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Short Horror Films By Independent Film Studio Fewdio

admin — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 17:53:37 +0000

The fact that so many films can be summarized in about 90 seconds is probably one of the reasons I enjoy short film so much. Why spend 120 minutes of your life doing something that can be accomplished in five? What is fairly easy to do, and is done a lot in this genre, is comedy. Which is why it was refreshing to run across Fewdio , an extremely talented and polished group of professionals who had been working in the studio system and decided they wanted to do something where they had complete control, and without a huge budget and production cycle. They cashed in on two facts that are largely overlooked regarding horror: first of all, that the best segments of horror films often stand up on their own and are strung together with setups, and secondly, that no-one was really doing quality horror shorts. As Fewdio’s Drew Daywalt points out in this Shock Till You Drop interview, it’s a very viable and largely unexplored format. As he puts it: “You end on a scare and bang, you’re out…it’s a good model to aspire to. Twilight Zone is formulated that way. Set up, continued set up, expected left turn, roll credits“. All of Fewdio’s films (and there are around 50) have fairly high production values, a clever concept, and exceptional attention to details that are often overlooked in independent productions, especially their attention to sound, probably one of the most powerful tools at a horror filmmaker’s disposal. You can watch most of their films on their YouTube channel, or buy the Nightmare House – Volume 1 DVD on their site. Watch a few below.

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VODO: A Cool New Idea For Distributing & Funding Independent Film

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 03:14:05 +0000

I have a number of friends who derive their livelihood from the mainstream, Hollywood-centric film industry, so if you find me dead in a ditch soon, it may be because of some of the things I’m about to say. In much the same way that record labels created their own demise a decade ago by desperately trying to hold on to a juicy business model that let them charge twenty bucks for a twenty minute CD (by doing things like suing customers and artists alike), the floundering and litigation-addicted film industry has been doing much the same thing for a while. They’ve used lawsuits, melodramatic anti-piracy clips, and distorted claims about how piracy has stolen billions in wages and thousands of jobs from Hollywood. Even the US General Accounting Office has called their bluff. So while it may have taken a few years for the indy music scene to evolve into the hodgepodge of profitable distribution channels that it is today, in the end we have more great music – and at a better price – than we’ve had in decades. And it seems that price is at most a dollar a song. So watch out Hollywood. Your days of multimillion dollar productions are numbered. And your demise will be at the hands of clever ventures like VODO, an ingenious new funding and distribution plan that coordinates the world’s largest torrent trackers to distribute artists’ films, and then facilitates funding them. You get a high-quality and original viewing experience for free, the artist gets massive distribution and a source of revenue based on perceived value, because you pay as much as you feel like paying, if anything at all. VODO has also partnered with MOFILM for a contest with over $100,000 in prizes. VODO’s currently highlighted project is a “hard sci-fi” series called Pioneer One. The series pilot cost just $6,000, which was raised through the micro-funding platform Kickstarter. Pioneer One was produced by the same team that created Vodo’s biggest success to date, a film called Lionshare. Having watched both Lionshare and the Pioneer One pilot, I have a lot of enthusiasm for where this could go. In spite of some occasionally wobbly acting, writing, or production in both projects, the material is largely pretty solid, and VODO has many other films to explore. All for whatever you feel like paying for them. Check out the trailers for Lionshare and Pioneer One below.

Lionshare is shot in a vérité style that suits its theme of “sharing files and girls”, but occasionally lingers on moments a bit too much. Still a nice piece of work, especially for the price.

Pioneer One has acting and writing that definitely wobbles here and there, but has an intriguing premise, and could easily gel into something much more solid.

By the way, if you like the idea behind how these projects are funded, make a donation to ME and I’ll keep writing about them

Red Letter Media – Brilliant, Hilarious, and… Annoying?

admin — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 03:18:38 +0000

What’s one half brilliant comedy, one half insightful critical analysis, and one half annoying? The movie reviews by Red Letter Media, that’s what. Yeah, I know that’s three halves, but the math just feels right. I’ve never been a big fan of critics and movie reviews; there’s something intrinsically annoying about someone who doesn’t know how to do something sitting around telling you how someone who does didn’t do it right. We’ve mentioned the “meta” nature of recent pop media before, and this is where the Red Letter Media reviews of films like Star Wars: The Phantom Menace shine. If you haven’t seen them before, the reviews are a strange mix of childish complaints mixed with brilliant insights, delivered with a simple-minded but self-aware lowbrow humor. All read in a contrived voice that sounds like a cross between Strong Bad and Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs . The reviews are sometimes almost as long as the movies they’re skewering, and sometimes worth the marathon, sometimes not. It would just be too meta even for my tastes to review a review of a movie, so I’ll let you decide for yourself. So who’s behind this madness? Surprisingly, it’s not some tormented nerd with a video camera like CopperCab, it’s an indy film actor/director/writer named Mike Stoklasa, who apparently collaborates with fellow indy filmmaker Jay Bauman. Read an interview Stoklasa here, and explore the reviews on Red Letter Media’s YouTube channel.

It would just be too meta even for my tastes to review a preview of a review of a movie, so I’ll let you decide for yourself:

Attack of the Clones Review Trailer

The one that started it all – Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review (Part 1 of 7)

Life Is Short – Films Should Be Too

admin — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:46:54 +0000

Tokyo/Glow Is Gorgeous, Simple, and Short

One of my only disappointments regarding the recent Ann Arbor Film Festival was that I didn’t catch enough of it. Which is a little amusing, since I had a press pass*, and it’s a festival comprised largely of short films. Which are coincidentally kind of a fetish of mine, largely because of my goldfish-like media attention span. I regrettably missed winner’s night, but was confident that I could cleverly find a lot of the films online like I had with some of the opening night entries. How wrong I was. What I quickly learned googling the festival winners was that there are two distinct schools of thought on distribution of these festival-oriented works: one that believes in the new economy of “release it free and cash in later” (as in Chris Anderson’s book Free), and one that maintains its cachet mainly via scarcity of distribution. Ah well. I guess I’ll just have to spend more time in real theaters, watching real films! Until then though, there’s a never-ending film festival online. The biggest problem ultimately is sorting through the astounding number of indy shorts out there to find that genuine gem. Which is – as I just learned – precisely one of the reasons to go to a festival. So with all my complaining about being short on time, it’s rather ironic that I spent as much time as I did to find some sites to share with you. Of the dozens of sites I perused, two that I found that seemed to have the highest density of quality films were probably NZShortFilm.com and CoffeeShorts. My search is only just beginning though; if you have any suggestions, feel free to share.

I don’t know if IndyMogul’s The Best Short Films in the World really are, but this episode says a lot about the current generation of aspiring filmmakers and film addicts. The cardboard title crawls, overlapping segments, and inserts of host Bobby Miller make it hard to tell where the film submissions begin and end, but deliver a lot of selected shorts in a timespan that doesn’t lose my drug-damaged brain’s attention.

Tokyo/Glow clocks in at 2:10, and fills all 130 seconds with gorgeous time-lapse HD color:

*Thank you so much Becca Keating for the last-minute kind consideration!

Indy Film Alive & Well At The 2010 Ann Arbor Film Festival

admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:00:31 +0000

I always think of myself as film lover until I find myself surrounded by the passionate fanatics that will comprise a festival like the amazingly long-lived Ann Arbor Film Festival, now in its 48th year. It’s quite a feat filling a classic venue like the 1700+ capacity Michigan Theater on a Wednesday night, especially showing short films that no-one has heard of, but the AAFF did well on their opening night; I didn’t check the balcony, but there were very few seats open on the main floor. I was a little anxious about attending a full evening of indy film festival shorts; the luxury of time-shifted viewing and Internet access to an amazing variety of indy media has made me something of an on-demand media monster. But the festival didn’t disappoint, which is another impressive feat. The double-edged sword of creating a successful festival like the AAFF is that – yes, of course, you’re guaranteed a lot of quality submissions from around the world – but as the festival’s Executive Director Donald Harrison pointed out in his introduction to the festival tonight, their screeners and programmers had to sift through over 2500 submissions this year. I get a headache just thinking about what that must be like. Combine the sheer quantity with the multiple media formats and preparation required for simply projecting the material, and if the festival takes place at all, a monumental task has been accomplished. Think about that if you happen to be lucky enough to attend the festival this year. If you aren’t able to attend the festival, a surprising number of the films are readily available on line. Of course nothing compares to seeing them on a huge classic theater screen like the Michigan, but below are a few highlights from tonight’s entries for your perusal. See the AAFF’s YouTube channel for more previews, and their web site for the week’s schedule and other festival details.

El ataque de los robots de Nebulosa-5

Photograph Of Jesus by Laurie Hill

Missed Aches – Preview (See the AAFF YouTube channel for more previews)

48th Ann Arbor Film Festival Teaser

This, by the way, is a film lover. John Johnson of Ann Arbor is wearing lanyards from every Ann Arbor Film Festival since the fifth year. If the house lights hadn’t dimmed, I’m pretty sure he’d still be sharing his passion for indy film with me. And I’d be happily listening.

Who Is Ann Arbor, And Why Are There So Many Movies About Her?

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:18:27 +0000

Someone actually asked me that once when I lived in San Francisco. For the uninitiated, Ann Arbor isn’t a woman, it’s a small college town in Michigan that at one time was as cool as say, Berkley, California, but has since slowly morphed into a dreary backwater of uptight Republicans and Liberal Elitists. Although it lays claim to being somehow hip and progressive, very little really happens here, and in spite of all the amazingly creative people in the area, nothing clever ever seems to escape the local scene. I jest a bit; I’m probably just being bitter because I’m tired of the place and too lazy to do anything about the fact. It’s actually a pretty cool town considering the fact that it’s only six square blocks surrounded by cornfields and strip malls. Aside from the University of Michigan’s overfunded and underperforming football team, one thing that has put Ann Arbor on the map over the years – and with good reason – is the Ann Arbor Film Festival. The festival began in 1963 as a 16mm film festival operated by the University of Michigan, and grew over the years until 1983, when it started operating on its own as a 501(c)(3) non-profit. The festival has definitely had its ups and downs over the last few decades. One of its high points was probably the 2006 festival, when Christen McArdle became executive director. McArdle not only seemed to bring a new level of professionalism to the festival (she was working for John Cusack’s New Crime Productions in LA prior to taking over), but the festival was lucky to have her at the helm that year, because she stuck to her guns when the Michigan Council for the Arts questioned the festival’s content and threatened to cut funding. The festival told them to keep their money, and managed to raise their own, showing that indy film is indeed alive and kicking. For a detailed account, see this NAMAC article by Jay Nelson. Although I barely met McArdle, anyone who questions her impact on the festival didn’t see her at the Judge’s Dinner her first year. I watched in amazement as she walked around a restaurant full of perhaps 80 people, personally thanking (with full name and personal details) every individual that had done significant work organizing the festival. That kind of focus and awareness of what one is doing is infectious, and will take a person places. It seems to have taken the festival itself somewhere; last year it made MovieMaker’s 25 Coolest Film Festivals list. This year’s festival is once again at the historic Michigan Theater March 23-28. The Michigan Theater is a fantastic large-screen classic theater; a really exceptional venue for taking in a film festival. This is the first year in memory that no-one has slipped me a festival pass, so I don’t know if we’ll cover it more. One tip though: a lot of people skip the main festival and go to winner’s night. I recommmend making a commitment to sitting through a lot of the weirdness that is the festival’s content; some of the most interesting stuff doesn’t win.

Repo Man’s Bastard Spawn: Repo Chick & Repo Men

admin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:09:04 +0000

As countercultural post art-punk film lovers in the 80′s, my unjustifiably snobbish friends and I weren’t too taken with Repo Man on its release. We felt that punk that called itself punk was nothing more than a cartoon of rebellion, so a movie with a soundtrack featuring Black Flag and the Circle Jerks just didn’t fly with us. I came to my senses a few years later when I re-watched the film during the heyday of indy film in the late 80′s and early 90′s, and although I haven’t seen it in a while, it remains on my mental list of cult favorites. Which is part of why I’m tremendously amused with the buzz surrounding the release of both Repo Chick and Repo Men! (YouTube trailer links) this year. If you haven’t followed the story around the release of the films, it goes something like this: Repo Man director Alex Cox was busy developing “Repo Chick”, which he emphatically stated in early press was not a sequel to Repo Man. With movie studios being the litigation-fueled monsters that they are, Universal Pictures (which has rights to Repo Man) sent Cox a cease-and-desist, pulled a film they had shelved since 2008 called “Repossession Mambo” from the vaults, and rechristened it “Repo Men!” for release this year, almost concurrent with Repo Chick. Universal’s strategy is both fitting and ironic in a time of auto-industry bailouts and mortgage foreclosures, and adds an amusing media backdrop for the release of both films, which probably couldn’t have less in common. Repo Chick was produced by David Lynch, and was shot on green-screen with Red HD cameras. It’s been called a “farcical anti-golf parody”, and if the trailers are any indication, looks like it’ll be brilliantly campy. Repo Men, on the other hand, is a rather expensive looking action/adventure flick in which Jude Law plays a repo man who works for a company that reposseses your body organs when you miss a payment. Personally, I’m looking forward to both. I just hope Universal doesn’t manage to repo the rights to Cox’s non-sequel while cashing in on the name with their own “non-sequel”. Cox has an interesting spin on the whole story on his blog, which is impossible to link to directly, so we’ve included it below, along with trailers for both films.

The Repo Chick Trailer

Alex Cox’s “non-sequel” to Repo Man looks like fun, with what is presumably an intentional weird mix of high and low production values. It was shot on green screen with cutting edge “Red” HD cameras:

The Repo Men! Red Band Trailer

Universal – in typical film industry luddite style – put the film on YouTube, but doesn’t allow embedding as of this writing. That’s okay, this R-Rated trailer on TrailerAddict.com is better anyway:

From Alex Cox’s Blog:

“REPO MEN”? PLEASE…
2009.7.30

I anticipated the “cease and desist” letter from The Studio, attempting to stop production of REPO CHICK on the grounds that it was an illegal sequal to REPO MAN. That was inevitable, given the history of the company, whose parent – MCA – stood for “Muscle, Cash and Attorneys.” So, when a letter came, forbidding me to make my movie and signed by no less a personage than the Executive Vice President In Charge of Litigation, I stuck it in the drawer labeled ‘Restraint of Trade’ and carried on.

REPO CHICK is a month from being done. She premieres in September, at the Venice Film Festival. Whereas most films get easier as you near the end, this one becomes more and more complex: a third of the backgrounds are in place now, but the rest of them – plus special effects shots from Collateral Image – are still to come.

If studio goons had any brains, they’d buy REPO CHICK and market the bijaziz out of it as if it were a sequal to REPO MAN. It isn’t really; it’s a story of different characters in a different world: but truth never gets in the way of the marketing department, whether it’s pixels or Prozac. That I understand.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the e-mail Jon Davison sent me today: an article reporting that “Universal’s embattled execs” were putting their big hairy monster picture on hold, and rushing out a film called REPO MEN.

What?

REPO MEN is definitely not a sequal to my film. I still have a contract with these guys and – if they ever want to make a film based on my original work – they have to ask me to direct it. What fun that would be! But it seems The Studio has, among its souvenirs, a Jude Law thriller called THE REPOSSESSION MAMBO, shot in Canada, almost two years ago. I’m sure this is an excellent film, which Universal accidentally forgot to distribute, and now are passing off, in their innocence, as the new REPO MAN. Only a cynical person might see any attempt to catch the upward draft of REPO CHICK, and give loft to a turkey.

REPO CHICK ain’t REPO MAN, or REPO MEN. These MEN have nothing to do with me. For shame!

Noah and the Whale – The First Days of Spring

admin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:52:24 +0000

The other day a friend of mine in Scotland turned me on to the latest Noah and the Whale release The First Days of Spring. I’m not always a huge fan of bands that might fall into some sort of alt/folk category, but this release is indeed “pure, dead gorgeous”, as my friend put it. The release is in one way a classic “breakup album”, but with a twist: it was conceived alongside a 45 minute film produced by the band. You can view the trailer at left, which features the wistfully hopeful Blue Skies. If the trailer is any indication, the film should be well worth a view on its own; with some compelling images and editing, they’ve cleverly created the feeling that you’re viewing an extended trailer from a non-existent conventional feature film that used their music. It’ll be interesting to see how they actually distribute the film; so far it’s only been shown at special screenings, and as of this writing there are no more US dates. It will, however, be available on DVD as part of an upcoming 2-disc edition. I would think they’d make it more available to coincide with release dates, but releasing a conceptual, slightly abstract film in conjunction with an album of songs is bold, uncharted….oh wait. Never mind.

Short Sites Worth A Long Look

admin — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 15:27:51 +0000

I’ve mentioned before why my goldfish-like attention span is a perfect fit for the YouTube era of short media. That’s why I was especially excited recently to discover two new HD-quality sites that focus specifically on short films and music videos. The clip at left is the first episode of Emily Time, a weekly show delivered only via the web at historyandtheuniverse.com, along with another show called Big Book of Lies. Both programs were created by David Lampson, a 29-year-old television writer from Boston who produces the shows in Buenos Aires. Both shows are quirky, cinematically slick, and intelligent. Big Book of Lies, for instance, features a dryly absurd, on-going subplot about Noam Chomsky’s sons Buck (a struggling beatbox artist) and John (a cop). On a grander scale, Australia-based PortableFilmFestival.com has a broad selection of seriously high-quality shorts that are “curated” by independent film professionals, guaranteeing a certain level of quality of content. After a painless (takes about 10 seconds and they don’t make you jump through any hoops) account signup, you’re able to view AND download some of the best indy film out there.