Slashdot Mirror
Discworld Fan Film Possibly the Largest Scale Fan Film Ever
An anonymous reader writes "After clocking in at $82,000 on their Kickstarter campaign, two Troll Bridge trailers have been released online showing helicopter shots in New Zealand (video) and a large scale bridge set that was built and shot on (video). A Behind the Scenes (video) has also been released demonstrating what fans are now actually capable of, given decent crowd-funding. The film has finished shooting and is expected to be released next year. Sir Terry Pratchett has been apparently thrilled with the progress."
But can it beat Star Wreck for best production award?
Lest you auteurs out there get too exciting, thinking you're going to film your Michael Bay ripoff dream project for a song, keep in mind that the entire cast and crew *volunteered* on the project (some for years). If you were to factor that cost in, it wouldn't surprise me if the actual cost of this project was well north of $1 million.
I just wanted to mention that, because these kinds of fan films often advertise incredibly low budgets that mislead a lot of people to think that real filmmaking is easy and cheap, and anyone can do it. It reality it takes a team of pros to produce a decent effort (not just some shitty student film or Youtube novelty). It's just that very low-budget efforts often get those pros to *donate* their services. They're not going to do that for your average Michael Bay ripoff.
My personal favorite professional-grade fan film is Broken Allegiance, easily the best Star Wars fan film ever made (IMHO). It was shot in Australia with a volunteer cast and crew made up of film professionals for about $10,000. It's one of the few fan films I've seen with professional lighting, actors who aren't horrific, and a halfway decent script. And it's one of the few Star Wars fan films that plays it straight instead of doing the 10-millionth stupid parody of a franchise that's almost become a parody of *itself*.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Hell, it doesn't translate out of any of the books whatsoever.
Discworld plays, board games, video games (yes, Discworld I and II were NOT "Discworld", just Simon-the-Sorceror style cash-ins), etc. 99% of the Discworld merchandise is absolute tat. Hell, even the endless calendars, "science books", and everything else are a waste of space.
I don't blame Pratchett and/or his agent for cashing in - far from it, I'd do the same. But it remains true that every adaptation outside of the books just can't do them justice.
Hell, I cringed through the first 10 minutes of the TV adaptations we had over in the UK "starring" David Jason, etc. Ick. I had to switch it off.
Some series you can do justice too (whether they have or not is another matter) - Lord of The Rings you can do quite well (though I don't like the current versions, there's sure to be a remake in 10 years time with even more "extra footage"), most sci-fi authors you can do quite well. But comedy literature is a tough one to crack and it won't translate to the screen properly at all.
All it *will* do is put people off trying to read the books because they've seen the (crappy) TV/movie versions.
In one book, Death has a scythe that's so sharp it slices his sentences in half when he speaks. Vimes is an ugly, fat, old alcoholic copper that kicks arse (okay, they NEARLY managed that in a lot of 80's cop shows). Unseen University is technically invisible (or not, depending on which part of which book you read). There are pages of explanations spread across 20+ books about how some of the elements of the world came about (e.g. klacks, other dimensions, Angua, Dibbler, etc.). How the hell do you translate that to a movie or even a play?
They should stop trying. At best you can attempt an amateur play or an audiobook reading. At worst, everything else you put out ruins the books even more.