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$300 Sci-Fi YouTube Video Lands $30m Movie Deal
krou writes "A producer from Uruguay who made a short science fiction film and uploaded it to YouTube has landed a film deal with Sam Raimi's Ghost House worth $300 million. The film, which shows spaceships and giant robots attacking Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, was made by Fede Alvarez for around $30. 'I uploaded (Panic Attack!) on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of e-mails from Hollywood studios,' he said. Alvarez is to develop and direct a film based on one of his ideas, but there is no word yet on the writer."
Further proof that Hollywood is running out of good ideas, and must turn to new sources.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
As awesome as that video is - and it is pretty damn awesome, let there be no mistake about that - I suspect that it only cost $300 if he's considering the time of himself and his friends to be worth zero. (I'm assuming the group scenes were the result of getting a bunch of buddies together.)
I'd be interested to know how many hours of his own time were spent on that.
However, it is pretty awesome and the mere fact that he can do stuff like that with his limited resources is a sign that he may well deserve that money.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
The guy did a great job with the special effects, but story wise - meh.
So... what's your point?
It has no story. Aliens or robots kill humans is not a story and it's been done to death.
It's a very pretty video of a special effects demo.
I'm impressed by the special effects and not impressed by his story telling ability.
I can't think of any other way to put it.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
The fog shrouded giant robots hooked me. Well done effects.
How many hundreds of hours does it take to create something like this?
To his credit, the plot of the YouTube video was a lot more interesting than around 80% of the movies that Hollywood does churn out these days.
but, but, he got a movie deal out of it and only spent $300 bucks? what have you done lately?
What development do you want him to do in a 5 minute piece?
I guess if his goal was to impress you with his storytelling ability he failed, but if it was to advertise his vision to Hollywood, he succeeded.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Otherwise, point taken.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
That price clearly does not include the value of his time or any number of other things
The value of your time is whatever someone is paying you for it. If nobody is paying you for it, then that time is worth $0. It almost certainly has a non-monetary worth, but you don't add that to your budget tally.
For a direct comparison, when the contractor working on my house bills me for 20 hours at $30, and tells me that he donated 3 hours to fix a mistake he made or because he was being anal retentive about getting something perfect, my bill is $600. Those extra three hours, hypothetically worth $30 each, actually cost $0.
Just call it a hobby project or something, but don't claim it only cost $300.
It certainly was a hobby project, yet I don't see why that means it couldn't have been made for $300. My contractor isn't doing it as a hobby, it's his livelihood, yet the same rules apply.
The enemies of Democracy are
The project is budgeted at 30M.
This is Alvarez's first project, probably no agent, definitely no actors attached to it, so they will probably give him an 'advance' and then lots of interdependent if-then conditionals. He won't get any on-screen credits. (That sets off a bunch of payouts the producer normally keeps) Then one of two things happen to a first-time writer/creator.
1. The conditionals are never met. Alvarez keeps his pittance of an advance and makes a little beer money. This is normally how it works for a project off the street.
2. The producer reinterprets the contract or has some sort of magical contractual difficulty with Alvarez if the project is successful. Alvarez then might see his five figures after a few rounds in court and 6-figure legal bills.
Check out the legal wrangling on 'My Big Fat Greek Wedding' as an example. According to the producer, that was an 'unprofitable' film. Welcome to business deals in Hollywood.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I am sorry but I would take this story with pinch of salt.
Could be someone is pulling a fast one on this guy?
There is nothing in the film that shows any originality or creativity in ideas. It seems like a amateur copy of scenes from "War of the Worlds" and "Independence Day".
So, what did Hollywood Studios see in this guy?
That he can make a hacky special effects film for $300? Even there, anyone can see that if you used the proper accounting methods, the budget was probaly way more than $300. All those crowds running was previously shot and reused dfootage. If he had to perform original shooting of those scenes, the budget would go way over $300. Same goes for the explosions and other special effects. He probably spent a long time on creating those but did not include the dollar value of that time which typically would add thousands of dollars to the film's budget. So, I am not seeing what he brought to the table.
Those fan-created Star Trek episodes have more going for them than this.
Being able to make movies much cheaper is a good thing. Means making a movie is much less financially risky, so people are more likely to back something new and unknown. Consumer grade equipment is getting better all the time, perhaps holywood won't be needed. This plus file sharing must have holywood filling their pants, not sure drawing such attention with such large sums of money was wise for them.....
Further proof that Hollywood is running out of good ideas, and must turn to new sources.
It's not even new - it's "War of the Worlds" and "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" mixed together.
The guy did a great job with the special effects, but story wise - meh.
Golloywierd will throw in some hot chick in short shorts and lots of cleavage and it'll make a few hundred million.
Mod parent up and GP down. It's very nicely done, but the only "good idea" here is having the robots attack South America instead of North America this time. Clearly he was doing a tech demo tribute to several large (and mediocre) recent Hollywood movies.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
You haven't flown much in real air, have you? You should try it in a small airplane. Check at your nearest airport for short flights and see if you can find one with a plane which holds less than 50 people. After a summer flight in a 10-passenger plane you'll change your opinion of how a wing through air might behave. Take a dose of motion sickness medicine before your first flight, as you don't know how you'll react to it.
I want to know how much money _net_ he'll get out of the deal after the Hollywood Accounting is done.
Stan Lee, Peter Jackson and many others had trouble getting their alleged fair share of the $$$ from Hollywood.
Considering that he had a "flood" of offers in his email before most of the world even heard of it? Yeah, I'd say it's a PR stunt.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
movie? Shows it is better to post in youtube than to pimp your movie project in slashdot.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The value of your time is whatever someone is paying you for it. If nobody is paying you for it, then that time is worth $0. It almost certainly has a non-monetary worth, but you don't add that to your budget tally.
No, there's this thing called opportunity cost that can be used to value a hobbyist's time. For instance, if I can get $8/hr on Saturdays working at a coffeeshop instead of playing computer games, then it's worth at least $8/hr for me to spend that hour blasting virtual monsters with virtual rockets instead of making tasty espresso for impatient customers.
"...it's the kind of thing anyone with a few weeks of experience with 3D animation would try to avoid..."
Or they tried to make the movie effects as accurate as possible.
It is called Wind Shear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_shear
It is the reason people are told to buckle up in airplanes when they are nowhere near landing. Doppler radar can catch it even though it is not visible to the naked eye (unless it contains particles that are visible) and thus the pilots know it is coming. Unbuckled people have been killed being tossed about in airliners because of it.
This guy did a great job! 300 bucks, uploaded to Youtube, and he gets a Hollywood gig out it!! It's the Cherished Daydream of half the digital video hacks on this board -- maybe the whole 'Net. And you're going to hate on him because you think it's merely "a very pretty video of a special effects demo."
God bless this sonuvabitch. Let's see you do better.
I've seen people tell a story with a still photo.
Yes I agree but I've seen really bad movies that are overflowing with plot holes, such as Transformers 2, gross 832,747,337 worldwide making it the third-highest grossing film of 2009 as of October 13, 2009. Hollywood is not an Artistic consortium.
Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformers_2
It doesn't matter if it crappy or not, or if it has a story or not, etc The point was to watch our city being destroyed by aliens/robots or whatever they are.
I'm thinking you're missing the point. If I were Hollywood, I'd be interested in this not because of the plot or the acting, but because the guy made a pretty impressive scene with lots of pretty sophisticated special effects on a shoestring budget.
If I were Sam Raimi, I'd be thinking, "If he can do that for $500, even if $500 is exaggerated and it actually cost him a grand or two, then for $300 million, I could probably get a hell of a lot more bang (literally) for my bucks than I'd get using traditional Hollywood special effects studios."
The "cgi bonanza" is likely precisely what they're interested in, not the shakeycam or acting.
Turns out he's a big PR agency guy - makes adverts for Pepsi and the like presumably for national prime time tv, for some sized budget. So it's not so much "young art school student and mates make $300 movie and gets lucky" more like "talented, experienced, well connected ad. movie maker in the media business makes fun film in spare time when he's not directing SFX heavy corporate videos and gets a step up to making feature films". More of a case of media people talking to each other than famous director's teenaged son asking his dad to watch something kewl him and his mates are all watching at school. Check his website showreel.
But fair play to the man. Still got a bit of a break. Go for it. I am really liking the fact that aliens are landing somewhere other than New York or LA for a change. (if you were aliens I wonder how you'd choose where to land? biggest cities? means Mexico and India have to be in with a shout!). District 9 had some nice African angles, I'd be interested to see how a Uruguayan angled sci-fi film might look.