Okay, so I downloaded Revelations yesterday. Now, I didn’t download the full DVD quality set, it’s 7Gb, life’s too short and I’m not that patient, I grabbed the 250Mb Quicktime version, so I obviously didn’t get the full viewing experience. In all, it took me about four-and-a-half hours to download, so I wasn’t in the greatest of moods as it monopolised my machine for the whole evening (my BitTorrent client quoted me an hour and 40 minutes at the start and I believed it, fool that I am). Anyway, I finally got to watch it.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but what I got was akin to a TV movie or something that goes straight to video. The acting was, at best, forced and generally wooden, the script was poor and often uninteresting with little in the way of tension, the action sequences, with the exception of the aerial dog fights, were lame (my respect for fight choreographers and stunt co-ordinators has increased a lot of late) and while the sound effects were good, the score was off, it didn’t have the quality of the originals and you can hear the lack of budget. The locations that weren’t computer generated, with the exception of the cockpit of the ship(s), were threadbare and Vader and the Emperor looked like parodies because they couldn’t match up to the films (the Emperor looks like Freddy Kruger in a shawl or a character from Bo’ Selector, Vader sounds like someone doing a Vader impression, a bad one). That brings me to the special effects, which have been raved about. I thought they were on a par with a low budget TV show or a computer game. For me, they were good, but not great.
Now, it sounds like I’m being harsh, like I’m knocking the monumental effort that everyone put in, like I didn’t enjoy it, in fact, it sounds like I’m doing everything I hate critics doing. I’m not. This is, as I think the press have rightly stated, a landmark, not just in fan fiction, but in digital film-making. Yes, I laid a lot of criticisms at the door, but let me explain. All of my statements are 100% my opinion, I stand by them, I meant them, but let’s not forget that the film was made for $20,000 over three years in their spare time by an unpaid cast and crew. That is some achievement. Why? Well, a single episode of a TV series (which runs about equal length) costs a lot more than that (Farscape cost $2 million per episode), the cut scenes in a video game costs considerably more than that ($20 million for something like Halo 2). $20,000 wouldn’t cover the catering budget on most Hollywood films. Anyone know what the budget was for Revenge of the Sith? $115 million (estimated). That’s 5,750 times more. I don’t know about you, but I can’t see that much difference. I can see a difference, yes, but are the effects and story on RotS 5,750 times better? I don’t think so (and RotS was shot on digital too, so no film-related costs either). So director/instigator Shane Felux and everyone else has a right to be very proud.
Do you want to know what the exciting thing is? Felux (and team I imagine) are now looking to raise money to make an original film. Yes, it took three years, nobody got paid, it may be riding on the name rather than the quality, it relies heavily on special effects over important things like the script (an accusation that can be levelled at a lot of Hollywood product though, Revenge of the Sith included) and making a good original film will be much harder, but if they can do this on $20,000 imagine what they could do with $2 million, a tiny amount for a film, but 100 times what was spent on Revelations. As Felux himself puts it:
I can make a two or three-million dollar movie that would normally cost $30m (£17m) or $50m (£28m) and I can make that back in overseas sales and DVD sales alone.
The man has got a point. The thing is, he could probably do it without studio involvement too, because of the press garnered by Revelations. It would be easy enough to find a good script (just root around on sites like Trigger Street until you find something) and then raise finance by pre-selling to TV or DVD distributors, even offer fans and investors a chance to come on board (all it takes it 20,000 fans with $100 dollars to donate and they get their $2 million budget). Grab a couple of unknown actors with some stage or screen experience (plenty of those) and off you go. I think it’s perfectly plausible to come up with a half-decent movie this way, even if it only rakes in $10 million in DVD sales, TV rights, box-office, merchandising, product placement and the half-dozen other ways you can make money on films, it’s still made five times it’s budget and puts it into an elite club of movies that actually made money.
If the Panic Struck Productions website ever comes back I’m sure it’ll make interesting reading (and there are behind the scenes extras on the full DVD copies, I’m back in the UK with the newly upgraded 2Mb pipe over the weekend so I might try downloading those). All in all this is a great effort and I look forward not just to the new films by Felux and his team, but fan fiction in general if this is the way it’s headed.
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