Backers, supporters, friends, fans, we continue to plow along on the film, slow but sure. There are a lot of VFX so progress slows when only a couple of people are working in their spare time on the film versus 30 during the short production in January.
There are hundreds of things to be created and hundreds of shots to composited, editing, sound, etc. It’s seemingly endless, even on something with a short runtime.
Keep you eye on the 11/8/15 date. Something is sure to happen on that date.
Follow the progress on facebook here: You DON’T need a facebook account. All the posts are public. You can follow along with the almost daily updates.
I will try to post more on the site for those that prefer it.
I have to be honest it’s been a long road with a lot of work and it gets me a bit riled up when I see people post that the project is dead, or that we took everyone’s money, or they are going to try to get their money back.
This project never raised anything like the money needed to create what is being done right now. It’s happening because a bunch of fans donated their money and whole lot of time to get it done. You can’t have a quality, film fast and cheap. You gotta pick two and since we had time we chose quality.
Anybody that works in the film or video production industry knows how little you get for the type of money we raised.
It’s taken us over two years to get this far. Thousands of man hours spent on everything from writing scripts, painting costumes, storyboarding and planning shots, to production on set, post production, GCI, compositing, and updating the community.
We are dedicated to this film. I just want to reiterate that.
The production workflow has been in 4k and we have been learning new tools as I go to manage the highest quality film possible.
RAW footage needs a lot of care an attention and although this is going on YouTube it’s also going on Blu ray and it should look like a $100 million film when people watch it in that way. That’s the goal.
A lot of people donated a lot of money and they should get their money’s worth even if it takes longer than we expected. That’s what I would want. We can’t cut any corners or throw money at it to fix it. We have to finish it and find creative professionals to help us do that if it’s beyond our means.
As in pre production when I needed to get all the props and costumes made it was next to impossible to get people to make that stuff for free so I ended up buying everything and doing it myself. I literally purchased a sewing machine to make the suit and then returned it and spent that money to buy fog juice and movie dirt for the production.
I have said this before and I’ll say it again. A good movie HEV suit could cost a million dollars. Sure you would get several and an insane level of perfection like Iron Man or Robocop. Steve Wang perfection. But if you take away the perfection and multiple versions what would it cost? 10 times less? $100k,? $50K? $25k? $10k?
Even if someone could get it done for $10k, that is a very significant portion of the production budget we had to work with. It’s just one thing on the list of hundreds. Then there were things on this film I could not get away with not paying for. Like locations, equipment rentals, insurance, union minimums and the cost of materials.
I will work it out exactly at the end, but I estimate the post production costs for this film (if we paid a Hollywood post house to do it) in the realm of $500k. That’s just for the post production. And the effects would be average.
You will not be getting average. We are close to the end and this is so much more than I ever imagined.
Thanks again to everyone that donated fiscally or donated their time. This is a film by fans, for fans and it will remain true to that promise.