We wrapped shooting on the second Red Herring trailer yesterday! Once again directed by Torey Haas, the second trailer for The Collective Project, Inc.'s upcoming comedic detective play features many of the show's main cast (Matthew Myers, Matt Bartholomew, Melissa Oulton, Corey Bradberry and Patrick Baxter) and sports some stylish black and white photography by Nick Lauinger. Greg Garrison, Keyla McClure, Katelyn Brammer, Ricky Hess, Jay Holloway, Kevin Hicks, Erica Sato, Quyen Tran, Hsiang-ming Wen and Fred Grant rounded out the crew- thank you all for your hard work in getting this project completed!
We would like to give a very special thanks to Pennie Peck, Linda Oulton and the Jamieson EquiCenter in Covington, GA for not only allowing us to shoot in their wonderful horse stables but also for being the most agreeable and helpful property owners we have ever worked with... without their help this shoot would not have turned out as well as it did!
This week promises to be a big one for MonsterBuster since both First Dateand Crowscare will debut on our YouTube channel. Also, the official MonsterBuster website will launch very soon!
MonsterBuster's 2011 black comedy short Mario and Luigi is now available to watch on our YouTube channel!
Based on the play by Greg Garrison and performed by The Collective Project, Inc., Mario and Luigi follows Jerry (Dylan Schettina), a young ne'er-do-well whose life is turned upside down when two gangsters named Mario and Luigi (Corey Bradberry and Adam Rice) break into his apartment and threaten his life. While first believing himself to be innocent, he soon discovers that he may be guilty of a most reprehensible action after all, and Mario and Luigi will not be the last of his uninvited guests for the evening...
"Even when faced with the challenge of writing an intense drama, I found a way to write one in the form of a comedy," playwright Garrison explains. "Mario and Luigi was a short play for a vignette show I was a part of writing alongside many other authors, but this play stood out as one of the most well received and successful pieces we produced. It is meant to be intense and mysterious, but the real fun in writing it came in making the play get laughs at the same time. I was fascinated with the response, and from then on kept it in the back of my head as something I'd like to go further with."
This desire eventually led Garrison to pitch a film adaptation to MonsterBuster director Torey Haas, whose short film First Date featured Garrison in one of the lead roles. "I had seen the play and thought it was hilarious," Haas says. "I jumped at the chance to do a film version because it offered a fun change of pace from our usual horror and monster movies. Plus, anyone who knows me knows that I love old school video games- playing the original The Legend of Zelda with my mom and sister while growing up was just as big of a creative inspiration to me as watching Ray Harryhausen and Godzilla movies. Mario and Luigi gave me the chance to pay homage to some of the games from my childhood."
Indeed, Mario and Luigi is packed full of many subtle (and some not-so-subtle) video game references. Apart from the obvious nods to Nintendo's Super Mario Bros., keen-eyed viewers will also spot references to Mega Man, Kid Icarus, Duck Hunt, Earthbound, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Milon's Secret Castle and Startropics. However, Mario and Luigi is ultimately not a film about video games but rather about how even the smallest of actions can have dire (and, in this case, grossly comical) consequences. "I love that such a large amount of product can come out of such a small idea, and from the perspective of Jerry, one little statement," Garrison adds.
"Whether he's in front of the camera or behind it, working with Greg is always a pleasure," Haas offers. "While I can't say his writing style is similar to my own, it's certainly one that I enjoy as a viewer and that I want to work with as a fellow creator." Garrison echoes this sentiment: "I found that [Torey and I] saw eye to eye in a lot of the same aspects of storytelling and that he has a unique ability to bring stories to life on screen."
Mario and Luigi was shot on a combination of Canon 7D and T2i and premiered at the MonsterBuster Film Festival in November 2011. Haas and Garrison's most recent collaboration is the trailer for The Red Herring (support the play on Kickstarter!) and their previous movie First Date, the heartwarming story of a boy, a girl, and her monstrous dad, will premiere on our YouTube channel next week.
Our 2009 short film Jake and Julie Vs. The Boogeyman! is now available to watch on YouTube! An homage to 80s horror/fantasy films like Gremlins and Labyrinth, Jake and Julie Vs. The Boogeyman! follows thirteen year-old Julie Jenkins (Dana Delappi) as she attempts to rescue her brother (Caden Gaskins) from the titular child-eating ogre.
Completed as part of the Master's program in filmmaking at Georgia State University, Jake and Julie was produced in conjunction with DAEL and was shot using a Sony EX1. The Boogeyman was designed by Brian Hardison (check out his awesome concept art below) and brought to life in the film via traditional stop motion animation by Torey Haas. It was an official selection of the 2009 Southern Appalachian International Film Festival and was featured on an episode of WPBA-30's Atlanta Shorts.
The Boogeyman has since gone on to become the official mascot of MonsterBuster Entertainment (that's him in our logo), and a grown-up Jake is one of the starring characters in our upcoming feature Invasion of the Undead!, where he encounters a creature much more sinister than the Boogeyman. Be sure to stick around during the ending credits for the rocking theme song "Boogeyman" performed by Pillage and Plunder!
Check back next week for our 2011 short Mario and Luigi!
MonsterBuster's trailer for The Collective Project Inc.'s upcoming play The Red Herring debuted on YouTube and Kickstarter today, and I'd like to take a moment here to talk a little bit about how we made it and also to give credit where credit is due.
Before I get into a bunch of (potentially boring) technical info on how we made the trailer, let me just say that I fully believe this play is going to be something very special- the script is hilarious, full of puns and almost sickeningly clever at times. However, it goes beyond simply being funny since it presents a compelling story that could've easily been the basis for a classic 40s-style film noir. Please consider donating to the Kickstarter campaign (even $1 helps!) since this play needs to be performed!
Anyway, when actor/playwright Greg Garrison first approached me back in January to shoot two trailers for The Red Herring, I immediately agreed because a) I thought it would be fun and b) I still owe Greg after the infamous butterfly shot in my short First Date, in which he tried for at least an hour to raise a tiny butterfly necklace into the precise focus point of a wide open 50mm lens on a Canon 7D... way easier said than done, and I'm convinced Greg still has nightmares about it to this day. Whenever we have a deceptively difficult rack focus shot on one of my sets we call it a 'butterfly' in honor of our misspent hour trying to get that shot.
This first trailer presented several challenges because it's pretty high concept- one long take, timed to a voice over with characters appearing and disappearing in flashes of lightning. In an ideal situation we would set the camera on a motion-controlled dolly and shoot the actors in their respective locations on different takes while mimicking the lightning with very powerful (and expensive!) lights situated outside. A few carefully hidden cross-dissolves could then be used to easily composite the whole thing together in post. However, MonsterBuster Entertainment is an extremely low budget operation even in the best of times, and our budget for this trailer was exactly $0, meaning no dolly (let alone a motion-controlled one) or expensive lights were available to us.
I taught myself compositing and visual effects when I shot my student film Troll Picnicback in 2008 because, well, I wanted to have a talking troll in my movie and couldn't think of any way to do it practically. I've since become an industry visual effects artist and compositor, and I pride myself on finding DIY ways to pull off complicated visual effects. For this trailer I decided to shoot the long tracking shot with a flat picture style (Cinestyle) on a glidecam; the extra latitude granted by Cinestyle would enable us to darken and overexpose the picture in post, thus simulating the lightning flashes, and the glidecam would theoretically be smooth enough that it could mimic a dolly after some post-stabilization courtesy of After Effects CS 5.5. Well, I was right about the former but not the latter, since despite the valiant efforts of my super-talented DP/camera op Nick Lauinger (who must have ran through the shot at least two dozen times, and yes, glidecams do get heavy even with just a T2i) the shot really doesn't resemble a dolly at all... thankfully it still looks pretty cool though!
Seductive Vesper Kind (Melissa Oulton) strikes a pose against our very professional green screen.
As for the actors, everyone was shot straight-on against a makeshift green screen. The glidecam footage was tracked using SynthEyes (I swear this software is magic) and the resulting camera data was then imported into 3D space in After Effects. The footage of the actors was then keyed and placed at the proper coordinates in the composition, creating the illusion that everyone was really standing in the shot. As for the Sin City-style splotches of red on each, let me just say that I'm a huge fan of Rotobrush.
Overall I think the trailer works quite well visually, and I'm happy with it. The approach we used would fall apart if we saw the actors for more than half a second though since it would quickly become apparent they are just flat planes projected into 3d space. As it stands now the lack of changing perspective during the brief moments you do see them only lends a surreal look that adds to the already-stylized visuals.
Since the trailer necessarily does not include any credits, I want to formally thank everyone who helped bring this project to life. All of the actors- Patrick Baxter, Corey Bradberry, Sarah Rapson, Matt Bartholomew, Matt Myers and Melissa Oulton- were great and I look forward to working with you all on more projects in the future. I already praised Nick, my DP, but I can't say enough about how talented he is (especially since I'm worried he's going to start demanding a paycheck to keep working on these projects with me). Keyla McClure, my assistant director, was wonderful as always, and sound ninja Quyen Tran did an excellent job with the audio. My three grips- Ricky Hess, Fred Grant, and Jason "J Man" Holloway- enabled us to finish the production as efficiently as possible, and I've got to give a shout-out to Hsiang-ming Wen for having a beer with Fred (somebody has to do it on these shoots). I know I said we had no budget for this trailer, and while that's certainly true Kelly Greene of The Collective Project Inc. did spring up some cash to keep us all well-fed in addition to helping out whenever she could on set. If you look next to the Red Herring in the trailer there's an infamous artifact from one of the most popular film noirs of all time; this is the work of CGI artist Anthony Baker, and I want to thank him for putting so much time into something that five people will see. And while I know it's his baby just as much as it is mine (maybe even more so actually), I do want to thank Greg Garrison as well for all of his hard work... his brother Matt even pinched in too. Lastly, I want to give an extra special thanks to Erica Sato for baking us cookies on Friday night... I know she helped grip and I think she cooked dinner or something after we wrapped, but chocolate chip and white chocolate macadamia nut cookies kinda trump both of those things, don't you think?
Torey Haas is both the founder of MonsterBuster Entertainment and one of its featured directors and cinematographers. He can be reached at torey@monsterbusterentertainment.com
We have a lot of big news to share in our very first blog post! First off, our trailer for The Collective Project, Inc.'s upcoming play The Red Herring debuted on YouTube and Kickstarter today- check it out, and look for a follow-up post this evening focusing specifically on the trailer and its production.
Speaking of YouTube, the MonsterBuster YouTube channel officially launched today; there's not much on it yet (just the trailer for First Date and a clip from Troll Picnic) but we'll be updating it throughout April and May until all of our movies are online. Look for Jake and Julie Vs. The Boogeyman! and Mario and Luigi to be our first full movie uploads, and please subscribe or follow this blog if you want to know when they become available.
The DVD for the MonsterBuster Film Festival is coming along nicely. The art for the DVD case can be seen on our Facebook page, and we're working on tying up a few final audio and music issues before submitting the DVD to CreateSpace for distribution. If everything goes as planned it will be available for sale by the end of May. Remember, if you worked on one of our movies you will receive a free copy!
The DVD will contain virtually everything we've created pre-2012; in addition to First Date, Werebum, Crowscare and Mario and Luigi, it will also feature the Invasion of the Undead! teaser, Troll Picnic and Jake and Julie Vs. The Boogeyman!, our music video for The Promise Drive's "Don't Wake Me Up" (sorry about that typo on the box art, it will be fixed for the final release), the movie segments of our 2011 Halloween Make-up series with xteeener, and our trailers for First Date, Werebum and the Festival itself. Many of the movies will be tweaked from their screening at the Festival, with the most drastic being Werebum, which has received a complete grindhouse-style recut that keeps more with the style of its trailer. The very first MonsterBuster movie Troll Picnic has also been completely color corrected for the DVD, and this version is easily the best the movie has ever looked.
The MonsterBuster website is currently under construction! If you've been to www.monsterbusterentertainment.com you've seen the placeholder image advertising spring 2012 as the website launch date, and yes, we will be launching a full site later this spring! The placeholder image also lists a few new movies we have in production for 2012, and if you're curious here's a full production update on everything we currently have on our slate:
Invasion of the Undead! starring Desmond and Jake, Paranormal Exterminators - MonsterBuster's first feature film, whose teaser trailer debuted at the MonsterBuster Film Festival last November, is currently in pre-production. Feedback on the script so far has been great, and we're currently looking at different fundraising options to raise the necessary budget. Shooting could conceivably begin as early as this July.
Horror Hotel - MonsterBuster's first web series is the creation of our regular special effects artist Ricky Hess. We don't want to give any plot specifics away just yet, but look to this blog for an official announcement regarding the series sometime this summer.
H.P. Lovecraft's The Statement of Randolph Carter - Our next short film will shoot at the end of May. We found an awesome location for the tomb and are keeping our fingers crossed we can get the necessary permits to shoot there! The script, written by Matt Garrison and Torey Haas, sticks pretty closely to the original Lovecraft story, and Torey will direct.
Super Mario and Luigi - The follow-up to Mario and Luigi follows the titular duo's efforts to thwart Jerry's budding relationship with Peach. We currently don't have any dates set for production, but Greg Garrison has completed the script. If Invasion doesn't shoot this summer Super Mario and Luigi will likely take its place on our production slate.
Jay Holloway's The Ghoul - Jay's follow-up to Crowscare, a twisted homage to the films of Frank Henenlotter, is currently being written. We shot a teaser trailer back in January that will likely debut this summer.
Metroid - Fred Grant's fan trailer is currently in post-production and is looking pretty fantastic. Anthony Baker is creating the CGI for Samus's suit while Torey Haas is crafting some stop motion Chozos for a flashback sequence. We're hoping to get this one out before the summer!
The Red Herring Trailer #2 - Yes, there will be one more Red Herring trailer, and it will be in a completely different style than the one that premiered today. Look for it in May since we have one more day of shooting later this month.
So yeah, we have a pretty busy year ahead of us! Look to this blog for updates on all of the above projects, and if you haven't checked us out on Facebook please do so! Thank you for reading!
