MORTAL KOMBAT: REBIRTH

Considering my previous post, the timing of this video is serendipitous.

Video game movies arguably suffer the most from the attitude “Meh, it’s a video game movie, what do you expect?” We have yet to have a video game-based movie that treats the source material with the respect shown to novel adaptations. Comic book movies used to suffer under the same yoke, but in the last decade or so, some filmmakers have realized what I was talking about before: just because they’re comic book movies doesn’t mean they can’t be good movies.

Video games, sadly, are still caught in the catch-22. Filmmakers don’t take the movies seriously and the movies wind up shitty. Since the movies are shitty, they bomb. So filmmakers get it in their heads that a video game movie isn’t going to do well at the box office because it’s a video game movie, so they don’t bother to take it seriously. And round and round. (It looked like we might be able to break out of that cycle when Gore Verbinski was attached to BIOSHOCK, but alas.)

Which is why this video, titled MORTAL KOMBAT: REBIRTH, is pretty exciting.

Short Film: Ghost Story

Today, the first of two new short films that are finally finished and released upon the world. Blog content FTW!

Earlier in the spring, I was asked to be a panelist on the “Comic Con Film School,” a workshop discussion that takes place in the mornings of the Con. The reason was that this year the coordinator of the panel wanted to do a special focus on “visual effects on a shoestring.”

Instead of doing a couple of isolated effects tests, we decided to make a short film that we could use to showcase the various points we planned to make about the production and post-production process. Sean, the coordinator, wrote the script for me to direct.

Before I go on, the film:

(Also a disclaimer: Comic Con does not endorse the contents of this film and was not involved in its production.)

Turbo: A Video Game Movie

These guys are totally going to get to make the feature — or at least take a lot of promising meetings.

 

 
Turbo: Trailer from Jarrett Conaway on Vimeo.

USC Graduate Thesis, budget “under $100k,” the film was shot on RED and is about 20 minutes long. 

(via Gizmodo)

Lots to mention…

Been hard at work on everything in the world these last few weeks, seems like. Some of the highlights:

Kung Fu Red: The first of many collaborations to come between myself and Anthony, we shot this the very first weekend we got our brand-spankin-new RED camera. I wanted to shoot a fight scene and he obliged. It was originally just supposed to be a camera test but we wound up liking the edit so much that we finished it out with sound, music, and color grading.

I’ve embedded the YouTube for your convenience and viewing pleasure. If you want to see it in higher quality, check it out on Vimeo.

The Descendants: Turned in the latest, and IMO greatest, draft. I’m super happy with it, I’m waiting on Dark Horse to see what they have to say.

Sandrima Rising: Working with the Dastolis and churning out finals. Some of the CG work in this is really top-notch. There’s a “city chase” sequence in the middle that I think will knock people’s socks off. My hat’s off to those guys.

fxphd: I’ve mentioned fxphd in the past, but this time around it’s even more special: Ryan and I are teaching a course this term! So if you can afford it (and for the level of training phd offers, aside from us, it’s an amazing deal), come sign up and we’ll drop some knowledge on you.

48 Hour Film Project: Already kind of addressed this. We really wound up liking the film we made, with the exception of the opening scene. We re-shot the scene and will be posting the revised version on YouTube probably in a couple weeks (I have too much going on to finish it right now). We will also probably post the 48 Hour version after that, just for comparison.

Troika: This is a project that Anthony wrote and directed a selection of scenes from in order to pitch it to financiers. As a writer I’m super-critical of my own work, and that of others, and there’s not a lot of scripts that really entertain or interest me. I like reading good scripts, but a lot of scripts just don’t cut it.

I have to say, Troika is a great script.

Among the scenes shot are a fight scene, a dialogue scene, and a car chase. The car chase was shot on greenscreen, and there are plusses and minuses to that. On the plus side, the fact that they were shooting green is the reason Anthony called me to be on-set, and that led me to being on-set for all of the subsequent shoots, and ultimately concluding that not only did I want to make movies with those guys, I didn’t want to make movies without them.

On the minus side, it was my first day on-set and I wasn’t totally committed to the project, or to them, at that point, so I came on board as a consultant for the first half of the day and then buggered out. I did have something else to do, but I can’t remember what it was and it doesn’t matter; I should have stayed there all day. So while I consulted and gave them advice, once I was gone they were on their own in a foreign land, and mistakes were made. Now, in between Sandrima renders, I’m working on the car chase stuff, and its difficulty is my punishment for leaving that day. Karma!

Still, it’s nice to have something that isn’t lightsabers to put on my reel.

He’s also written another script that he’s working on developing and may shoot in the next few months, and which I also think is great.

So that’s where I’ve been the last few weeks and why my posts have been scarce, and will probably continue to be scarce through July. I am still active on Twitter, and will be getting more active back here once all of these projects — which have bottlenecked into July — are completed.

Oh, also, Ryan and I will be at Comic Con this year, as is swiftly becoming traditional. If you see us, do say hi.

Animus

As the folks reading this may or may not know, I’m a sucker for martial arts movies, particularly kung fu stuff. A former roommate of mine had a similar obsession, and had a library of old Shaw Brothers and other obscure or rare titles that I still miss today. Among that library was a DVD called Everyone is Kung Fu Fighting, a collection of amateur martial arts short films. Most of them were pretty crap, but there was one called “Cradle of the Blind” that I really dug. The choreography was solid, and of the same tastes that I find fun and interesting in fight choreography. I was also really impressed by some of the clever camera work.

Well, at one point when surfing Craigslist for something to stave off my pre-RvD2 boredom, I came across a posting by the same Anthony Alba who had made “Cradle of the Blind,” looking for a writer to help him with a book idea he had. I got in touch with him, we met up and although that specific idea has not yet come to fruition, we’ve kept in touch the last couple years, shared some WIP stuff, and I’m pleased to say that one of the WIPs that I saw a few years ago is finally a finished film, called “Animus”.

When I saw the rough cut of “Animus”, I have to say I didn’t get it. But I liked the final version a hell of a lot. There are interesting choices made in the shooting and editing that I keep watching over and over. Give me a few more days and I might even say I love the thing; I’m not sure I’m ready for that kind of commitment just yet.

One thing I can say for sure: Anthony is insanely talented, as a director and especially as a fight choreographer and martial artist.

Case in point: if you’ve seen Equilibrium, you may remember the fight scene at the very end with the Big Bad, where the two characters were supposedly doing a wild and highly technical gun-fu fight against each other — when in fact they were playing patty-cake, batting each other’s weapons away lazily as the camera dollied frantically about them.

Starting at 2:11, “Animus” has the fight scene we SHOULD have gotten at the end of Equilibrium.

I’m not going to comment or review the film itself here, other than to say that the film managed to hold my interest for over 20 minutes in a dinky low-rez YouTube window, and that’s hard to do. I enjoyed it and I told Anthony I would use my Intarweb Powerz to try and get the word out.

I’ve been helping him with a concept shoot for a feature he’s co-written with his brother Ski-ter¹, and I think our respective teams — me and Ryan with Anthony and Ski-ter — have a long and fulfilling future of collaboration and partnership ahead. Once you see some of Anthony’s work, I think you’ll be as excited about the prospect as I am.

If you have a YouTube account (and all the cool kids do), be sure to click through to the actual film page and leave a comment for him, so he knows his work is seen and appreciated. That’s really all us filmy-types want.

Without further ado, “Animus”:

---

1. If you have the RvD2 DVD, Ski-ter shot some of the pyrotechnic BTS. He’s the guy behind the camera who says “You gotta love that sh*t.”↩

In Soviet Russia, ass kicks YOU

So, I just got turned on to this scene from a movie called Undisputed 2. Sequel, presumably, to Undisputed. I have not seen either, but I LOVE a good fight scene.

This fight scene — apparently the FIRST fight scene in the film — definitely makes me want to see the movie. The action is maybe a bit too wushu to be believable in a kickboxing tournament, but I can forgive that because of the levels of awesome it achieves. And unlike many fight scenes today, the action is extremely well-shot. There’s no cheating in quick cuts here. Just great, brutal choreography and performances.

I’m going to check YouTube for some other of my favorite fight scenes.