Fan Group Creates Full-Length Discworld Movie

greenrd writes "'Almost No Budget Films,' a group of Terry Pratchett fans from Germany, recently finished a 9-month filming stint on a full-length dramatisation of pterry's novel 'Lords and Ladies.' A grand total of 300 euros were spent on this production, and all profits from this fan movie will go to the Orangutan Foundation. Check out the new English trailer for some grin-inducing special effects!"

Well

[Anv*l]

Nice CG graphics :) Actually it's amazing how people can do something like this; and let the profit go to charity...

No

[Omkar]

Keep them away from money. This is a labor of love; do you want an exec fucking it up?

Re:Bandwidth Cost

[-brazil-]

Actually, it's hosted on a university webserver, which means it's taxpayers' money...

I've always considered "Lords and Ladies" to be the best of the discworld novels. If only Hollywood would get its act together and do a movie that does Pratchett's genious justice. I do have the British animated features, but to be honest, those look like only negligibly more than 300 EUR were spent...

dv editing and Gutenburgs press

[Fox_1]

With so much power on the desktop it's becoming easier and easier to produce polished video products at home. There's even software to correct for shaky camera work, it's possible to redesign shots in the editing programs and digital effects are becoming very easy to setup now. (remember Lightsabre boy)
I love the idea of more and more content being produced by hobbyists, enthusists and other non-studio persons. We are at that point where knowledge passes from a few to many - much like the printing press took the books away from the scholars and gave them to the people. Screw the RIAA & DMCA, we are gonna start producing our own copyrighted materials and they'll lose out.

Re:Bandwidth Cost

[mboverload]

However, that bandwidth and server are alreayd paid for. A slashdoting does not cause one to spend anymore money, unless you are paying by the megabyte, which I doubt a university would do.

Re:dv editing and Gutenburgs press

[zalas]

Overall, I think it looked pretty nicely done. The way the scenes are stitched together was really nice. Some effects looked really nice (the glowing eyes), but some looked really distracting (the starburst type effect, not sure what to call it). I liked the use of the miniature sized people. However, it seemed like sometimes the people look too "normal" in a sense, while at other times, they really fit in with the scene. Perhaps some better lighting/atmosphere could make up for it?

bittorrent for god's sake!

[lkcl]

somebody bittorrent it - next time _before_ announcing it on slashdot, please.

The footage isn't usually the problem...

[Kjella]

Some of the really major stumbling blocks I see:

1. Scenery/Models. Unless it is set in contemporary earth, this is one of the really hard ones. By models I mean models of castles, spaceships etc., which tend to look like they were made of Lego.

2. Getting enough angles. Particularly an issue in action movies, where my impression is the shot lacks angles (i.e. it was filmed once from one angle, instead of a commercial movie often mixing and matching between overview shots, action "highlights", close-ups of key people, pans etc.

All of that is used to form a good scene. It takes time, requires a good editor and provides very little screen time, but it really sets them apart. In particular, notice that you never see a "pan-up" scene done with rails/crane in an amateur movie. Same with aerial shots.

3. Acting of B-class characters. The leads usually have some acting skill. But the fringe characters (i.e. not the extras) suck donkey balls.

4. Cheesy CG/special effects. Yes, I know many of the effects are easy to make today. But more often than not, the program doesn't support (or it is too damn hard to figure out how) the effect you really want, but you settle for what you can. They tend to look plastered on top like a sticker from a Donald Duck magazine on top of your photo.

5. Audio effects. The music is usually decent, but the timing might be off. But more often than not, the audio effects sound "unmatched" or simply fake. No, changing the pitch and streching/compressing it still makes it sound like a horse/pig/dog/bird/animal of the day, and that was just you screaming.

Kjella

Considered

[Mark_MF-WN]

Do these people ever consider the idea that maybe... just maybe... books don't translate well into movies? It's not exactly a strange idea. Look at how badly music translates into movies, or how poorly a sculpture translates into a song. I say let books stay books. Just come up with new ideas for movies.

Hmmm. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm going to start a project to convert Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" into a television series.

Re:Gotta Catch 'Em All!

[makomk]

Pterry? Sounds like a Pokemon.
It's an alt.fan.pratchett in-joke [lspace.org]

It was a book?

[coder.keitaro]

It read like a Hollywood script!

I am really surprised that this has not yet been picked up by some studio.

I was not particularly impressed by the book, I thought the pacing was off, the characterization was amateurish, and it tried far too hard to be hacker-chic, but I really thought its style would appeal to Hollywood.

It felt like a movie far more than the Neuromancer [amazon.com] series by William Gibson [wikipedia.org]
I consider Gibson's literary works superior, but they are almost impossible to make into movies.
[Too much internal dialog and not enough action]

But, I suppose, after The Matrix any studio will have a difficult time doing an adaption of any Cyberpunk novel.

Re:Bandwidth Cost

[ConceptJunkie]

Terry Pratchett writes a book that's a better movie than Hollywood can make using an actual movie. It's amazing how he does it. It's a combination of pacing, dialog, humor and grand vision. I don't know what's more amazing, the fact that he can do it so well or the fact that he's maintained this style and skill through almost 20 years and 30 books.

Sure, some Discworld books are better than others (and "Lords and Ladies" is in my top 3 for sure), but they are all good.

I was re-re-rereading "Men at Arms" last night and enjoying (once again) translating Gargoyle speech. That and the French and Latin puns, brilliant and sharp satire, plus tons of believeable and funny and likeable characters, and a world as richly detailed as Tolkien's, combine to make the best fiction reading ever.

Re:flamebait, sure

[bwcbwc]

Humor is in the eye of the beholder, so I won't debate which author is funnier. But I think you'll find that Pratchett has the best-integrated plot-lines of the three authors you mention.

I wish I could figure out why you think Aspirin is more sophisticated. To me, his writing is the weakest of the three. Characters are almost as flat as Isaac Asimov's. Asprin's great contribution was his ability to skewer genre-fantasy conventions with a sci-fi or real world twist, but he rarely works the other way around, skewering the real world with a fantasy twist. For Pratchett, anything is fair game.

The variety of characters that Pratchett has available, plus the fact that Ankh-Morpork allows him to introduce new characters with minimal fuss, allows him to take on stories that just don't fit into Asprin's universe. When did Asprin take on Hollywood (Moving Pictures), Rock 'n' Roll (Soul Music), Shakespeare (Wyrd Sisters), or Opera (Maskerade)? Or himself, for that matter?

Both Asprin and Pratchett put their characters into stock, satirical situations, but since the M.Y.T.H. stories revolve around a smaller set of characters, sometimes the characters don't fit the satire or the story line so well. Pratchett essentially runs two ongoing sets of primary characters, with several other personalities that appear less frequently: The Ankh-Morpork gang (primarily the Watch and the Wizards, with various other sub-groups that grow or fade in importance over parts of the series) and the Witches up in Lancre with their supporting cast. The Uberwald group may grow into an ongoing cast as well, but they seem to be more like some of the other ongoing characters like Casanunda the dwarf or King Verence.

Disclosure: I pretty much stopped re-reading Asprin in my late 20's, where I still reread many of Pratchett's works.

Adams and Pratchett are very similar, but if you look at the copyrights on their earliest novels, I think you'll see that they both started up at about the same time. So "Douglas Adams wannabe" isn't fair. It's more like Newton and Liebniz both inventing calculus at the same time. Or Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Or McDonalds and Burger King.

Another big advantage of Pratchett is he's still writing Discworld novels. Adams and Asprin have stopped their series (for various reasons). And Asprin can't seem to write without help. Every story he starts seems to evolve from or to some sort of shared world where other authors do most of the work. Thieve's World anyone? Actually, I found Thieve's World a more interesting series than the MYTH series over the long haul. MYTH should've stopped at a trilogy.