The one minute teaser is almost done and I'm gonna publish it very soon and very soon we'll launch a kickstarter campaign!
Besides the "making of" of the weapons/vehicles/cyberoctopus/city miniature that you can find in this blog, I'm writing this post to make a summary of the project so far...
Basically I came up with this idea in July. I wanted to make a short film with viral potential, a tribute to the 80s scifi masterpieces, like Blade Runner or Escape from New York, using the same methods they were using back in time... practical effects, model miniatures and lot of handcrafted things. All without using CGI (except for compositing and for creating vintage graphics, like the one for the cyberspace). This is me with the handmade city miniature, trying to look like an art director of the Eighties...
It was something completely new for me, so I started googling around on how to make such things (kit bashing, diy, model making, etc) and at the same time I started to write the script. I then designed the cyber octopus and bought a cheap 3D Printer.
The first things I built for the project were the weapons, painted Nerf toy guns.
I then started to print the Cyber Octopus.
And to built flying cars...
After some days of printing and finishing, the Cyber Octopus was ready!
It was time for creating the city, partially 3D printed, partially crafted using cheap materials and junk.
Everything was ready for the shooting!
We shot in 3 days: 1 day for the city miniature and flying vehicles, 1 day with the main character only (that has more scenes than the others), 1 day with all the 9 characters (mainly for photoshooting) and especially with the 3 main ones (in a wonderful Soviet futuristic location called Linnahall in Tallinn). All together there were 16/17 people, from all over the world (USA, Estonia, Italy, Canada, Belarus, China and even Nigeria!). Here some backstage photos.
After the shooting it took some weeks to finalize the 1 minute teaser. I was also busy doing some other jobs, so I worked time to time... And other people were involved: Andrea Ragusa who made the amazing 80s music, Dmitry Natalevich who did the incredible sound design and Wesley Griffin who recorded the voice over.
The teaser is almost ready and on Saturday 7th of January we'll launch it. Then on Monday 9th we'll launch the kickstarter!
Please consider this whole project is an indie zero budget film, so any donation, even few bucks, is very welcome.