Our first feature film Invasion of the Undead is now available on Vimeo On Demand. Hesitant to check it out? Here are the top six reasons you should, taken from what reviewers have been digging about our movie.
(Warning: Many of these are spoilers but knowing them in advance should not deter from your enjoyment of the film.)
#6. Genre Mash-Up
Invasion isn't just a horror film- it mixes elements of horror, comedy, action and fantasy into one fast paced and fun adventure. Many viewers have compared it favorably to such diverse film and TV series as Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Big Trouble in Little China, Night of the Living Dead, The Evil Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Ghostbusters, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and The Mighty Boosh.
#5. Zombies!
Admittedly zombies are getting really played out, especially in indie horror films, but Invasion switches things up by featuring traditional voodoo zombies (above) and the skeletal Sons of Z'athax (below). Neither are your typical Romero or Walking Dead-style ghouls... the former are actually good guys!
#4. Characters you actually care about
Desmond, Jake and Allison are not boring stereotypes- each has a unique personality and goals that will make you root for them in their battle against evil. Even when Jake loses his head he's still a valuable (and feisty) member of the team.
#3. Video game references
Invasion is inspired by retro video games just as much as it is by '80s horror, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the 'flicker' effect that occurs when the undead take damage, just like the enemies in an 8-bit Nintendo game. The final 'boss battle' between Desmond and Guysmiley is even prefaced with Zelda-style title cards.
We also made a retro Invasion of the Undead video game that's currently in beta; check out the trailer below or play it here.
#2. Stop motion monsters
Belle and the Sons of the Z'athax are hybrid stop-motion/live action creatures, but Z'athax, the demon at the heart of the undead invasion, is a Harryhausen-style animated monster that throws fireballs and resides in an alternate dimension.
#1. The sword fight
Invasion climaxes with a sword fight between the heroic Desmond (Greg Garrison) and the nefarious undead leader Guysmiley (Nathan DeRussy). Greg and Nathan trained for six months to bring this scene to life, and their fight is further enhanced by Star Wars-style color-coded lens flares and kickass rock music composed by Hsiang-Ming Wen of BABY BABY.
These are our top five reasons to watch Invasion of the Undead, but don't take our word for it- read the original reviews we compiled these from and decide for yourself:
Invasion of the Undead is currently only available at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/invasion. If you watched the film from a torrent or a pirate movie site and enjoyed it, please rent or buy it from our Vimeo page... we are not a Hollywood studio by any means and a lot of hard work, time and passion went into making this film (check out our old blog posts for a detailed timeline of Invasion's production). As always, thank you for reading!
It's official: Invasion of the Undead will have its WORLD PREMIERE at Atlanta's historic Plaza Theatre on February 10, 2015, and it will be available digitally just a few weeks later on March 3rd! Signing the contract for the screening at the Plaza Theatre was one of the most satisfying moments of my life; all these years of hard work (and many more of just dreaming about it) will finally come to a culmination and I couldn't be more stoked!
As you know we were planning to release this month, but despite our best efforts (and multiple sleepless nights) we still need more time to finish the numerous visual effects in the movie, and this is the reason we pushed back to February. I'm a chronic underestimater of not only the time it takes to create effects but also the time I actually have to do so in between my work schedule, and this is something I'm trying to get a better handle on in the future. I wholeheartedly apologize to anyone reading this who is disappointed by the shift in the release date, but I assure you it's only for the best; we want Invasion to be the most awesome movie it can be, and the February release date will allow us to do so. Plus it will give us more time to market the film, which is an entirely new challenge for us.
Belle is a combination stop motion and live action creature- all of her shots take several hours to animate and composite, even if they're less than a second long.
We are SO close to finishing movie- I estimate it's about 85-90% complete, and if you've been following our Facebook page you know that we only have eight scenes remaining that need VFX. I've shown the current cut of the movie to a few friends and colleagues, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive, which after all these months of post-production work is extremely gratifying to say the least. The most exciting feedback so far has been the response to the story and characters- I know you've read my numerous blog posts about all of Invasion's visual effects, but I never intended for it to be an 'effects' film. I got into filmmaking because I love the stories movies tell, and I'm very glad that people are responding so well to Invasion's story because it was something I definitely put a lot of effort into during the writing phase. That said though, we really crammed a lot of awesome visuals into our $17,000 film... I can't think of any other movie with our budget that features stop motion undead monsters, voodoo zombies, a magic-wielding mummy, a period flashback sequence, a kickass sword fight, and a final boss battle with a fireball-throwing demon inside of an alternate dimension.
We tinted our flashback sequence sepia in homage to The Beyond
Getting back to the release, here's some more info on what we currently have planned:
Theatrical: In addition to our premiere at the Plaza, I'm really hoping to bring Invasion to a few more theaters throughout the country. This is entirely dependent though on how much interest we can generate over the next few months... one of the coolest thing I learned from the MonsterBuster Film Festival back in 2011 is that you can rent independently-owned theaters and hold your own screenings, but the trick is to make sure that you get enough people to show up to cover the (not insignificant) rental cost. What this means is that while Invasion won't be playing at your local AMC or Regal, it may be playing at the nearest Landmark Theater. If you're reading this and you'd like to see Invasion on the big screen near you, send me an email- seriously!
Digital: Vimeo On Demand will almost certainly be our main streaming outlet on March 3rd; they're really filmmaker-friendly and they only take 10% of the revenue, which is significantly less than most other video on demand (VOD) services (for example iTunes takes 30% and Amazon takes 50%). We're likely to use a few other VOD sites as well, and I'll of course mention them on this blog and our Facebook page when we do so.
Blu-Ray/DVD: This is a huge project in of itself, and I can't say for certain when it will be released. The main special feature will be a making-of documentary that will likely be longer than Invasion itself, and since this is essentially the equivalent of another feature film it's going to take a bit of time. It's most definitely happening though, and it will be our top priority once Invasion is finished. To any Indiegogo backers reading this, you will still receive your copy as soon as it's made!
Just a few of the cast and crew members we've interviewed for the documentary so far!
The Video Game: Invasion is as much influenced by classic video games as it is by eighties horror films (that fight with a fireball-throwing demon in an alternate dimension that I mentioned earlier? Totally video game-inspired), so it only makes sense to make an Invasion video game. As seen in our official trailer, the game will debut alongside Invasion's digital release on March 3rd. It will be free to play inside of a web browser, and gameplay will consist of guiding Desmond, Jake or Allison through the mansion to a boss battle with Belle. The beta I played is really fun and challenging, but just so everyone knows it's not a full game (hey, we're creating it simultaneously with a feature-length movie that itself is already much more work than anticipated). Being a huge gamer I want to develop more film/video game tie-ins in the future, so this will hopefully be only the first of many.
Cool shot of Bonnie Harris as one of the voodoo zombies in Allison's basement.
Thank you for reading as always, but more importantly thank you for following this movie for so long... it's really awesome that we FINALLY have a release date, and I can't wait for you all to see this movie. Stay tuned to this blog and our Facebook page for more updates!
There's been a lot of progress in the two months since our last update, but this post is necessarily going to be a short one... hey, these things take time to write and I have to get back to working on Invasion! While we're not in the homestretch just yet, we are getting close. Invasion has 75 scenes, and we've completed color correction and visual effects on 48 of these, leaving 27 more to go. That may sound like we still have a lot more to do, and while that's certainly true it's actually not as much as it seems since several of these scenes are literally just one shot long (remember the CGI mansion in our last update? It's still a work in progress and it constitutes several establishing shots that are each designated unique scenes in the script).
Jake's severed head is consistently one of my favorite effects.
Several of our major FX and creature set pieces remain to be completed as well... if you saw our teaser trailer on Bloody-Disgusting or Dread Central (more on that in a bit), you may be wondering where the promised 'stop motion creatures' and 'sword fights' are; well, those scenes require the most amount of work, and they are consequently going to be among the last things we finish.
The final look for the voodoo zombies in Allison's basement.
A few other quick updates:
- The Invasion video game is coming along nicely; we posted a new gameplay teaser to Facebook, and our designer is currently in the process of creating the final artwork and graphics. They're going to be much more somber and Castlevania-like than the graphics in the teaser, which are almost entirely placeholder.
The game's art style will be more akin to this once it's finished.
- We are in the early stages of planning our (extremely limited!) theatrical release and are currently deciding which cities we'd like to screen in. Atlanta is obviously going to host our premiere, but if you're reading this and you'd like to see Invasion on the big screen near you by all means send me an email! I may be able to make something happen. We're self-distributing Invasion and we're thus limited to independent theaters that offer rentals, and realistically we're only going to book a handful at the absolute best. However, even with that in mind if you want to see Invasion on the big screen I certainly want you to as well, so definitely contact me!
- Nothing has changed with the plans for Desmond's webisode; we're still planning to release it closer to the film's premiere to help spread the word.
- We have a few more interviews to shoot for our Behind the Scenes Documentary; if you're a cast or crew member and you're reading this I haven't forgotten about you! I've been completely focused on finishing the movie, and I haven't even watched the cut of the documentary that Jay's been assembling. The documentary will be released on the Invasion Blu Ray/DVD, which won't be until a bit further down the line (probably not until 2015).
On a closing note, I want to sincerely thank Bloody-Disgusting, Dread Central, Horror News Network, My Zombie Culture, and Almas Oscuras for sharing our official poster back in June. It was extremely gratifying to see this movie that has been in my head since 2002 finally start to get out there. It was also a really interesting process to send out press releases for the first time... we're learning indie film marketing as we go here, and eventually I'm going to write a blog entry about my experiences marketing Invasion since I think other indie filmmakers may find it useful.
That's it for now! Stay tuned to this blog and our Facebook page for more updates... I'm planning to finally get some pics of our stop motion monsters posted in August. Thank you for reading as always, and now it's back to After Effects...
It's been awhile since our last update (almost four months!), and although things may have seemed quiet we're actually right in the middle of one of the most exciting times during our lengthy post-production process. Before I get to that though, let's talk about our premiere. We teased on our Facebook page a few weeks back that we'd announce our release date soon, and while we do have one picked out I don't want to announce it (or the final, kick-ass design of our poster) just yet because I'm working on getting that announcement covered by a horror news website (keep your fingers crossed). I will say though that while Halloween is easily my favorite holiday it's going to be especially awesome this year.
For those of you who aren't filmmakers one thing you may not know is that post-production is easily the longest part of a film's creation; in fact I'd estimate that it's easily 75% of the total work (and possibly even more for our FX-heavy movies). That said, we're finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel for Invasion, and the reason these past few months have been so exciting is that it's the first time where Invasion has actually started to look like a real movie. That may seem like an odd statement, so let me go into a little bit more detail about our status.
Currently, the primary team working on Invasion consists of myself, Quyen, Hsiang, Tricia and Jay. Tricia is working on the final remaining make-up and creature effects (most importantly Z'athax, Invasion's stop motion-animated, fireball-throwing 'last boss') while Jay is editing our behind-the-scenes documentary. Quyen and Hsiang are working on the sound and music respectively while I'm simultaneously color-correcting and creating visual effects scene by scene. What does all this mean? Well, as an example this is what Scene 58 in Invasion looked like as shot:
Colors are flat and lack contrast (the Blackmagic camera shoots this way, known as RAW, to maximize color information and thus creative possibilities in post), there's a weird fake head in the background, and while you can't hear it the sound completely sucks (trust me on this). Now here's the same shot with color correction and visual effects:
As you can see there's a pretty big difference. The colors pop, we can clearly see Jake's severed head behind Allison, there's a cool 2.35 letterbox crop and everything sounds great (again, just take my word for it). It takes a fair amount of work to get here though; scene 58, which runs a little over 30 seconds, took over eight hours to complete, and that's not including the time Quyen (and Hsiang) is putting into the audio mix. Of course, some scenes take much less time while a few others (such as the final fight with Z'athax) will take much, much longer, but overall we are getting close to the end of this long journey.
A few other quick updates: anyone who knows me knows that I am not a fan of CGI in horror movies, but apart from the fireballs and glowing eyes there is one major CGI effect in Invasion: Allison's mansion. We couldn't afford to shoot at a real Southern plantation, so instead we shot here:
We chose this place because of its porch (and also because it's on my parents' property and we didn't need a permit) since I knew we could just replace everything else with a 3D model. Here's the preliminary test comp:
Obviously there's a ton of work to do but it's still pretty exciting to see this start to come together. This was actually from the first day of shooting (I think it was our very first shot if I'm not mistaken) and I imagine a lot of the crew was confused as to why we were shooting at this place. Fix it in post, indeed! For the record, Invasion will contain no CGI creatures- all of our monsters were either live on set or stop motion models.
The Invasion video game: We posted some concept art from this on Facebook and this blog several months ago, but we haven't said too much about it since then... well, it's definitely happening!
This is a beta build, and it's several months old on top of that, so please excuse the quality. The game designer would probably prefer if I didn't post this video, but I did want to put something here other than a screenshot to prove we're actually doing this; being a huge gamer (especially 8- and 16-bit) I just think it's the coolest thing. The final game will be playable in a web browser (and possibly Android devices if we can figure out a decent control scheme) and will feature Allison and Jake as playable characters in addition to Desmond. We're going to use it to help promote the movie once we get closer to our release date since we're going to need all the help we can get in that department (marketing a movie is at least as difficult as making one).
Desmond's webisode: Greg bugs me about this almost every day, and it is most definitely still coming; it just keeps getting pushed back in favor of working on the feature film. But we will release it to further help with the marketing for Invasion closer to our premiere.
So that's where we're at! I do have to wholeheartedly apologize for the constant delays; I thank you all for your patience and continued support, and please remember that we're not a major studio, or even a minor one. We're a group of friends who decided to band together and shoot a feature film and who are now working all hours of the night beyond our day jobs to finish it up and bring it to you. Stay tuned for more updates, and as always thank you for reading!
It's been a while since we've posted about Invasion of the Undead, and that's because we're still in the not very glamourous process of editing that we've been in since we wrapped back in August. We're getting close to a picture lock though, and we've even begun creating a few of the visual effects (the most time-consuming part of post-production for us) for the sequences that are locked:
It takes a fair amount of work to go from this...
... to this.
While we've shot a few FX pick-ups, we still have a significant amount left to complete. We'll continue to shoot these throughout the ongoing months.
One of our pick-ups required a bird to land on a specific branch for
an FX gag where it is killed by a Son of Z'athax. This took hours.
In addition to the pick-ups, we also need to shoot our 'invasion' sequence; during a climatic moment in the movie a dimensional barrier is breached and undead creatures appear all over the world (think this scene in Ghostbusters when the containment unit is shut down and ghosts appear throughout the city). This sequence is going to be a lot of fun as it will feature characters and locations from past MonsterBuster movies (and maybe even a few surprise cameos from other independent films).
Editing has also begun on our making-of documentary, and it is going to be HUGE. Virtually every actor and crew member on the film has agreed to an interview, and we'll shoot these throughout January. We've also captured every significant moment of Invasion's production on video, from our first script reading in August 2012 all the way to our final day of shooting a year later. The documentary will easily be a feature onto itself... it may even be longer than the movie!
Our Making-Of Documentary will include the familiar faces...
... and some not quite as familiar but equally important.
Here are a few other Invasion-related updates:
• Desmond's webisode: Our much-delayed third and final character webisode is currently in the hands of our sound designer and music composer. Our webisodes were meant to promote our Indiegogo campaign, and since we've missed that boat by a wide margin we're planning to release the webisode immediately once the audio is complete.
Coming soon!
• Our official poster: Our equally delayed poster is in the final stages of coloring.
• The video game: Our promotional Invasion video game will release alongside the movie's premiere. It will be a classic 16-bit style platformer playable in a web browser (we're hoping to get it on Android-based devices as well but can't make any promises yet) where you'll guide Desmond, Allison and Jake through the mansion for a confrontation with Belle.
Desmond battles Archlarvae and a Son of Z'athax in this concept art for the video game.
So, when is the premiere date? Well, with everything that remains to be done we can't realistically announce a date that we could possibly keep, but we are all working as hard as we can to get the movie done. Trust me, we want to see it even more than you do! Post-production is the longest part of making a movie, and please be patient with us as we move forward. A year ago we launched our Indiegogo campaign for Invasion, and now we're inching ever closer to the finish line. Thank you for your constant support, and as always, thank you for reading!
The Metroid fan trailer was both a chance
to adapt a beloved video game into a live action story and an opportunity for me to stretch my directing legs by taking on a very
effects heavy project. Knowing that the look of Samus was one of the most important aspects for the film's success, I sought out the help of Sean Michael Patton, an
experienced costume designer/creator, to come up
with a Zero Suit that was to both of our likings. I wanted Samus to maintain her sexy
girlish figure but also look more tactical and military-appropriate while in
her Zero Suit. Finding the right actress was also a challenge, and Josefine Mikuta, a model/actress from Denmark (and who will represent Denmark in the 2013 Miss Earth Pageant) was eventually cast by Keyla
McClure to play Samus Aran.Shooting took place over one afternoon at Crawford Media Services. When Josefine went into wardrobe with Sean and hair/make-up with Christine Nguyen and came out as Samus Aran, the transformation was incredible.
Josefine tries on the Zero Suit for the first time.
98% of the
production was shot entirely on green screen, and almost all of the backgrounds and
effects were created during post-production, which is why the short trailer took so long to be released to the public. Anthony Baker, a local Atlanta CG artist,
was in charge of creating and rigging the “Power Suit”. We actually had to alter the design of the Power Suit so that Samus could fit into it since
the Nintendo version was physically impossible. Kevin Ridgeway did an amazing
job modeling Ridley, combining multiple versions of the creature from several different Metroid games together for a
realistic and frightening appearance. Torey Haas added his creative
touch with his stop motion Chozos. All of the visuals were wrapped up magnificently with sound design by Quyen Tran and narration by Marie Barker (Invasion of the Undead's Allison). While the Metroid Fan Trailer has been on my personal YouTube channel for a while now (I was initially using it to promote the Indiegogo campaign for my first feature film Dekiru) it is now officially on the MonsterBuster channel.
We had to modify the Power Suit design so it could accommodate an actual human body.
Modeling Ridley!
Overall, the Metroid Fan Trailer was a big learning experience because it showed me where I was as a director and where I needed to improve. If you like it please check out Dekiru!
A variation on Lord of the Flies with elements from The Karate Kid and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (check out the radioactive pig man), this video was shot back in August on Jekyll Island shorty before we wrapped Invasion of the Undead. With most of our resources tied up in Invasion, we had limited crew, a shoestring budget and no permits whatsoever to pull off what was a pretty epic story line for a music video. Torey wrote the script (from a concept by Grant and Fontez) and directed the video, while Eric (Invasion's assistant camera) and Tricia stepped up as cinematographers using both the Blackmagic cinema camera and a 5D mkIII. Propmaster John Holbrook made all of the DIY weapons seen in the video (the sea shell spear and knuckles were especially rad), and Greg Garrison designed the fight choreography (he's turning more and more into Desmond every day). The enemy tribe are all performed by MonsterBuster regulars/crew members- that's Nathan DeRussy, Guy Smiley himself, sans make-up as the enemy leader, with Fred, Jay, and Eric rounding out the rest of the tribe. Fontez, Kyle, Grant and Colin of BABY BABY were all a blast to work with- you may see them making a cameo in Invasion as we shoot some pick-ups later this November.
As always, thank you for reading and Happy Halloween!
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