Slashdot Mirror
$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.
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
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 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.
South Africa was already occupied.
I think it's a big studio viral hoax.
stuff |
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
Im sorry to tell you but argentine and uruguayan press think it is real.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
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.
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.
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!
Oh, I clicked one of those hoping that the media had thought the attack was real, War of the Worlds style.
Too bad.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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.
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
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.
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.
So why isn't the time you spend blasting virtual monsters worth $100/hr, since that's how much you could hypothetically make as a prostitute? Because you aren't a prostitute, just like you aren't a Saturday barista?
But in any case, that's only your opportunity cost for not doing anything productive. The fact still remains that your time spent playing video games is worth $0. Nobody is going to pay you to do it.
And for the ultimate point that is relevant to this discussion, which is the cost of making a film: Even in the unlikely event someone wanted you to do it for some gamer reality TV series, and you do it for free anyway, then the dollar value that appears on their balance sheet for getting you to play video games is still $0/hr. Not $8/hr, not $100/hr. $0.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.