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Off-Topic => Something else => Topic started by: japanesebaby on June 14, 2009, 13:18:28

Title: "the hunt for gollum" - and other 'films by the fans for the fans'
Post by: japanesebaby on June 14, 2009, 13:18:28
regardless of whether or not you were in any way into the lord of the rings (either books or the film), i still  find this quite interesting:

http://www.thehuntforgollum.com/

it's a film made by fans for the fans, the budget was around $5000. ok, some of the acting and the script is pretty awkward at times. but just the look of the film is pretty impressive, the locations look very good (imo some look even better than the originals in peter jackson's films).
just check the trailers:

http://www.thehuntforgollum.com/trailers.htm

i sort of do find this kind of productions really interesting: nobody realy profits, nobody makes money. still you can achieve it all  if you only know how to do team-work. and it starts putting all the millions of dollars that movies are "normally" considered to cost into perspective... well ok, one can always say that in the end quality will cost money: to get top professional actors, top director, etc. but how much of all those millions is really money well spent? a lot of it goes to nonsense too, a lot of it goes to overly high salaries that quality people can charge (just because everyone else does the same) and a lot of it goes simply to the studios' pocket.
i'm not a big fan of the jackson's LOTR movies, but i do find these "web only" (fan) productions kind of interesting format.



the first one of these fan films that i followed was this one: http://www.starwreck.com/
it was made by a group of finnish fans.
now they've also released it on commercial dvd, to cover the costs for their second film:
http://www.ironsky.net/

i'm really looking forward to 'iron sky'. i know their they hired an award winning finnish author johanna sinisalo  to write the script. i've read some of her books, she's really a good and witty writer. that's one reason why i expect something form this film.

despite the fact their first film is now commercially released (which might make one think "ok so they've started to make money with it now", they are still using "fan power" like in the beginning: i went to this computer/media/music festival last year and one of the open workshops they had there was to invent a machine mentioned/needed in the movie, "hakenkreutzierungmachine". the makers of the film said "we need this machine for the film and we know what it does but don't have any idea what this thing looks like - help us!". unfortunately i couldn't attend the whole festival so i didn't get to see what the workshop results were.



by the way, and what comes to the distribution of this kind of films: it's a bit "funny" that it's legal to distribute a film like this among fans:  the owners of the rights for the LOTR films or even the heirs of mr tolkien cannot sue anyone there, because it was a completely nonprofitable fan production. but at the same time it's not similarly legal to share live recordings taped by fans - even if fans didn't make any money with it. hmm?