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Fan Group Creates Full-Length Discworld Movie
greenrd writes "'Almost No Budget Films,' a group of Terry Pratchett fans from Germany, recently finished a 9-month filming stint on a full-length dramatisation of pterry's novel 'Lords and Ladies.' A grand total of 300 euros were spent on this production, and all profits from this fan movie will go to the Orangutan Foundation. Check out the new English trailer for some grin-inducing special effects!"
And another 300 euros will be spent thanks to the direct video link on Slashdot.
A grand total of 300 euros were spent on this production
Until they were hit with multiple times that in bandwidth costs after a slashdotting. Mohahahaha >:->
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Nice CG graphics :)
Actually it's amazing how people can do something like this; and let the profit go to charity...
Keep them away from money. This is a labor of love; do you want an exec fucking it up?
I could hear their server exploding from England!
qntm.org
Oook ook OOOk ook ook ook OOk ook ook ook ook.
[trans. I for one welcome our oragutan overlords]
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
Isn't that the TV show on Max Payne 2? That was a funny show.
my lord... my laaady...
"Check out the new English trailer for some grin-inducing special effects!""
Wearing too tight underwear can produce the same effect.
http://trackerwww.prq.to/download.php/3294903/lnlu ksm.avi.torrent
Site is nuked so get it from here.
Well, looks like their university hosting wasnt up to a good /.'ng :D
: www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~jknoblo2/LnL/Downloa ds/downloads.html+&hl=en
Google cache of the webpage at - http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:QuFjhiYyVvQJ
Then never mind moneys, give them some sandwiches
With so much power on the desktop it's becoming easier and easier to produce polished video products at home. There's even software to correct for shaky camera work, it's possible to redesign shots in the editing programs and digital effects are becoming very easy to setup now. (remember Lightsabre boy)
I love the idea of more and more content being produced by hobbyists, enthusists and other non-studio persons. We are at that point where knowledge passes from a few to many - much like the printing press took the books away from the scholars and gave them to the people. Screw the RIAA & DMCA, we are gonna start producing our own copyrighted materials and they'll lose out.
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
Wonderfully entertaining, kitschy trailer.
For more stuff quite like this, check out Channel 101 and its New York sister site, Channel 102.
For an example of how brilliant zero-budget filmmaking can be, check out their winner for this month's contest: House of Cosbys.
If you don't laugh at this, you're probably Bill Cosby. And even then.... well, just click.
Screw Pratchett. We need a Robert Rankin movie. I vote for The Book of Ultimate Truths.
Cool!
But I just hope in Terry Gilliam to find the budget to start Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman's "Good Omens"!
Wouldn't that be great?
---
Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisement said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighbourhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches.
42.
Since so many others have commented along similar lines, here's my tuppenceworth.
Neal Stephenson's SnowCrash would be an Awesome film.
When a passenger of the foot, hooves in sight, tootel the horn trumpet melodiously
somebody bittorrent it - next time _before_ announcing it on slashdot, please.
If done right (from your perspective) yes.
The problem with movies is that they leave very little to the imagination. Filter a good written story through a film and all you are left with is the movie
Films which I wish I had never seen include Millennium (from a fantastic short story by John Varley) and (Gibson)
http://michaelsmith.id.au
...to link to http://dijjer.org/get/http://www.rzuser.uni-heidel berg.de/~jknoblo2/LnL/lnluksm.avi?
on a full-length dramatisation of pterry's novel
Pterry? Sounds like a Pokemon.
Back on topic... I sure wish real movie studios would pick up some of these Discworld novels to make a great expensive movie out of. I can see them as the next Star Wars or such, if they do it right.
Or, even better, a faithful recreation of Dune!
Some of the really major stumbling blocks I see:
1. Scenery/Models. Unless it is set in contemporary earth, this is one of the really hard ones. By models I mean models of castles, spaceships etc., which tend to look like they were made of Lego.
2. Getting enough angles. Particularly an issue in action movies, where my impression is the shot lacks angles (i.e. it was filmed once from one angle, instead of a commercial movie often mixing and matching between overview shots, action "highlights", close-ups of key people, pans etc.
All of that is used to form a good scene. It takes time, requires a good editor and provides very little screen time, but it really sets them apart. In particular, notice that you never see a "pan-up" scene done with rails/crane in an amateur movie. Same with aerial shots.
3. Acting of B-class characters. The leads usually have some acting skill. But the fringe characters (i.e. not the extras) suck donkey balls.
4. Cheesy CG/special effects. Yes, I know many of the effects are easy to make today. But more often than not, the program doesn't support (or it is too damn hard to figure out how) the effect you really want, but you settle for what you can. They tend to look plastered on top like a sticker from a Donald Duck magazine on top of your photo.
5. Audio effects. The music is usually decent, but the timing might be off. But more often than not, the audio effects sound "unmatched" or simply fake. No, changing the pitch and streching/compressing it still makes it sound like a horse/pig/dog/bird/animal of the day, and that was just you screaming.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Gavin Scott, the Butcher of Earthsea, should not be allowed to read or write ever again.
But you are right on the SnowCrash thing or A Diamond Age which I also enjoyed.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Here is a mirror of the english trailer:
http://ftp.acc.umu.se/mirror/temp/lnluksm.avi
i can't wait to see this after someone mirrors it or something. but i wish these kind folk had done one of the starter books, lords and ladies is definitely kind of into the series a little bit, although it pretty much doesn't matter with the discworld stuff.
pratchett's about due for a new one seems like - going postal's been out a while now. been reading the bromeliad triology last few days, it's fun.
what ever happened to gilliams good omens efforts?
unless it is uni-form-hot-chicks.de or something. But that kind of sites have their educational goals, anyway.
....eh shoulda used 16 mm film. But hey who cares if it looks like crap?
A really good sci-fi movie shot for a very low budget ($7000) I recommend is Primer.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
I noticed on LSpace that there's also a short of "Troll Bridge" being filmed by a bunch of Aussies.
They even got a quickie script rewrite from PTerry himself.
Hmmm. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm going to start a project to convert Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" into a television series.
It read like a Hollywood script!
I am really surprised that this has not yet been picked up by some studio.
I was not particularly impressed by the book, I thought the pacing was off, the characterization was amateurish, and it tried far too hard to be hacker-chic, but I really thought its style would appeal to Hollywood.
It felt like a movie far more than the Neuromancer series by William Gibson
I consider Gibson's literary works superior, but they are almost impossible to make into movies.
[Too much internal dialog and not enough action]
But, I suppose, after The Matrix any studio will have a difficult time doing an adaption of any Cyberpunk novel.
watashi wa bengoshi dewa arimasen!
ROFL... this is the most incompetent troll I've seen for a long time; everyone knows that the goatse.cx account has been suspended for *months*! (BTW, looks like its replacement, goat.cx has met a similarly tragic fate)
Good account name though...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Site loads fine here. Check your ethernet cable is plugged in. If you light it on fire you get fire wire and your page will load faster. Too bad your cable only lasts a certain ammount of time though.
I saw an interesting insert on TV a while back documenting the efforts of film-makers in Africa.
What these guys do is write a "quick-hack" script, get some actors, a couple of (their own) cars, camera's, some lights, etc. And go make a movie.
1. Shoot footage you need in about 3 days. 2. Edit 3. Make lots of VHS tapes. 4. Sell to street vendors. 5. Profit! Notice there's no ???, and that's because it's actually a booming business. Their clients don't want to see Americans blowing up aliens. They want to see people like them, in situations they can relate to.
They also create jobs for a lot of people down the food chain: From Cameramen, actors, editors, right down to the guy that sells you the tape on the street.
You don't need big budgets, millionnaire actors, and 4000 people to make an engaging film.
> no, yes, maybe (tagging beta)
The main difference between Pratchet and Asprin is that Asprin is just funny; Pratchet on the other hand is deeply funny. By that I mean that to fully appreciate Pratchet you need to know certain things: like Latin, or heraldry or quantum physics, to get the full efect of some of his jokes and puns (actually most of his humor works that way; one good example is Unseen University...it's only after reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver did I realise Pratchet was riffing on the Invisible College, the precursor to the Royal Society).
Plus there's some mayor commentary going on on modernday life on an anecdotal level. Asprin just does not have that; hell Aprin doesn't even have a simple theme (in the literary sense) going on in any of his MYTH books. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed the MYTH series...it's just that it's like penny romance novels against Pratchet's more mature, 'real' literature.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Why are the old people, like the witches, played by young people ?
In the books, the witches are old.
Couldn't they have found some grannies ?
Or just, you know, download the correct codec (divx) like they advise at the top of the page...
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
It works fine in the VLC Media Player. VLC is a great program - it plays just about any video and you never have to download codecs
siener's youtube channel
Humor is in the eye of the beholder, so I won't debate which author is funnier. But I think you'll find that Pratchett has the best-integrated plot-lines of the three authors you mention.
I wish I could figure out why you think Aspirin is more sophisticated. To me, his writing is the weakest of the three. Characters are almost as flat as Isaac Asimov's. Asprin's great contribution was his ability to skewer genre-fantasy conventions with a sci-fi or real world twist, but he rarely works the other way around, skewering the real world with a fantasy twist. For Pratchett, anything is fair game.
The variety of characters that Pratchett has available, plus the fact that Ankh-Morpork allows him to introduce new characters with minimal fuss, allows him to take on stories that just don't fit into Asprin's universe. When did Asprin take on Hollywood (Moving Pictures), Rock 'n' Roll (Soul Music), Shakespeare (Wyrd Sisters), or Opera (Maskerade)? Or himself, for that matter?
Both Asprin and Pratchett put their characters into stock, satirical situations, but since the M.Y.T.H. stories revolve around a smaller set of characters, sometimes the characters don't fit the satire or the story line so well. Pratchett essentially runs two ongoing sets of primary characters, with several other personalities that appear less frequently: The Ankh-Morpork gang (primarily the Watch and the Wizards, with various other sub-groups that grow or fade in importance over parts of the series) and the Witches up in Lancre with their supporting cast. The Uberwald group may grow into an ongoing cast as well, but they seem to be more like some of the other ongoing characters like Casanunda the dwarf or King Verence.
Disclosure: I pretty much stopped re-reading Asprin in my late 20's, where I still reread many of Pratchett's works.
Adams and Pratchett are very similar, but if you look at the copyrights on their earliest novels, I think you'll see that they both started up at about the same time. So "Douglas Adams wannabe" isn't fair. It's more like Newton and Liebniz both inventing calculus at the same time. Or Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Or McDonalds and Burger King.
Another big advantage of Pratchett is he's still writing Discworld novels. Adams and Asprin have stopped their series (for various reasons). And Asprin can't seem to write without help. Every story he starts seems to evolve from or to some sort of shared world where other authors do most of the work. Thieve's World anyone? Actually, I found Thieve's World a more interesting series than the MYTH series over the long haul. MYTH should've stopped at a trilogy.
We are the 198 proof..
I can't tell from the website. Is the film in English or German?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
I think that one of the most enjoyable moments I've had regarding a pratchet book, was after reading, I think it was "Reaper Man," where there was a description of the magic detector that consisted of an urn with several elephants around the rim. When magic was detected, a pebble would drop (well, shoot)out of the elephant which was pointing towards the source of the magic.(pib)
a couple of years after reading this, I was leafing through a catalog of ancient pottery, ( I believe it was chinese,) and there was a photograph of an ancient siesmometer. an urn with a bunch of elephants around the rim with a pebble balanced on the trunk. if there was an earthquake, the elephants in line with the direction of the source of the earthquake would drop their pebbles.
this was the point at which I really came to appreciate the depth of Pratchett's satire and observations. He doesn't just make them up, he references things which already are. I think that his insight into the mental condition is as great as his sense of historical trivia.
While I enjoyed Asprin's books (I tend to prefer the phule series to the M.Y.T.H series), the characters and stories he uses seem to be much more earnestly childish (childish is not a bad thing) and far less applicable as examples of humanity. They are definitely funny, but not, as the parent here says, deep. It's kind of like the difference between wit and humor. One definition of which Pratchett gave in an interview, (I can't remember where,) and another you can find in the movie "Ridicule" (french movie, VERY funny)
the other thing about Pratchett, is that his grammar isn't as condescending as Asprin (or for that matter, most children's book authors) "Hat full of Sky" and "Wee Free Men" , books that Pratchett deliberately aimed at the younger reader do NOT make any attempt to 'dumb down' the writing style because he is writing for children. he just chooses a topic that is of more direct interest to a child. i.e. the life of a pre-teen character.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Close - it was Numbers Richter's reality measuring device from Moving Pictures.
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
A number of characters in the story, such as Granny Wetherwax, Nanny Ogg and the various wizards are supposed to be fairly old. Alas, you can see that the actors and actresses are much too young. Proper makeup would have helped, for those of us familiar with the series. Even so, it doesn't spoil the film, it's just a little bit of "that's not right; they're too young" when you first see them. I'm sure I'll stop paying attention to it quickly when I see it.
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