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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.
Both articles mention $30 million, not $300 million.
He posted his video in Taringa! and from there he became famous. Original post at taringa.net
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
If he did this for about $300, its really amazing. The CGI is really nicely done.
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.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Who knew that the man behind Spiderman, The Grudge, Evil Dead, and Drag Me to Hell is a fan of cheesy low budget special effects.
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
Here's the link to the original video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPvmIxu-LSA
(NFSW language. If you work in a lame place. My co-workers laughed their asses off.)
Comment of the year
I can't wait for the upcoming "Leave Britney Alone [2011]" and "Cat and Box [2012]".
lol: You see no door there!
To be honest, this one looked a lot more realistic, just the fact that none of the airplanes/spaceships seemed to be connected to giant invisible rubber bands that made them bounce around in ways that they simply couldn't without falling apart (or out of the sky). If you have no idea what I'm talking about, just watch a few of scenes with F-18 Hornets in Independence Day and notice how they time and time again "bounce" mid-air, it's the kind of thing anyone with a few weeks of experience with 3D animation would try to avoid (which makes me think it was a directorial/managerial decision to make them behave that way).
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Yeah $30M goes a long way in Uruguay!
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.
Um... How about this: Adam Sandler fights against spaceships and giant robots attacking Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, or something.
The fog shrouded giant robots hooked me. Well done effects.
How many hundreds of hours does it take to create something like this?
Nobody would make that piece for $300. That price clearly does not include the value of his time or any number of other things (like the computer used for CG and editing for example). Just call it a hobby project or something, but don't claim it only cost $300.
Hollywood couldn't come up with "Giant Robots Attacking A Modern City" ?? I'm not a movie aficionado, but dudes, that's been done before.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
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.
South Africa was already occupied.
What makes you think they'd give a rat's ass about New York or Tokyo?
But to answer your question more effectively, when you make a movie you target an audience. A hobbyist would probably aim his audience towards the locality upon which the film is made. (Meaning, if he's in Uruguay, he's going to make a film for Uruguayians).
It takes a special kind of person such as yourself to fill an essential role in any religious or quasi-religious movement. This is the sort of man who, when confronted with an extraordinary claim, does not ask for extraordinary evidence, but manages to both absorb the claim without question and put down those who dare to question it.
Yes, the special effects are quite cool, if unpolished. Yes, not everyone with a random workstation would have the talent or experience to produce them. This doesn't mean that some guy in his basement with $300 managed to amass the hardware, software, (self-)training and on site budget to achieve this film. Nor is this man show a unique production talent which would make him stand out from the crowd of professional CGI artists who have already produced similar scenes.
On the other hand, $300 + [0]00,000 = $30[0],000,000! I want to believe!
But you know what? it makes for a great way to start buzz about a movie, and Hollywood's all about the dream of what could be.
I was going to say that I was waiting for Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, the movie, but according to Wikipedia, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshimi_Battles_the_Pink_Robots) there is a Broadway musical in development. So the movie will not be far behind.
And the plot outline looks pretty interesting.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
'Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay'
Thanks for clarifying that.
Does the article submitter work in movie post-production by any chance?
This post brought to you from London, England.
Anyone? Same scene done better in a novel story that was a huge risk in Hollywood.
Yes, it's impressive that the linked video was done on an amateur budget, and congratulations to this guy; I hope he makes millions, but let's not pretend this is original stuff.
The Movie
Am I the only one who thinks that the whole situation was setup as a viral marketing/PR stunt? Maybe I'm just naturally distrustful of Hollywood.
It is easier to sell tickets to another run of the mill Sci-Fi movie if it has a story like this behind it.
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.
Have you ever made one of these? You pull in all the favors you can. $300 in Uruguay will go a lot further than in the USA. Borrow equipment, get talent to work for free in exchange for film credit, get your friends and family to work as extras, use idle editing suites... you get the idea.
If you add up all the effort, the total cost would be way more than $300. The point is that it cost him $300 to put it together. It speaks volumes about his ability to get good results at low cost. That is pretty impressive.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely, what does this say about renewable power?
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.....
...I'm not going to get Rick rolled...
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class, especially since I rule.
No offense intended to the great nation of Uruguay, but why would giant robotic aliens give a rat's ass about Montevideo of all places?
They've been intercepting our interwebs for some time now and as such they've been watching porn from 8thstreetlatinas.net. Like most gigantic robotic overlords they require fresh, nimble, "barely legal" workers for their Energon mines in order to continue to function properly and thus continue to watch even more porn as well as do all those other things that overlords do. Pass pointless laws, monitor the pleebs, protect the children, make deals with other alien overlords, etc.
I know this because I too am a slave of the robotic overlords however, I work in accounting...
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.
He surely isn't factoring in all of the crap he's been accumulating over the last few years in order to put this all together.
Using crap you have lying around is a classic method of saving money when making a movie, even one with a serious budget. Of course you don't factor in the cost of things you aren't paying for.
The $300 maybe would have covered what it cost to pay that lady off to let her kid roll away in the stroller.
Unless he said "Hey want to be in a movie with your kid? There's no money in it." and she said "Sure." Cost: $0.
The enemies of Democracy are
With all the hollywood accounting, I hope he at least makes his original 100USD. But most likely he won't get anything and with a bit of bad luck, he ends up loosing money.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Shouldn't youtube silence the vid? Plenty other vids get silenced for using copyrighted music, and this one obviously i've heard before. PRobably in 28 weeks later. not sure.
they remake the movie once more.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I would hazard a guess they are paying for the potential story behind this but mainly the ability of this guy to produce this on such a budget. $300 for something that looks that good and realistic is VERY good. The explosions are not bad and are generally well done. The shaky camera work gives a good impression of what the scene is apparently about - an attack with people fleeing in panic.
Give the guy a break. If I a produced something like that for 186 quid I would be absolutely ecstatic.
A hobbyist would probably aim his audience towards the locality upon which the film is made. (Meaning, if he's in Uruguay, he's going to make a film for Uruguayians).
I am sure you meant:
he's going to make a film for a reasonable amount of money.
I am pretty sure a trip to New York or Tokyo would have blown his $300 budget.
Primer was one of the best sci-fi movies I've ever seen, on a budget of $7,000. It's about damn time that guy gets the funding he needs to bring his other ideas to fruition.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Kudos to this guy for putting together what looks like a big budget trailer for $300. However, I don't see any original filmmaking ideas - only technical content. I saw this short film months ago and think it has a lot more originality and an awesome sci-fi slant. Plus, augmented reality is sweet. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU_reTt7Hj4
basically a bunch of average CGI on top of the tried-and-true cinematography to cause a sense a panic in the viewer. I didn't see any new ideas nor any new cinematographic techniques. what am I missing? it seems like Fede wrote a short storyline, divided it into scenes, shot the scenes with a "few" extras and dropped some CGI on top. how is this different from any Film School project? Ah, it doesn't show any plot, character development, suspense or new techniques/ideas :(
story must be bogus.
Well, of course, their requests for subsidies was not Uraguayan in and of it is as it were the United States government would never have if the president, our president, had not and as far as I know that's the way it will always be. Is that clear?
I agree. There is no way that was made for $300.00.
Not unless he's using free equipment/software, not paying anyone else for anything, and not counting his own hours as an expense.
I really hate to be so cynical, but this really looks like viral advertising to me.
The video is kind a clever splice-together of scenes he shot and scenes he copied, but I don't see anything especially original.
this film was interesting to watch and would most likley make a decent film if the studio doesnt wreck it but what worries me is the soundtrack has been blatentley copied from '28 Days Later' and does add eerieness to the atmopshere, so shouldn't danny boyle, or whoever owns the rights to the music be sueing this guy if hes just been offered a $300 million movie deal?
You mean they have already taken over England?
I'm going to go watch the longer version of it called "The War of the Worlds" (2005) again tonight. No, seriously, the Youtube vid was VERY cool. But I think what I liked most about it was that it reminded me of the Dakota Fanning movie. Oh, I guess Tom Cruise might have been in it too... Anyway, it was a very cool, very scary movie.
I am not left-handed, either!
I agree on the he should be recognized, but disagree as to how. I'd rather guys like this were able to make a feature length film and completely bypass the normal hollywood cash skimming, over paid "star" paying and story altering facets, to just skip the whole bloated budget and higher cartel DVD and ticket prices MPAA thing and do for movies what the indy music artists are doing skipping affiliation with the RIAA crew.
If he can do this for three hundred bucks, maybe that means a full feature length movie can be done for under one million and not cost hundreds of millions. He still gets paid, but it would be all his and his crew then, not 99% going to middlemen and overpaid so called "talent", and consumers/watchers can get good films legitimately to view at much more reasonable prices.
I think there are many much better special-fx based movies. Some even have somewhat of a story!:P Personally, I like the one below a lot, but that may be because it was recorded where I live;-) Anyway, it's a lot more entertaining than the video the story is about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU_reTt7Hj4
0x or or snor perron?!
It uses the same music as 28 days later? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x_ovbbXHMY
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
I've seen a fair few Hollywood movies made for a lot more where the storyline is tenuous to say the least.
I think the direction shows promise and why not - Spanish speaking American and European markets must be a potential goldmine for Hollywood. It rather reminds me of the music industry, which I worked in for a short while. They take a good looking teenager or group of teenagers with a few half baked songs scribbled on the back of their schoolbooks off the streets and throw a few million at them just in case they are the next Michael Jackson or SClub7 or whatever. Reckon Hollywood is the same. Take a punt on somebody with a bit of promise, surround them with time served veterans who can keep things on schedule and at worst it gets written off as a tax loss to balance the books and at best you might find a genius. Got to be worth a punt, costs about the same as one Hollywood star's pay for one movie probably.
Plus Hollywood loves a formula. District 9 = "African sci-fi", maybe this is the missing link "South American sci-fi" that will clean up that market.
...they want their meme back.
I saw it when it was called "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (I know, the film actually did get picked up and finished by a studio, but it started out as a homegrown short)
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - HST
I've flown quite a lot and I've also been to a number of air shows and I'm still convinced there were way too many maneuvers pulled by the CGI Hornets in Independence day that would have resulted in crashed or at least stalled planes. Have you seen some of the things those planes in the movie do? Their movement is too cartoonish and "action packed", basically it's Hollywood aerodynamics where suspense and "wow cool!" are way more important than realism.
(When I say "bounce" keep in mind I also described it as "giant invisible rubber bands", that is to say, going downward with the plane facing more forward than downward yet somehow making a neat sine-curve "bounce" up at low speed with the nose still pointing way too much forward for it to simply be explained by "oh well he used the afterburner", unless it was some magic Area 51-style VTOL Hornet it shouldn't have been able to move like that.)
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
"...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.
Dear Sir,
I'm Mr. Finkelstein of Megalith Studios, and we've decided that you're the perfect person to write a script for our new bajillion dollar robot invasion film. This job pays roughly $8/hr.
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.
Aliens might not look at the world from our narrow perspective. Maybe they are looking for some kind of secret Nazi stuff hidden there by an émigré Nazi fugitive genius type who was really an alien. Maybe Hitler was really an evil alien and he is still there. (Some conspiracists thought he was down that way for years.) Good plot fodder... Nazis.
Remember "The Boys From Brazil?" Anyway, IMHO it seems more interesting than them attacking Washington DC again. Unless Tim Burton has them do it, of course. In that case it's cool.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
You mean they have already taken over England?
Well yes, among other places... Why do you think countries are passing three-strikes and you're booted off the internet laws? It's so the overlords have more bandwidth to download pornography and interlink with other overlords via IRC.
Fix both the headlines and body text, please.
I'm Mr. Finkelstein of Megalith Studios, and we've decided that you're the perfect person to write a script for our new bajillion dollar robot invasion film. This job pays roughly $8/hr.
WOW sounds great! no really, get that to me in writing and I'll get started ASAP. I work 15 hour days, six days a week so it should only take a year or so.
Well, before you started posting comments about it I actually considered adding it to my sig but I was being lazy, now I have a good reason not to do it, it keeps at least one troll occupied.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Love scifi but my eyes did widen when I saw the pram going down the stairs and thought, well at least they know their stuff... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battleship_Potemkin#The_Odessa_Steps_sequence good luck to them ;O)
Or Santa Claus. If Tim Burton made a movie with giant robots attacking Santa Claus, I would so stay up late watching that on SyFyLus channel.
I drank what? -- Socrates
For all the talk about "Hollywood accounting" I find it just as disingenuous when all of these indie shorts come out claiming ridiculously small budgets. Yes, he might have spent $300 out of pocket for some snacks or something for the crew... but the crew worked for free, the cast worked for free, he didn't pay anything for filming on the street (which in most metropolitcan areas in the US he'd have to get a permit and insurance for), the cost of the camera and equipment wasn't included, and most importantly the hundreds of hours he spent creating those visual effects weren't included either. This really gives people a warped sense of scale of how time consuming and work-intensive a production is - especially on here with everyone claiming this is the death of Hollywood. Just like the open source adage - Open Source is free only if your time is worthless... This movie cost $300 bucks only if everyone's time on it was worthless. This is why Sam Raimi didn't say "Oh, you did this for $300 bucks and it's 5 minutes long? That means you could make a 90 minute film for $5400 bucks. Here you go, kid, go nuts."
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
... by all the wanna be SciFi film makers uploading their budget clips to YouTube trying to get a movie deal now. Thanks a lot buddy.
[signature]
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.
Wow.
That car/helicopter reel was a good demo of a 3D animator's skills and might well snag him some decent work in the field. But I think the story in the robot attacky-thing was probably a significant grab for the Hollywood execs. --The video didn't just show animation, but also interation with actors, demonstrating that the director has both versatility and a sense of what people are interested in. People like concepts which stir the imagination.
Cars and helicopters don't really inspire anything new. It was more like a nice screen saver than a "What if?" sci-fi idea.
Of course, unless a decent script can be pulled together, which I don't have high hopes of, this probably won't amount to much. But you never know. As I understand it, the "District 9" director got his start doing similar small animation projects, -though his early work was much more intricately thought out in terms of story and human reactions, whereas this guy's work looks suspiciously like a Uruguayan Roland Emmerich.
But you're right; that car reel did look impressive!
-FL
He forgot to mention, they're giving you an executive title so they don't have to pay you overtime.
And underwater planes
...
And Angelina Jolie (before she went weird)
...
And Gwyneth Paltrow
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
You obviously need some orgone.
They wanted to take up canasta to replace their Friday night intergalactic whist league so they went to the source. It makes perfect sense.
And I'm not even talking about paying talent. Let's just say he has a bunch of friends that will do everything (acting, CGI, basic crew work) for free. This isn't unheard of for something so short.
The software ALONE to generate CGI on that level is more than $300. You can't do that kind of work in something like Adobe After Effects or Apple Motion. Hell, animating something in Photoshop (painful) wouldn't look this good and it still costs more than $300. This requires something like Shake or IFF stuff... then you have to have the hardware to run it on.
Also there is NO way the camera he's using is some cheapo point and shoot DV or even HDV cam - the quality and frame rate look almost film like. I've seen high end DV and HDV cams, all of which are above $300, and they still don't look this good after proper lighting and post-production color matching/tweaking.
You can do plenty of stuff on shoe string budgets these days but I don't think it's scaled down to QUITE this level yet.
WTF? All of these comments and not one person has discussed *HOW* he did it? This is fucking slashdot! You people are supposed to be engineers, scientists and geeks. You are supposed to care about the how and not so much about the why.
Something is broken.
$300? How?
Camera
Rendering
Software
alone that's more than $300, even if you consider that he used Blender to do the robots and ships.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
I was watching this thinking, hey, that music sounds awfully familiar? Dug through my music collection and found the music in the video (Which does add a good deal of the "awesome" factor.) is a splicing of the song "In The House- In A Heartbeat" from the original soundtrack of 28 Days Later by John Murphy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSYYEDXaGo0
The guy made a cheap, uninteresting version of Casshern in Portugese or Spanish or whatever. Not impressed... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk9fGI90qdM Have a robot, ninja, super-evolved zombie cut through a robot with a karate chop and I'll start paying attention.
What's $270 million between friends?
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
I was going to suggest that perhaps they were meaning in Ugandan dollars but looking it up Uganda uses the Schilling and it would be a budget of almost 59 billion of those.
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.
Neil Blomkamp rocks!
'I uploaded (Panic Attack!) on a Thursday and on Monday my inbox was totally full of e-mails from Hollywood studios,'
From: 20th Century Fox
To: Youtube video winer
Subject: you won 300 million US
Congratulations Mr. Alvarez! Your youtube entry was the lucky winner of our video sweepstakes. To collect your lumpsum of 300 million US dollars please send a small processing fee of 2000 US dollars so we can begin releasing the funds to you. Once your payment has been processed you will be contacted for an account to deposit the funds to. Please do not delay!
Regards,
Mr. Jones.
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.
6. Shaky cams suck, PERIOD.
True. But it lets producers get away with cheaper CG and less talented actors. It's the "Jay Leno at 10pm" production model (a.k.a. "Who cares how popular it is, it's cheap as dirt, so our markup percentage is through the roof.")
4. Robot attack formation is VERY poor
I'm sorry, I didn't realize we had people here who had extensively studied the military doctrine of asymmetrical conflict involving giant humanoid robot combined infantry/artillery. What academy do you go to for that, anyway?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
He forgot to mention, they're giving you an executive title so they don't have to pay you overtime.
Hummm, the standard contract then? The one with the hookers and blow clause?
...because giant alien robots and spacecraft are trashing a city? Oh, right. It's doesn't take place in the U.S.
Scratch that, it probably will. Aliens don't usually plan one-country invasions. Anyone wanna take bets on whether this will be better or worse than Transformers 3?
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Um, empty stroller? All of the shots are outside, so no sets or lights were required. Presumably several of the buildings were local landmarks (which males even cooler to see them blown up).
The camcorder could have been borrowed or rented, or even bought-and-returned ala Superbowl Sunday big-screen TVs.
I would really like to know about the software.
Film geeks will recognize the stroller shot as an homage to the Odessa Steps sequence from The Battleship Potemkin.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Don't get me wrong, it was a well made short film, and the special effect were impressive, but as far as I recall the extent of the idea was aliens blowing the crap out of Montevideo, with the explosions getting bigger and bigger. Granted that's probably as good a plotline as Transformers 2, but all in all, I would rather see money go to somebody that has shown they can write a good story, and not just map out action scenes.
Mr Burton has (or had) a show at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Nice to see him properly recognized. They displayed some of his concept drawings for movies etc. Tina Brown's "The Daily Beast" did a feature on it with a slide show. (Too lazy to find you a link.)
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
If he had used a USA locale for his CG creations, he might be in Guantanamo instead of Hollywood by now.
Or, uh, are we past that now?
So, is it a $300 video gets a $30 million deal, like the title, or a $30 video gets a $300 million movie deal?
Based on the comments from people who appear to have RTFA, it seems the title is correct: $300 / $30 million. I sure hope whoever wrote that summary is working in entertainment and not engineering. Hollywood gets things wrong by a factor of ten all the time and no one dies, right?
[ Come on, that's a softball - someone post a good response. ]
Lose essential liberties to get temporary safety = get only hassles and security theater.
Good visual effects - check
:P
Epic music - check
Illogical plot (certainly dropping a bomb would be easier than marching through Uruguay) - check
Yep, he is certainly Hollywood material.
Well, if they came here looking for latin women, Montevideo is the wrong place.