Help Support Indie American Tokusatsu!

[Vitor]

It's good to see people like you making an effort to showcase more Toku to a country thats only familiar with Power Rangers

Trust me, if I had a job and cash to spare right now, you'd get some of it

 

[jfreedan]

Well all of my money is going toward my own project and otherwise, to be perfectly honest, based on the stuff you have to show I'm not convinced that $6000 is what you need. My opinion is that you should try and scale your ambitions back and focus on being as creative as possible within the limits of a considerably smaller budget.

Those are my thoughts, at least.

If you have your own project then it's reasonable for you to focus on it.

As for scaling back ambitions, modern audiences have big expectations, and there are plenty of threads in this forum that prove that. And you can't just run around filming in a city, because if you gain any notoriety later the city and store front owners will sue you for having filmed without a permit / agreement.

Also, the hard reality is audiences cannot get excited about a film unless you have something exciting to show them. I don't know how much experience you have with film-making or how much research you've done, but I don't know of any special effects heavy film shot for $6,000. Even when you look at the really great, action heavy fan films, they tend to cost around 10 grand. Heck, this is true for films that have little to no special effects; for example, Paranormal Activity cost 15 grand to make. While (due to improvements in technology and how cheap that technology is) I can film something on the scale of, say Super Inframan, much cheaper than originally filmed, I can't do it without resources and some resources cost money.

I don't know if you've looked at the page or not, but I'm not asking for $6,000 from a single individual. I'm hoping for small contributions of 5 and 10 dollars, but if people want to donate more then I've tried to make the pledge rewards better.

I have the task of creating an 88 minute film that is going to have mass appeal and keep the interest of the audience for the full 88 minutes. I need to be able to run a tight schedule and not have key cast members abandon the shoot because they not only need to pay for their own gas but their own breakfast, lunch and dinner-- not to mention extras at least need a craft table to keep them around as long as they're needed. We'll have a lot of extras for some scenes.

If you think you can get people to pay money out of their own pocket for the opportunity to work on a low-budget film and all the hard work that entails, that's great. But everything I know about film-making says you need to feed your people or they won't stick around. I've seen student films go to pot due to lack of a craft table and people simply not returning after the lunch break for a laundry list of reasons. Everything I know about working with city locations says you need permits. Everything I know about prop and set construction says you need some amount of money to buy the resources if you can't get them for free, especially if you want them to look good. For example, if I want GKaiser to fight a Teletubbie biker gang, while I can find lots of people who have motorcycles because people with motorcycles are common, Teletubbie biker costumes are not something people just happen to keep in their closets. Those costumes have to be constructed and that material costs money. Sure, I could write them out of the movie but then we've lost some of the quality and tongue in cheek humor we need to make the film successful.

Everything I know about shooting digital special effect scenes says you need to shoot with a quality camera or you're gonna have loss of colors and consequently crappy greenscreen (not to mention when a picture is blown up on a big theatre screen, the picture quality has to be really good and things you can get away with on a TV you can't on a big screen).

Sound is a really big deal. An audience will forgive the occassional bad shot, but they will not forgive any amount of terrible audio. Currently I can record decent sound but I need to record amazing sound.

I know a lot of toku fans would like toku to become more notable. My film will have lots of references to henshin hero shows that aren't well known in the US. Just take a look at the title character. His costume design is a homage to early Kamen Rider (primarily fabric armor and scarf, but also the motorcycle he'll have. GKaiser also has a special attack kick, Shining Kick) and Gatchaman (mouth visible). I hope that my film will have a side-effect of encouraging people to check out more toku stuff.

It really doesn't take much for people to help us. For less than the price of watching Jonah Hex, you can help a toku film get made!

 

[Daikamonohashi]

What I was trying to say - and I'm struggling to find a way to say it without coming across as offensive - is that I don't think your proof-of-concept is up to snuff. At least not enough to move up to a $6000 budget, anyway. When I say scale back on your ambitions I mean put this project on hold and work on making a better proof-of-concept short. Make a ten-minute short that shows off the tightest script, slickest editing, and most eye-popping effects you can muster and THEN ask people for $6000 for your feature.

Again, that's my opinion.

 

[Geord]

What I was trying to say - and I'm struggling to find a way to say it without coming across as offensive - is that I don't think your proof-of-concept is up to snuff. At least not enough to move up to a $6000 budget, anyway. When I say scale back on your ambitions I mean put this project on hold and work on making a better proof-of-concept short. Make a ten-minute short that shows off the tightest script, slickest editing, and most eye-popping effects you can muster and THEN ask people for $6000 for your feature.

Again, that's my opinion.

This.

 

[jfreedan]

What I was trying to say - and I'm struggling to find a way to say it without coming across as offensive - is that I don't think your proof-of-concept is up to snuff. At least not enough to move up to a $6000 budget, anyway. When I say scale back on your ambitions I mean put this project on hold and work on making a better proof-of-concept short. Make a ten-minute short that shows off the tightest script, slickest editing, and most eye-popping effects you can muster and THEN ask people for $6000 for your feature.

Again, that's my opinion.

I apologize for taking so long to respond to this. I want you to know I did take what you said to heart and I've spent the past several months re-planning how I want to do this.

Basically, I've broken up the feature film script into a series of short episodes. It's going to a web series now. By doing it that way, I won't need as much money to do a pilot episode (for example, no location fees or breakable walls). I've also been slowly acquiring (or rather, bartering for) some of the resources I needed, further reducing the budget. I've also scaled back a lot of the practical effects out of the scenes in the first episode which reduces the budget further but on the downside, means more digital effects than I originally wanted. I'm a great admirer of the practical effects used in the old-school tokusatsu shows and I wanted to incorporate as much in-camera effects as possible since the whole point of doing this series is to pay homage to the genre.

On the positive side, I now have a better point of reference for what I want to do: I'm going for a Scott Pilgrim visual style (not just in the fight scenes but also the editing style).

The first episode won't have any wire-fu or the other nifty practical effects I originally wanted, but hopefully people will look at the pilot and understand the potential. It will basically be Scott Pilgrim meets Kamen Rider.

As I don't want to try making another no-budget "test footage" of the hero fighting enemies in unfinished costumes (ex. GKaiser helmet is missing the chin strap and Butterfly Ninja costumes still need their real cloth wings vs the cardboard ones I made for the test footage), I'm going to make a promo that shows off the visual style the show will have while explaining what the show will be about. I hope that will demonstrate that my crew and I have the ability to make a good tokusatsu hero show. We'll be filming the promo in two weeks.

Also, the show is storyboarded and while I don't want to give away the entire story, I'll also post up an audio video storyboard that shows one of the scenes from the episode, again so you and others can have an idea of what we're trying to do.

I will be creating another Kickstarter page and the promo will air there, and the pledge rewards this time around will be much better (t-shirts, prop replicas, song downloads, autographed posters, etc) and the goal much smaller : $1,000.

To be honest, $1,000 isn't going to be enough to produce the first episode but it will cover the cost of the 3D art assets we need to purchase and the completion of costumes / props. The rest of the funds will come out of my own pocket.

For a rough idea of what the first episode entails, the story takes place in a futuristic city so that environment has to be created (much of the 3D art will be used for this; the other 3D art used for the henshin sequence which involves a 3D golden dragon). There is also a concert with a Japanese-style "idol" (again, more 3D art needed for the stage and other effects) and a Scott Pilgrim-style fight between the hero and the villains who are trying to kidnap the idol (since the costume is yellow and blue while showing skin, this is more complicated than simply filming in front of a greenscreen / bluescreen. It is a technical challenge to do these scenes with the costume colors of the hero, especially due to the long scarf). There is original music composed for the show which is also sung by the same actress who plays the idol.

I know this all sounds really ambitious but it is. I know I could scale back a lot of things and make something with a budget of nothing, but I think the final product would suffer for it. Tokusatsu is, by its very name, special effects heavy (or at least it should be imo). I want to make something that is going to really get people's attention and not be immediately written off as a pale imitation of a genre I have admiration for, ya know? I want to do a good job.

Thanks for reading.

 

[jfreedan]

Also if anyone wanted to see the test footage "trailer" I made years ago when I really didn't know what I was doing with film-making, it's here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hji-Mn1gp_k#t=2m55s

 

[Daikamonohashi]

I think you're still confusing a higher budget with true creativity. In my experience, $1000 is more than enough to make something spectacular. It's a matter of finding out what you can do with next to no money combined with tight scripting and good camerawork. As a potential donator, I would be far more interested in seeing a complete film showing off these things and more likely to donate than I would with seeing a visual effects reel or fake promo. That might fly if you already had an impressive backlog of several solid short films but the stuff you've shown us to date fails to move me.

I'm not trying to sound harsh or overly-critical, I just want to encourage qualities that I see lacking in a lot of student filmmakers that I've encountered.

 

[planetxleader]

I feel like I need to chime in here. I work with Daikomonohashi on his short films, so I totally feel what he's saying here. Creativity and ingenuity is always more important than bells and whistles. That's why big-timers like Michael Bay funnel in millions to make tepid, flash-in-the-pan movies. Bigger budget isn't always better.

Check out Dai's vimeo page: http://vimeo.com/lobsterdance
A lot of the projects are small ideas he thought up and decided to put on film. "Episode 74b" was a quick idea he couldn't get out of his head that he got me and another mutual friend to act in and film one night for a quick 20 mins. It turned out to be one of his best films, and it's just a quick little idea.

Likewise with "Luxembourg," which was thought up while we were eating at a local bar, and was written and filmed right on the spot. Both of those films were an exercise in a simple idea (e.i., a clever camera trick that tells a funny story, or a an amusing vignette exaggerating an actual conversation).

What you need to do is amass a resume of simple ideas so you can practice your craft, and I don't necessarily mean special effects. I'm talking storytelling and cinematography. See what you can do with nothing, and how good you can make it, before you pour your heart into a huge undertaking. That's the best way to go about any type of craft.

 

[jfreedan]

I hope this doesn't come off as defensive or nitpicky or anything but if you're going to use Daikomonohashi's work as an example of why a budget isn't needed, then I'm going to have to explain why that isn't a good way to justify why my show doesn't need a budget.

I've watched Daikomonohashi's Ultraman Sorta videos. I can look at them as someone who likes tokusatsu stuff and can appreciate the videos for what they are (fan homages), but I don't feel passionate about them, especially when the audio is so bad and the stories are so simple. I realize you are trying to do as much as you can with what you have, but audiences don't care. You can't put up a sign in your film that says, "There was supposed to be this awesome scene of people laying on the ground injured and the building trashed, but we didn't have budget, so please imagine it". That's not how film-making works. I imagine the general audience to be a harsher critic than I am.

Would I, if I had cash to spare, donate money to improve the production value of Ultraman Sorta? Absolutely, because I can see the potential. I would never say, "You don't need money". That's silly; even decent costumes cost money. Not a lot but it still costs more than $0. If that wasn't true then all cosplay would look awesome.

I think Daikomonohashi and I also have very different goals with what we want to do with our videos and this is where you may be misunderstanding things.

There are many "no-budget" Power Ranger and Kamen Rider fanfilms out there. Most of them are made by people really passionate, but are expecting audiences to just accept something looks bad onscreen. "They'll use their imaginations", they say. I hate that mindset. If you want people to use their imaginations then write books. Film is a visual medium; the audience isn't supposed to use their imagination.

Of the "no-budget" productions you see that look awesome, they actually did cost money. Someone paid for the camera, the editing system, the props, costumes, the special effect programs, etc etc. More than likely even the food.

Maybe the items used were purchased for some other project and re-used for the new project, but still, at some point in time someone who owned it paid money for it. The equipment we're using we didn't need to buy specifically for the show but we still spent money on it. Looking at it that way, I've already invested a couple thousand dollars of my own money into this.

And stuff we spend money on in the first episode will actually get re-used through the show (reducing the budget needed for later episodes), but that won't change we had to spend money on it in order to have access to it.

I've spent a lot of time looking at what others have done to look at what is already out there and understand how they did it. One show I look at often is Insector Sun, which is a Brazillian homage to Kamen Rider. In my opinion it's probably one of the best Kamen Rider homages not created by Japanese, but I always ask myself, "What could they have done if they had more money?" (but I'm sure they spent a fair chunk of change making the costumes).

Another I'm impressed with is France Five; it's clear they spent some money to make it look as good as it did. Perfect Sentai costumes and suitmation sets don't fall off trees. A non-tokusatsu inspired show is Legend of Neil and though it has lots of cheesy effects I imagine they they had more than $1,000 to spend on props and set design (which is why it looks considerably better than other Zelda fan-films).

I want GKaiser to at least look as good. It has to, because it's an original property. The novelty of being a fan version of Power Rangers, Ultraman or Kamen Rider is not going to work. The show has to stand on its own two feet because it will be judged solely on its own merits. And really, it has to stand out.

I don't post here much, but I lurk. I lurk here and other forums, too. I feel that if the die-hardest fans are going to nitpick over something in a low-budget Japanese television show, they're gonna do the same thing with a low-budget American web tv show. There is an expectation for it to be good.

I could make a show that is heavy in dialogue and sparse in action, which is the usual route people take when they try to make low-budget stuff. Or I could do few dialogue and just have some chase and fight scenes, as you have done.

However I don't believe that is what the audience really wants (it definitely isn't what I want). I want to make something people are going to love as much as they do the "real" shows and will look at as a real show.

Comparing my attitude to Michael Bay is, I think, an unjust analysis. Michael Bay is not a screenwriter, he's a director. I do care about character development; I write the screenplays. [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXgZKrREmGI"]I'm also familiar with the differences in narrative structure between Japanese and American narratives[/ame].

But I also care about meeting and exceeding the audience's expectations. If I'm going to make an action show then I'm not going to have people talk and run around for ten minutes and then throw in a three minute fight at the end which could have been choreographed 40 years ago. A significant amount of the episode will not be slow zooms of the character basically doing nothing, in order to eat up runtime and make the story drag (commonly done in many no budget films).

I want to do something special that people are going to remember and not see as a pale imitation but a worthy contender. Something they will pass on to their friends. And they need to be awed in the first episode. The most important episode of any series is the very first one because it tells the audience whether they should watch the others.

I know I don't have the budget for wire-fu, which I originally wanted. We'll use camera tricks and post-production instead.

I also don't have cranes, sound stage for building elaborate sets, or other really high end equipment commonly used for producing these type of shows.

I do have a Sony NEX-VG10 camera, rail system, professional light kit, shotgun mike w/ XLR cables, a portable green / blue / black screen, and locations that add production value to the show without costing money. My production crew (not actors) constitutes eight people right now.

Basically, even if the first episode is produced cheaply, it can't look cheap. People who should be the target audience will reject it because it fails to meet expectations. And not looking cheap does cost some money.

I can't control whether people will like the show but I do have control over the show itself. I can improve the odds of the show being successful by ensuring the quality is as high as we can afford.

Lastly, this is not a student film and this absolutely cannot look like a student film. I am sick to death of making crappy student films in assigned group with people who are content with making something that might look good but has no heart and consequently bores people to tears; or might even have a few really crappy shots because no one except me was willing to chip in a few bucks to make the set look believable.

My crew is handpicked by me. The tiniest detail in the production is planned ahead of time. Every shot is storyboarded.

Also, people are always complaining about bad acting in this genre of show. I'm trying my best to cast good actors, but good actors do not work for free. Payment is deferred on this production but that also means their pay comes out of how successful the show is. If the show isn't successful they get nothing, and the show won't be successful if it looks bad. And if looks like garbage on set they are going to walk.

I feel very confident that if I had the budget, we could do a feature film. But I'm not going to get the budget, so we'll do a web series that basically covers everything the film was going to have. The budget needed for the first episode is less than the first episode, but it still costs more money than I have access to. Mostly because we are missing props and costumes that have to be created and used throughout the show (I do not want costumes that basically look like someone walked into Wal-Mart and put on a bunch of stuff straight off the racks. Even if we buy something, it's just to use as a base to construct the prop).

I hope I haven't come across as super defensive; I'm trying to explain my position because I feel you're misunderstanding it. But maybe you'll just need to see the promotional video we make in order to be convinced this isn't what you think it is.

 

[Birdie Num Nums]

If you approach people and tell them the only way you can make your film good is with money money money and you show them a few, forgive me, poorly shot effects demos to illustrate this, you're not going to fill them with anything except dread. Through elaborate scheming and schmoozing me and my crew took over an old inn for five entire days and shot over 40 hours of carefully-planned out footage for a rather ambitious short horror film, and we were also able to acquire all of our equipment and wardrobe needs and feed the cast and crew. The only things I paid for were a pair of pants at a thrift store, a small hoard of some coffee energy drinks I was getting rather addicted to and a couple bouquets of flowers to woo the leading ladies with. My point here isn't to boast but rather to point out that there are some things money doesn't need to buy, and for everything else, you don't need Master Card. You just need to schmooze and network the hell out of people. Don't just sell your project, sell yourself (not to be confused with selling out!) and I think you'll find your enthusiasm (which you seem to have a lot of) is contagious. Everybody loves movies and television, most people want to be a part of it and live a little bit of the dream, even if it's just to see their name in the end credits, so take advantage of this and you can get a lot of whatcha need. I bet you could whittle your production costs down to half of what you think you need by finding creative ways of solving challenges, without sacrificing any quality. You might even be improving the quality it because you'll really be getting hands on in ways you wouldn't if you were just sinking wads of money into it.