him dead. The only way they can endure is to find a way to trust each other again, which, in this extreme situation, is easier said than done. Will they survive the night? And if they do, where will they stand after all that’s happened? This myth is deadly…
"Yowie", which is being produced by Jarred Bocca and stars Rupert Raineri, Anna Kennedy and Brendan Smoother, may only run for 10 minutes, but it looks as if Bayford has managed to squeeze a big film into a little package.
Bayford adds, “A younger audience and those of all ages who love tension and drama can sink their teeth into this psychological thriller."
Look for "Yowie" to hit the film festival circuit in 2011.
Written By: Ken Hulsey Sources: Douglas Bankston / Avery Guerra
You may, or may not, remember back in June when I posted an article about film maker Douglas Bankstrom's perils at trying to produce a short film called "It Came From Beyond The Mountain!" an homage to the 'big-bug' films of the 1950s like "Them!", "The Deadly Mantis", "Black Scorpion", and most notably, the 1955 Jack Arnold classic, "Tarantula".
Tom make a long story short, Bankstrom's dreams of producing a full-length feature film fell way short and all the indie film maker could afford to produce was a mere four-and-a-half minute monster tribute.
Granted, what Bankstrom was able to cram into his mini-movie was quite good, pity he wasn't able to find enough green stuff to make the movie he wanted to. It could have been really something.
Well, as fate would have it, the film maker was able to get his hands on some more money, not a lot of money, but enough to extend "It Came From Beyond The Mountain!" to a staggering 10 minutes and 38 seconds.
Okay, it's not as long as one of Peter Jackson's 'month-long' movies, but it was the best that he could do ....... give the guy some slack.
Bankstrom refers to this new version of his film as the 'director's cut'.
A classic! Long thought to have been destroyed in the great vault fire of '59, a print was discovered during the police raid of a reclusive collector's home and can now be seen for the first time in 40 years! Teens are terrorized by a giant rampaging spider mutated in a 1950s atomic test gone awry, featuring a mad general, a freight train and a mind-numb... I mean bending... climax that will make your brain turn into some sort of quivering, gelatinous substance. This restored director's cut features footage found under a bed in room 927 in the Roosevelt Hotel.
Lots of old film footage is found like that.
So, without further ado, here is the new, and improved, director's cut of "It Came From Beyond The Mountain!"
Written By: Ken Hulsey Sources: Jesse Blanchard / Robert Hood / Avery Guerra
It has been said over a billion times, if you ever want to be really good at something, you need to practice, practice, practice.
If you want to be good at football? You need to practice. If you want to be good at baseball? You need to practice. A good writer? Practice. Painter? Practice.
Practice, practice, practice ....... okay, I know you all get it.
But, what do you do if you want to be a better movie maker?
You can't exactly go out and make a movie every day. That costs a lot of money.
Do you film your wife, or life partner, doing naughty things with a handi-cam?
No, um ....... well, maybe, but film makers never really talk about that stuff. No, you make short films in preparation for filming the 'really big one'.
Well, at least that's what you do if you a film maker with as long a list of credentials as Jesse Blanchard, who has made over 43 films in eight years including the documentary, and film festival fave, "The Ranch", and one of George Romero's favorite zombie flicks, "Run For Your Life."
The 'big one' that is looming just over the horizon for Blanchard is the 3D monster film "Chompers 3D", but in preparation, practice if you will, he has just completed the short film, "Space Bugs", a great little sci fi/horror about alien insects that come to Earth to feed on people, and cause their heads to pop like a ripe pimple.
I know ...... eeeeewwwww!
Here Blanchard gives us a little history on how "Space Bugs" came to be:
Mutant Bugs attack Portland, Oregon. A young girl rushes home to warn her husband. Will she get there in time?
The original idea for Space Bugs was a ticking time bomb that shoots down from space and latches onto someone’s arm. The Hero then spends the next three minutes running through total chaos trying to get the thing off of him. However, I couldn’t connect with a 3D person to do the effects I wanted. So, I tweaked the idea into Space Bugs so that I could produce the bugs without any 3D work.
Originally, I was going to use LED lights for the bugs. I ordered a whole bunch from China and got heaps of hearing-aid batteries to power them. I was really excited about this approach and planned on throwing them past the camera and pulling them around on wires. But, another failure. The LEDs were not bright enough. I could either see them or light the set and see my actors. So, back to the drawing board.
Eventually, I ended up using a whole bunch of tricks including homemade ooze covered light bulbs, flares, flashlights, and one shot with LEDs.
The Bugs’ point-of-view shots were a ‘homage’ (rip-off) of Sam Raimi’s monster cam from the Evil Dead series. I tried to one up him by mounting the camera on a board two storeys in the air. This end shot flying into the house took a long time to get right. And I’m certain the neighbors were a little confused seeing me running over and over again at a house with my camera on top of a 16ft board.
I made Space Bugs completely on my own including all of the writing, shooting, editing, and effects. I’m practicing for my next feature Chompers 3D which will be much more ambitious, much more fun, and whole lot scarier.
Here is the finished product:
And here are some concept drawings of the "Space Bugs":
Written By: Ken Hulsey Sources: Douglas Bankston / Robert Hood / Avery Guerra
If parody is the sincerest form of flattery, then film maker Douglas Bankston must really love the giant insect movies of the mid to late 1950s. To put it bluntly, his film, "It Came From Over The Mountain", may very well be the best satire of the giant monster genre to come along in quite some time.
It's all there, a giant tarantula, wacko scientists and military types, teens straight out of Mayberry and, of course, the bomb. Everything that made for B movie gold in the era before The Beatles.
Films like "Them!", "The Deadly Mantis", "Black Scorpion", and most notably, the 1955 Jack Arnold classic, "Tarantula" are the obvious influences that Bankston drew upon when he conceived his film.
Though the film maker wanted to make "It Came From Beyond the Mountain" into a feature film, three and a half years, two computer meltdowns, software peculiarities, unforeseen technical difficulties, scheduling disasters, inopportune equipment failures gale-force winds, locusts and the random acts of God later, a short 4 minute and 43 second movie is all he could produce.
Bankston, however, notes that with more funding, he could have made it longer, "....you’re right — ICFBTM absolutely should be a feature film, but I only found so much loose change under my couch cushions. (I really should start inviting wealthier friends over.)"
Granted, you can only go so far with the money in your wallet, or in your furniture, but Bankston really got the most for his money, and though his film may be just shy of 5 minutes in length, it certainly has the feel of a much larger production.
Here is the synopsis:
Man treads on dangerous ground while trying to tame the atom, but power-mad General D.E. Williams doesn’t care — it’s his last day on the job at Pearl Lake Weapons Range anyway. His reckless detonation of a nuclear bomb unleashes an eight-legged mutation that exacts 1950s, B-movie-style revenge on all who get in its way.
or
A classic! Long thought to have been destroyed in the great vault fire of ‘59, a print was discovered during the police raid of a reclusive collector’s home and can now be seen for the first time in 40 years! Teens are terrorized by a giant rampaging spider mutated in a 1950s atomic test gone awry, featuring a mad general, a freight train and a mind-numb… I mean bending… climax that will make your brain turn into some sort of quivering, gelatinous substance.
As Bankston soon learned, stop motion effects are expensive and time consuming, so he took a page out of Arnold's book and used real tarantulas for his film as well, though, as John "Bud" Cardos learned in making "Kingdom of the Spiders", that presented other problems.
This is how Bankstom explained how conversations between himself and his effects man usually played out:
"… the number of effects shots skyrocketed. Because of this, I turned to visual effects artist Erik O’Donnell, whom I met through a friend, to help out … Our first conversation went something like this:
Erik: This movie sounds great! I’d love to help! Me: Perfect. I’ll get you the footage. Erik: How many effects shots are there? Me: Uh…12?
After the number of effects shots reached 40, I had to tackle the remaining effects myself because Erik would pretend he wasn’t home every time I came around."
Don't worry Doug, we all have friends like that.
The film maker goes on to explain how one of the shots, a scene taken directly from the 1957 Edward Ludwig film, "The Black Scorpion", involving a train and the giant tarantula, was achieved.
"Somewhere outside of Mojave, I found the perfect location with the perfect background to shoot the miniature freight train. It had to be in the middle of nowhere because the train would be on fire and it was the height of fire season. I didn’t need any witnesses to my pyromania. I had bought a bunch of HO trains and track off eBay, and the morning of the shoot I set up a stretch of about 30 feet of track and wired the power transformer to my Jeep. Everything was ready to shoot. Then in the span of about 10 minutes, the nice, calm morning turned into 40 mph wind. The small HO-gauge train just spun its wheels because the track happened to be facing into the stiff wind – the angle for the perfect background. The background was unacceptable if I ran the train downwind. I compromised and turned the track somewhat. This helped, but the wind, now coming toward the train at an angle, frequently blew the freight cars off the track. There is plenty of footage of me running into frame chasing after tumbling box cars as I curse the stinging sand, the wind, and even God himself. The footage was useless anyway. I had borrowed an Innovision Probe Lens for the day. Apparently, the Innovision’s adapter that attaches the Probe Lens to the XL1S was loose. The wind shook the Probe Lens violently meaning the image was all over the place and off the camera sensor. I returned the lens at the end of the day and pointed out the problem. The adapter was loose because of one tiny screw that could be tightened with a jeweler’s screwdriver. “You almost never have to worry about this,” I was told by the equipment manager as my jaw clenched and my knuckles whitened. I was in the Mojave Desert. In the middle of nowhere. In 40 mph wind. I did not have a jeweler’s screwdriver."
"For the re-shoot, I charted the wind conditions for Mojave for over a month. Finally, one day, the wind was calm. I raced back to the location, set up and shot the miniature train. My oil fire idea wasn’t working – or lighting – so at this point in the frustrating game I put flame directly to train."
"To put the live-action engineer into the train engine, I basically bought a piece of plywood, cut a square out of it, painted it chroma key green and mounted it between two C-stands, then put a second green piece of plywood behind it. The actor stood between the two pieces. The engineer’s hat flew off when I yanked the black string that was tied to it."
And that's how low-budget monster movies get made folks, with a few bucks and a lot of good old fashioned ingenuity.
As a model train nut, I cringe at the thought of a HO train being set ablaze, but in the spirit of true independent monster movie making, I can forgive.
Update: I was just forwarded an email from Douglas Bankston where he mentioned that he was able to rummage through some wealthy peoples furniture, check local pay phone return slots (do those still exist?) and knock off a little girls' lemonade stand to come up with more funds for an 11 minute, 'extended director's cut' of "It Came From Beyond the Mountain."
So far, however, all of Bankston's attempts to get his, new-and-improved, film online have fallen short of his expectations.
Once Bankston finds a suitable home for his film, I will let you know!
Here is the entire film, not just the trailer, plus some behind the scenes shots from "It Came From Beyond the Mountain":
Written By: Ken Hulsey Sources: Alexander G. Seyum / Avery Guerra
What do you do if you are a Ironworker who has found it hard to find work during these rough economic times?
Why, you go to film school and make a werewolf movie of course.
It may sound like a joke, but that is exactly what Alexander Seyum did after he got laid off from his job as a boilermaker, he bit the bullet and decided to follow his dreams.
Seyum explains, "..I'm a student film maker currently at The Los Angeles Film School in Hollywood. But I wasn't always a film maker. I was a Union Boilermaker local#92 and an Ironworker for 5 years. During that part of my life I was writing short stories, poetry and recording music as my side projects. The recession hit and my Union lost a whole lot of work. So I had to make a hard decision at that time in my life. Wait for the work to come back or take a leap of faith and follow my dreams and become a film maker. So I decided...become a film maker! I grew up watching horror films, being inspired by Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsesse, Oliver Stone, Quintain Tarantino and Stephen King."
For his first film project, Seyum decided on a making a short werewolf movie entitled, "Darkmoon", which is part "American Werewolf in London" with a good portion of the 1941 Universal classic, "The Wolfman", added into the mix.
On "Darkmoon" the inspiring film maker teamed up with FX artist Zoie Roman, and his fellow Los Angeles Film School classmates, to create a modern film with the look and feel of the classics.
Roman was obviously inspired by the makeup created by Jack Pierce for Lon Chaney Jr when she designed the look for the werewolf in "Darkmoon". (See Below)
It is so refreshing to see young film makers reverting back to the way movies used to be made before CGI came on the scene.
The film, which is about 15 minutes long, and cost about $1800 to make, was originally a short-story penned by Seyum called, "The Beast of Forest Greens", which the film maker turned into a screen play.
Here is the synopsis:
For the past fifteen years there has been a myth about a creature lurking near the city of Los Angeles...today these sightings have reached an all time high."
As someone who has lived in Southern California most of my life, I can tell you that there are all kinds of 'creatures' lurking around LA .......... some human, some trying to pass for human. You really have to see it to believe it sometimes.
Presently "Darkmoon" is in post production and Seyum is pondering over a list of potential film festivals to submit it to.
Here are some behind-the-scenes photos and the trailer for "Darkmoon":
Written By: Ken Hulsey
