Wednesday, April 19, 2017

AOTCO main shooting is done!

Dear backers, followers and cyber fans.
I’m proud to announce that last Thursday night we ended the first, biggest part of the shooting!! And so far we got amazing shots, as you can notice from the still frames I’ll post along this update (please note: those are 90% raw footage, just a minimal test grading were applied and the compositing is yet to be done).
Now left to shoot are just the outdoor scenes in Tokyo and few miniatures.

It has been a long and exhausting week: we truly did our best and even more to achieve a professional stunning looking film, to please our fans all around the world!
I’m not trying to show off when I say that we basically we made a 200k short film with 1/10th of the budget! Thanks to our amazing crew (many people worked for free!) our wonderful cast, and all the companies that helped us with the equipment (like CineUnit for the camera, HighVoltage for lights, BBrental for lens and Nordic Vision for the atmospheric effects) and also thanks to everybody’s willing and patience to work for very long shooting shifts: an average of 16 hours a day! We barely slept during the week of shooting... It was really exhausting! But at the end of each day, everybody was happy and satisfied for the great results.
Maybe I aimed too high, but I’m really proud of what we achieved together.

Overall, the long lasting shooting days meant also more food, more transport expenses and, unfortunately, some unlucky accidents: our sound recordist broke a couple of lavalier microphones, some small parts of the equipment got lost and a couple of scratches were made on the rented van, which we had to pay a big fine for! All of these things made our already super tight budget raise even more

  
So please, if you still believe in this project, it would mean the world for us if you decide to help us a little by considering a donation on PayPal following this link: https://www.paypal.me/NicolaPiovesan. Some of you already did it and we can’t thank you enough, but we are still quite far from covering all the extra expenses we had.  


Anyway, what matters the most, is that the biggest part of the shooting is done and we can’t wait to show what an incredible footage we have! I’m sure you won’t be disappointed with the final result. I’ll keep you posted with the next stages of the production and meanwhile remember that you can still follow us on facebook, instagram or twitter!

More things to come! And a big surprise for all of our fans is planned for early May!
So stay tuned!

Your cybernetically,
Nicola 

Sunday, April 2, 2017

The Cyber Octopuses are ready to shoot!

Hello dear cyber followers and octo-backers!
Sorry if I haven’t updated you yet, but they have been a very very though and busy month, after an amazing Kickstarter campaign that got 133% of the goal and a month preparing everything for the movie! Lot of crafting, lot of organizing, lot of things to do! Now we are only 5 days ahead the shooting and it’s a very exciting moment!

First of all, let me thank the again the Kickstarter backers for making this dream a reality! The biggest challenge now is making a great movie with a relatively low budget. Consider also that about €500 of the Kickstarter funds didn’t make it (some expired or empty cards...). This mean our third goal is, in fact, not achieved, but I made the impossible to have some great props and easter eggs anyway! I’m sure you won’t be disappointed. If anyway you are geneorus and want to help the project a bit more, you can consider a PayPal donation, HERE:   

Then, here some updates, photos and more! 

Well, the crafting haven’t started the best way, since I chopped away some millimiters of my finger! Nothing serious, but it was damn painful and for more than a week I couldn’t craft properly... This slowed down the process a lot!



Meanwhile I ordered from all over the world some amazing props and costumes, also thanks to some companies that loved the project and made a special deal.

Like Dieselpunk.ro who provides some amazing masks.



Or Timmy Hog for the gauntlet and armor and Illumi-Nation for the futuristic visor:



VRtifacts shipped me from US those vintage helmets:



And Gustav Ljungdal and me made this Tsukamoto style headset



This is a tribute to Blade Runner (they used the same Panasonic TV in that movie!)



And I guess you’ll also recognize this kind of umbrella...



A guy from Canada, Les Malcom, made a couple of stunning flying cars



And I’ve been crafting hard to make a bigger cooler city, also thanks to some MDF futuristic building provided by DarkOPS.



While a company from Spain, guided by Alex Tutusaus, printed a legion of Cyber Octopuses!



Supported also by my new 3D printers provided by Wanhao!



So yeah, many people from all over the world are helping this film a lot and now everthing is almost ready for the shooting!!! I will publish one more update in a couple of weeks, showing you some behind the scenes photos. The machine is moving forward, it’s unstoppable now!!!

If you want to be updated on an almost daily base, you can follow us on Facebook.

And please consider some extra donation on PayPal 

I’m kind of broke now... ehehe! :) 
Thanks again and speak you soon!!!

Nicola