The Weekly Planet - How To Get Your Movie Made (With Michael Shanks)

Episode Date: April 12, 2020

Michael Shanks is a director, special effects wiz, actor and human man that is responsible for some spectacular projects. From his time at the Escapist, the George Lucas Star Wars The Force Awakens Special Edition trailer the amazing time and space adventure Time Trap and more recently his film Rebooted. This discussion overs how to get your work noticed in a crowded online space, dealing with job delegation, working on a budget, getting representation, stop motion and much more. Be sure to check out his work linked below along with the extended interview. Thanks for watching!Rebooted Short Film ► https://youtu.be/1Rkn6rnsgc4Michael Shanks Twitter ► https://twitter.com/timtimfedVideo Interview ► https://youtu.be/SbE16LQK6RQSUBSCRIBE HERE ►► http://goo.gl/pQ39jNJames' Twitter ► http://twitter.com/mrsundaymoviesTWP Itunes ► https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-weekly-planet/id718158767?mt=2&ign-mpt=uo%3D4TWP Direct Download ► https://play.acast.com/s/theweeklyplanetTWP YouTube Channel ► https://goo.gl/1ZQFGHPatreon ► https://patreon.com/mrsundaymoviesAmazon Affiliate Link ► https://amzn.to/2nc12P4T-Shirts/Merch ► https://www.teepublic.com/stores/mr-sunday-movies#Rebooted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

FX's The Veil explores the surprising and fraught relationship between two women who play a deadly game of truth and lies on the road from Istanbul to Paris and London. One woman has a secret, the other a mission to reveal it before thousands of lives are lost. FX's The Veil, starring Elizabeth Moss, is now streaming on Disney+. The Wizard of Oz, Time Trap, and someone whose work you've probably already seen on the internet, even if you weren't aware that you have seen it. If you are in the extended audio edition of this, I highly suggest you also check out the video version, because there are of course clips that highlight the things that we are talking about. That is the beauty of a visual medium. But if you are interested in film and special effects and how to get something off the ground, I think you're really going to enjoy this. Specifically though, we talk a lot about his new short film, Rebooted,

which is this incredible story that's a blend of stop motion and live action and motion capture. Also, leave a like. Leave a like. It's important. Don't forget to leave a like. Don't forget. Don't forget. I'm Michael Shanks, by the way.

Welcome. Thank you. Hey, thanks for having me. Before we get into it, people should also definitely check out that short. I'll link it below. Go and watch that and then come back to this. It's a bit over 10 minutes, that's right? Is that right?

That seems right. Yeah, I think it's about 12. And look, what else are we doing these days? Exactly. Your channel, though, it's this treasure trove of short films and also insanely complicated jokes in really small packages sometimes. And one of the things that really came to my attention from you a few years ago was the George Lucas version of the Star Wars Force Awakens trailer. yeah that was fun and I know that's something that you did like five

years ago would probably don't think about but how did you get that turnaround in such a short amount of time because that was a huge video and it was like a day and a half and then it was up yeah it was about that it was it was within 48 hours it was like um so the Force Awakens teaser had come out and you know I obviously was excited for it because i'm a i'm that guy sure and i was watching it and then that night i had um not to brag but i had a date with my girlfriend and she was uh she had she had driven around to my mom's house where i lived to pick me up because i didn't and still don't drive and uh she'd parked at the front and i was watching the trailer and it had just come out and i just i had this idea of like oh crap i should make like a version of it, which is like the George Lucas special edition, like covering it with like unnecessary and cheesy special effects that just kind of ruin the whole experience like George Lucas does.

Sure, yeah. So I called Louis and who was literally at the front. I said, hey, I got to stay home and make a sketch. And she's like, cool, fine, whatever. And we're still together now. So that's great. So your girlfriend's like my wife when you're like, listen, I have to do this really stupid thing that most people don't understand.

And she's like, yeah, of course. I know that. I know you. Is that how it works? Yeah. She just went to see like her other boyfriend. It was totally fine. But I realized that, oh man, like I think this is a funny idea.

The whole world is watching this trailer at the moment. Like not to sound too cynical about it. I thought if I can get this out immediately, then it'll really get get out there and so i i did i just turned it around like super quickly just i'd become you know all the kind of work that i'd done up to that point was was lots of quick turnaround like heavy visual effectsy stuff so i really knew my way around how like to edit and remix the footage and make it kind of silly and funny so i just got it yeah got that done basically in one night and put it on the internet and it was almost concurrent with the release of the actual trailer and uh and really helped get kind of some some eyes on the channel because i guess from that people went back and watched

time trap and a bunch of other stuff from your channel i assume well yeah well actually so so time trap is this uh just to contextualize that a little bit it was this uh short film that i made uh well me and our late night films made and uh we'd put a ton of effort into it it's it's sort of like a seven eight minute long short film but really special effects focused it's like this it's like a castaway story but instead of tom hanks on a deserted island it's an alien on a deserted earth and the only way that they can get off is a little time machine i can't understand also that how you managed to do that on 6k was that is that right is that what you did before yeah yeah yeah that was just six grand that i had saved up. It was sort of like trying to

mash up a really old style of filmmaking, kind of like slapstick silent comedy with the most modern form of space, J.J. Abrams kind of movie. I remember when I was editing it, I had a premiere, I had the timeline of my edit, and I had the timeline of clips from Star Trek into darkness, and as I was doing the visual effects, I was just kind of switching between the two and like studying how the camera moved in that shot, so I could make my CGI camera move for kind of the fully CG shots and just really trying to hold them side by side. And obviously it doesn't quite hold up, but on a six grand budget of the visual effects done by one person in his mom's basement, it kind of worked. But this was a short film that I put a ton of effort into and I didn't know when to release it.

I was nervous about it because I was like, oh man, I really need people people to see this and this isn't like a lot of other content that i've done which is you know riffing on something that's already in pop culture this is like a fully unique thing and i really want to get eyeballs on it yeah and it was actually i released that george lucas thing and suddenly the star wars trailer suddenly all these eyes were on my channel and we weren't actually going to release the the video yet but i thought crap we've got to put out time trap right now and so within you know 12 hours i called all the producers and said okay cool i'm gonna put it up that's all fine great let's go so you were just sitting on it it was it was ready to go yeah and that was that absolutely wasn't my intention when i made the star wars thing but it suddenly just seemed like well i'm

never getting an opportunity like this and that actually worked out really well like it really got a lot of eyeballs on it it went up i think to the top of videos on reddit and actually it was that video going up that got me uh representation in the states it uh within the week i was getting you know calls from all the people uh they people told me that it's what they call in hollywood the film went around the town okay i can imagine a guy in a van just kind of throwing it like delivering newspapers to people shurikening dvds out of people yeah but uh it was like two days after that i got a call from the weinstein company and back then that wasn't a bad thing yeah it was like okay cool i mean that's a that's a huge deal obviously yeah i mean it's still a huge deal but that's that's incredible it also shows how things

have changed since then oh absolutely and by the way i don't bring that up to be like i'm so cool i got a call from america but like working in this industry for a while like i'm if i'm ever on like a panel or something people often ask those questions like indie filmmakers like how do I get rep in the states and everybody's story is different but like that was my example was putting a short film out tethering it to something that was sort of a surefire thing to go viral and sure enough it did I wanted to ask you also about making something like that because you didn't do any kind of formal training at university you didn't go to film school or special effects school, whatever that's called. No, James, you know so much about me.

I know what I'm doing. You do a lot of your own special effects and music and all of those things. Would you say that's the way to go for everybody or do you think that's something specific to you? It certainly worked for me. I think, I'm going to get this quote wrong, but I think it was Jerry Seinfeld was talking about

how up-and-coming comedians often asked him, like, how did you get noticed noticed how did you get discovered and in the 10 years since he was sort of first discovered the world had changed in stand-up comedy so much that he might as well have been explaining how to succeed as a juggler or as a plumber because these worlds are changing so so so quickly like when i started on youtube they compared to these days like there weren't that many YouTubers so whenever I'm kind of like asked to give advice the time has rendered every part of my experience

completely irrelevant I remember Kevin Smith saying a similar thing how when somebody gets in one way that door kind of shuts because then everybody goes for it that probably makes a lot of sense yeah

well if you're looking at something like what was his first film was it More Rats or Clerks? it was Clerks like what that's like a black and white just him and his friends kind of making wry comedic dialogue that's so much more easily achieved these days because of digital cameras and uh how you can just self-distribute but in those days the fact that he got film in the camera and got it finished is kind of a miracle in and of

itself that yeah that that definitely wouldn't uh raise as many eyebrows as it did today so you're saying no no film school basically that's what you're recommending or whatever works for you would that probably i don't want to say that because that's probably not what you were saying at all well no well well my uh my way in was kind of it was weird because i was uh i was in my final year of high school uh year 12 so we call it down here in melbourne and uh i had just taken an interest in looking up how to make my own kind of special effects online just via tutorials because I had no dating prospects and it was approaching the end of the year and I was going a lot on a video game website called The Escapist magazine. I see

the aforementioned comment about no dating prospects and they had a film competition and they were like hey if you can make a short film as like a pilot for a series the winner will win a contract making uh that series for us and i'd never made a film before but i was like i was like a theater kid and i was like i reckon i could do this so i you'd seen film you know yeah exactly i'd watched the shrek bonus features um well actually no i'd watched all the lord of the rings special features like so many times over so i was really kind of into that world well i've heard a lot of people say that that's their film school, right? Because I've also watched those, yeah.

Not that I'm anywhere near the level that you are, but they're so insightful. Yeah, amazing. And just like inspiring, even if like for what they teach you is one thing, but what they inspire you to want to learn is totally something else. Effects like that also, results like that even,

they're very achievable now as well with what people can just do at home. Yeah, amazing. And the Lord of the Rings, I grew up in New Zealand and it was just such a big thing when that was being produced i was like the right age for that where it was like the news every night would be like uh coming up we've got the weather the sport and then what's happening with lord of the rings it was it was wild yeah so i was in year 12 and i made this uh film as an entry to this uh escapist magazine competition and it won the competition. And so I was 17 and I suddenly had this contract saying,

make this action comedy show because that's what the pilot was and every two weeks you've got to release an episode. And yeah, so from that I had to make this 25-part action comedy show on the Escapist and we're talking about kind of the film school thing. I think of that as my film school because I didn't know anybody in the industry. I just had to, it was that year post high school, so I was like, so many of my friends don't have jobs, like you're going to come act in it, you're going to hold the camera, you're going to do that. And through that, there were a couple of friends that kind of consistently would be helping out. But otherwise, I had to, I had no option but to learn how to edit, learn how to

shoot, learn how to, you know, compose the music, do the sound design, etc. So I was really in the deep end. And that worked great for me because I have the sort of mind where I can obsess over things like that. But for other people, that wouldn't work at all. And I certainly missed out on lots of experiences by not going to film school. You've got a girlfriend. It's fine. What else do you need? Exactly. And what a girlfriend. By which I mean she's cool.

Yeah, absolutely. So have any of those people come along with you? No, none of them pursued film or acting or anything like that except for my friend Nicholas Issel, who we wrote that series, The Wizards of Oz, together. That's right, you did. Yeah, of course. Yeah, and he's a great writer and still pursuing that. And yeah, he was in almost every episode of Doomsday Arcade,

which was the name of the show on The Escapist. I beg you all to not look it up. Well, I certainly won't put any clips of it in this video. Don't you even worry about it. So I wanted to, that kind of brings me around to your new project. I read at one point you decided not to make it a silent project. It had a lot of kind of witty dialogue, and you said it didn't kind of really flow,

and it was, I don't know if you'd use the word cringe, but that's the kind of sense that I got from reading some of your interviews about it. Was that incorrect, the way you started things off? No, that's absolutely right. So this is the new short film Rebooted, which ended up being a silent film, but there were so many drafts of the script where it wasn't. It was very dialogue heavy and always the same premise and the same characters. But at one point

it all took place at a funeral. At one point, the main character was a living exhibit in a museum and it was like, it kept changing. And all the time I was putting in dialogue, I just realized it became very sitcom-y. I was like writing jokes. Therefore it really became verbose. And I wanted something to be kind of concise and to the point. And instead I was constantly having to write in setups for punchlines, et cetera, et cetera. It was odd because a lot of the work that I've done online, and you can see on the YouTube channel, Tim Tim Fed, actually has no dialogue in it. And one of the great things about that is it allows it to kind of travel and that people from all over the world can actually watch that content and relate to it without needing subtitles or replace replace dialogue etc everyone understands a man

you know playing tennis with a tank you know i mean that's that's universal yeah exactly well hopefully but um but there wasn't really a reason i was avoiding dialogue in the past other than i just love visual storytelling and that's very much kind of my directorial style i was always trying to ape kind of pixar films and edgar wright films and silent films uh that sort of thing right and i don't know why it actually took my friend laura who's a who's a playwriter kind of Pixar films and Edgar Wright films and silent films, that sort of thing. Right. And I don't know why it actually took my friend Laura, who's a playwriter, to be reading. She was reading my draft of Rebooted and just kind of said, why isn't this silent?

Your work's like, you know, always silent. And it kind of opened this world up to me. And I stripped all the dialogue out. And I think it was the best creative decision I made on this project because, or rather Laura made by suggesting it. It really endears you to the character. It makes you, I think, much more empathetic to this sort of world. And there was no need to have these kind of creatures speak. I love the challenge of working with that dialogue.

What was it something like you had 16 kind of faces you could put on the skeleton? Was that the idea? And you got so much emotion out of that. Yeah, well, that's really on the animator Samuel Lewis who gave him so much emotion with, as you said our 13 facial expressions all we could change were his eyebrows and he had 13 different sets of eyebrows yeah he he really came to life sam was incredible and because this is such a special effects heavy project that must have been really

challenging because i know the wizards of oz starts off in this huge epic kind of medieval fantasy setting and then you shift things to Melbourne. And I understand that was somewhat budget-related also, because you can kind of tone things down a little bit at points. But this is all... He's in almost every shot, right, with this new one? Yeah, basically every single shot. Yeah, it was a huge project to pull together, and massive kudos to my producers at Late Night Films

for making it all work from a budgetary point of view. But I mean, everything I've ever done has always been really special effects heavy partially that's because i just love genre stuff and partially stupidly it's because i love doing special effects like i i love um just like kind of sitting on my computer and and sort of i like i kind of think of uh doing like comps as sort of like playing a puzzle video game it's really stupid but you you have a set of tools and you know where you need to end up. And it's like, how do I use these tools

to get to that destination? It's like a super nerdy portal level. Well, to actually, to give the kind of synopsis of it, the quick pitch. Yeah. It's- So I probably should have done all of this up top. Oh, no, no stress.

So, well, now I'm going to PR mode and I can go through this. Rebooted tells the story of Phil, a stop-motion animated skeleton from Hollywood's golden era who can no longer find work in modern Hollywood due to being an out-of-date visual effect. Was that off the top of your head then? That was, but I've done that a lot.

Incredible. Oh, man, I remember doing the PR for Wizards. It was just, I became like an automaton, just reciting the same things over and over again. I always feel bad for those celebrities in interviews and directors where they sit in a chair and they've clearly just been there three days straight and people come in and go,

what was it like to work with whoever? And what was it like living in wherever? Oh wow, so great. Yeah, they're fantastic. They never say, you know what? He fucking sucks. Yeah, he's bad. He was like the worst dude.

What I was also really interested in about this project is I can't imagine there was a lot of wiggle room to cut things or it would have been difficult to because they were so special effects heavy. Was it something like six months of stop motion to get everything going? How hard was it to trim down a scene to be like, oh, that doesn't quite flow if I, maybe if I cut it here.

Maybe you're cutting off 10 seconds, but then that's weeks of work. The way that I direct, which is the same of some other directors and different to others, is that, wow, what a profound statement, Michael, is that I know a lot of directors who kind of will storyboard, or maybe they won't storyboard, but if they do, they'll just kind of go, okay, close up of him, close up of her, wide shot, cool, and we'll get the coverage.

I really fastidiously storyboard everything before I shoot it to the point where every single one of my projects, I've got like an almost crappy comic book of the whole thing even if we're going back to a shot from two shots ago that we've already seen I'll redraw the board because I really want to look at it all and realize that visually it stays interesting and fresh I really dislike the idea of coverage which essentially means like you get everybody in a close-up you get a wide and then you kind of make the film in the edit like i really want to edit the film before we actually get on set so when it comes to kind of cutting and trimming i i really don't cut and trim very

much at all because i've already done that work in the storyboard and when it comes to the animation style of things because our main character is stop motion animated despite it being a live action film and stop motion animation is so difficult and so time consuming and we had such little budget. We couldn't afford to pay our animator for a day longer than we needed. Right, okay, yeah. So the way we did that was we shot every shot in the film at least twice.

And in one of those takes, I performed as the skeleton character. But what that allowed us to do is before we even started the animation, we had a full edit of the movie from A to B, from front to back, from start to finish. I'm going to keep saying that. Of me performing so we could make all the trims there so we never animated anything we weren't going to use. Because it would have been heartbreaking to animate an amazing piece of animation and then go, actually, that scene doesn't work.

Cut it. And then it descends out of nowhere. So we just did the whole thing with me. And then gradually, shot by shot, I was replaced by a skeleton. And it was kind of like watching a time lapse of my eventual fate in real time. It was great. I couldn't believe some of the stop motion stuff. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors, like when our estrogen levels drop during menopause, causing the risk of heart disease to go up. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca.

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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Only in theaters May 10th. Tickets on sale now. Stuff that you did, including when the skeleton melts. you animated it two different times and one of them was with different lighting exposures so you got that kind of effect i mean things like that where does that come from is that you or is that your animator how does that how did that come up that was that was sort of sam's idea well our animation team was actually two people we had samuel lewis who was our stop-motion animator and we had gerald thompson who was our stop-motion animator, and we had Gerald Thompson, who was our stop-motion cinematographer.

And what we had at that time is our, somebody from Late Night Films, Kevin Look, was taking all this data and measuring the distance between the light and where I was standing and the light in the camera and the angle that the camera was pointed at and all this technical data and all these photos. So then when we came to animation, our stop-motion cinematographer, Gerald Thompson,

would rebuild basically the lighting setups, but in miniature so uh if we had a light here here and here up in our big shoot he'd make put lights here here and here on our kind of teeny tiny little shoot i saw that spreadsheet where that was all mapped out on and that that's an incredibly laborious process i'd imagine oh yeah the result i mean it just looks in camera i mean i think if you didn't know you just assumed that it was just a very good looking cgi skeleton yeah and that's so great to hear like thank you like and i can't take any credit for it like it's all gerald and sam they they did an astonishing job and uh well going back to that uh skeleton uh the the melting shot yeah we have a scene where where phil uh melts And so the silicon of his puppet melts off his metal armature frame.

And then that was something in the script. And I storyboarded it up. And I thought, oh, that's a really cool idea. I don't know how we're going to do it. And we actually thought, Sam thought he would build a meltable version of him. And we'd use a heat gun and sort of like Indiana Jones face it. Oh, right. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. And there's one shot where we actually did that. There's a shot right just preceding that shot where it's a close-up of his hand and his hand. Yes. Yeah. Normally on the fill part of the hands, like, I don't know, a couple of centimeters big, but Sam built a sort of a 20 centimeter long hand that was out of a meltable plasticine.

Oh, right. Okay. And he used a heat gun to... That's how you managed to get the detail on that. I guess that would be incredibly hard to film on such a tiny hand, I guess, yeah. It was just fumes aplenty in our very unventilated office and Sam was like, maybe you're going to die.

Let's reassess this, yeah. I wanted to ask you about relinquishing control on something like this because I know with Wizards of Oz, you're in it, you're doing the special effects, you're doing the music, you're storyboarding it all. I also noticed how your storyboards kind of, they start really magnificent

and then by then you just like stick people or whatever, which is incredible to me. The detail you put into those is phenomenal. How hard is it to relinquish control? Or is it nice to have a team like that where you can go, I'm not good at stop motion animation like they are. Is it nice to be able to go,

can you do a better version of this? i mean that was that was amazing we had early on discussions of like could i just learn how to do stop motion animation just literally animate over my performance and using that i'll just become really good at it and every animator i spoke to was like you're an idiot that's never gonna work and and and they were right you're gonna be you'll be doing it for the rest of your life basically yeah oh yeah and then the results will be very bad but um relinquishing control is is i'll i'll gladly fess up as actually like a big problem i have when it comes to working particularly when like moving on to direct some stuff you know it's more like traditional like working on like a network show or something like that that when i've done little bits and bobs of that because i'm so used to the indie guerrilla

realm because all i know that's actually something you lose from film school you're really ready to be part of it you're taught to be part of a team and to lean on other people but the way i came up was if i don't do it it doesn't get done yeah and so i struggle with that like something like stop motion animation i was i was never going to do that well so giving that up to sam yeah absolutely fine but i compose all my own scores and uh there's definitely other composers out there that would do a better job than me but because i can also kind of do it i'm like well i'll just do it then because i don't trust them but that's that's a terrible skill because you know part of directing is delegating and being able to communicate to people what your vision

is and having trust uh in their ability to interpret it absolutely and what they usually do is better than what you can do. And they come up with ideas. Like everybody on set is an incredibly creative person. And you should always, I mean, here's my take, is you should always be really open to listening to every person on the crew because they'll have often better ideas than you. I mean, I guess it's so important to build that kind of essential team around you because the team of editors that I work with,

they're all great and they're all better editors than me. And that's kind of the idea that you want somebody for me who can not only compliment what I do, but enhance it to make it much better than anything I could ever produce. But also I used to be a primary school teacher before I do whatever the fuck this is. And I also found working in teams when you're working with people who you think I could probably do a better job of this, or at least a job, you feel yourself kind of taking it on to kind of lessen the burden of other people as well which is probably not a good idea I'd imagine well yeah and also like when you really enjoy doing every aspect of it then it's just like oh you're taking my fun away I love composing I don't why do you get to do that that's

that's no fun is that why you're like look I'm gonna be Phil I'm gonna be Phil on set yeah yeah well exactly yeah well and also then like with something like that, we very, very rarely have enough budget for what we're trying to do. So we're always kind of fighting against the small budgets that we have. And that usually comes down to time on set. The more time on set exponentially, the more money you're going to spend. And the idea of just having to communicate what I want to do to an actor whose performance is only going to be covered by an animation is just like, well, that's just going to communicate what I want to do to an actor whose performance is only going to be covered by an animation. It's just like, well, that's just going to slow us down. So I'll just do it. And then I don't need to check, you know, then as an actor, I don't need to check with the director if they're happy. And as a director, I don't need to mold the actor's performance to

where I'm happy because I can just be unhappy with my performance and live with that because it's my fault. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess that's also the same with when you're doing things like music, you can also tweak it on the fly. You're like, I'm not really happy with this. Instead of, you know, you're ringing around and you kind of sit down with the person and explain it, you can just be like, I'll just tweak this just now. It'll take like five minutes, as opposed to doing this whole thing. I think I worked on a little thing earlier in the year. I guess you'd call it like a pilot for Princess Pictures. And we worked with another composer on it, a guy named Brendan Caulfieldield and he was so amazing he he like

completely nailed the vibe i was hoping for and made it way better than i would have done but then i realized that in my feedback to him i was so like desperately trying to be like you know i know how to play music too and my notes were like so didactic and just so douchey you know like a like an insecure kid trying to be like, oh, beer? Yeah, I love beer. It's so cool. Although I think that's very endearing. I bet he was very impressed. I'm sure he didn't interpret it that way at all. He's such a nice man. I'm sure he probably was, but I would have been in his shoes like,

what a douchebag. Shut up, let me do my job. Yeah, this fucking guy, are you kidding me? Just to kind of wrap things up, I wanted to ask you a bit about funding because you've mentioned that a lot of these projects are relatively uh low budget starting with time trap obviously but then going through screen australia you're afforded a bit more of a budget which you can kind of expand things out a little how do you go about kind of getting money for these projects in general in a nutshell i mean i've been i've been really fortunate to have a couple of things funded from screen australia but uh to the first thing i got funded from screen australia was wizards of oz and uh the way that actually came about was screen

australia approached me which was amazing i'd released time trap and a bunch of stuff online and screen australia actually just kind of got in touch and said hey we've seen your work we think you'd be a good candidate to get some sort of uh web series funding if you want to come in and talk and and and i came in and talked with them and they said do you have any ideas and i sort of had this wizard show this kind of wizard comedy uh in mind and and from that i contacted nick issel and said hey do you want to write the show together and so we did that and uh we were fortunate enough to get funding but even from that point when we submitted the script say or even just the ideas i said you can't do this for this budget like we can the most amount of money that we're funding at that point was 350 000 australian so for any non-australian listeners that's like five bucks american that's like that's like 280 american i'd

say but but i and i was like that's the most money anybody's ever had look at time trap we made that for six thousand dollars and it looks great however here's the issue when nobody's getting paid you don't have to pay anybody because there's no money and nobody's getting paid but as soon as you get the budget from the government you have to pay and thankfully you have to pay so nobody's getting exploited everybody uh union rates which is obviously fantastic but suddenly you know our cast in wizards is over 40 people. And just that alone was like almost the budget. Like we were like, oh crap, what are we going to do? My understanding is that you didn't take any money for that in the end. Was that the idea?

Yeah. So I directed the show. I edited and did the visual effects with my producer, Chris. And I co-wrote the show and I was the lead actor in the show and I composed all the music. And I took, I think I took my writer's fee and burnt the rest. Because the only people that we were allowed to not pay were essentially the people in charge so it was me and chris hocking uh the producer of the show we one of the producers of the show we did the visual effects together we did 36 weeks of unpaid full-time visual effects work on it so i actually

moved back into my mom's house and uh i was about to say how do you fund something like that how do you live? I guess you didn't pay rent at that time. I guess that's the answer to that. Yeah, it's totally exactly. It's totally untenable. Unless you're, you know, as fortunate as I was to have like a mum

with a spare room who was like happy to be annoyed by me for basically a year. And I didn't take any weekends off. Like it was honestly intense. Actually, no, that's true. I took one weekend for my brother's wedding and then half a weekend for my sister's wedding because it was second so i was like i'm over weddings i was gonna say yeah that's just that's how that works what does she want really no offense carrie so so that's kind of how that

funding thing worked uh well i suppose to talk broadly about funding uh we actually chatted about this a little bit before we started rolling but i have started doing some assessment for screen australia and the way that uh some of the online funding works at least i'm not sure about some of the other stuff they get so many submissions that they have external assessors which are people they've worked with before and that they know kind of understand uh both the creative and the uh producorial roles of funding and they get two external assessors to assess a project, as well as somebody in-house at Screen Australia to assess the same project. And they kind of, you know, capitulate those results to figure out whether or not to fund it or not. And it's fascinating

being on the other side of it. And the main criteria that I'm sort of concerned with is that when I'm looking at it, like, I just want an interesting idea. I want to see something that I've never seen before. You read a lot of applications that are largely dealing with really similar premises and really similar settings. What does that come down to? A lot of stuff set in an apartment and there's a shot from inside a fridge when somebody opens their fridge. Is it that kind of stuff?

What do we... Yeah, if I get a housemate comedy i'm not against it but i'm like i want to know why this is better than the other nine house i was gonna say yeah it better be the best comedy in the world you're looking for something else other something unusual a bit left of center i guess or you in particular because there's obviously other people that i suppose i suppose everybody brings a little bias to them and i and and i absolutely try not to but everybody brings a bias to everything. And I suppose maybe my bias is I'm looking for, I do enjoy genre content, and I enjoy stuff that really makes me go, oh, that's weird.

But also it comes down to sometimes you get work just submitted by people who have a great track record, and that's one of the other criteria. But you don't have to have had a great track record before if the idea is really good. So, yeah, I actually think putting together a is is not as much paperwork as it might seem so it's not really that scary and uh screeners really has money and they have to give it to somebody and you know they really want to so if any assessor gets a project that they really think is interesting and great like yeah we'll be like absolutely let's let's try our best to make this make this happen my understanding is it's a very positive environment and they are there to help you along the way they're not trying to kind of step on your dreams and kind of mush it into something that it isn't

no absolutely i mean from from what i understand like if screen australia doesn't give away money they're not doing their job like they sort of have to well speaking of development i guess we'll end on this and i feel like this is kind of a difficult question to ask a person especially when you've just wrapped up this massive project. What do you do next? Do you take a break or are you straight into the next thing? Obviously, there's a bit of a forced break at the moment, but are your wheels kind of turning on the next project?

What's the idea there? Well, obviously, Rebooted, the short film, is just released, and that's actually the first piece of YouTube content I've put up in over three years, which is something I used to do a lot more. That's true. Yeah. So I've got that. Yeah, it is too. I didn't even realize that. Yeah. That's because like, I, you know, I always wanted to kind of work longer for me stuff. I never wanted to be sort of a YouTube guy and this, this might seem kind of weird, but after wizards, I kind of thought, well, I think I'm kind of done

with YouTube. Like I sort of did everything I wanted to do on this platform. Like I I've had way more success on it than I ever thought would happen. I'm like, cool, now I want to move into kind of some other stuff. But then Rebooted kind of came up and I thought, okay, cool. I love this idea. I want to make sure it gets, and then the strand of funding was online. The short film was actually funded by Screen Australia and YouTube as part of a skip ahead initiative. So it was very kind of YouTube based. so now i i actually well i have a lot of work that i never released because i did some for a comedy channel show and uh some sketches that i sort of been sitting on because they're not that good

but now that i've released a reboot and i'm like oh maybe i'll just like release a bunch of old work but moving ahead it's it's really hopefully to move on into the the feature uh space i'm writing a feature film for a studio at the moment and there's a couple of others that uh that have been written and we're just you you know, like every asshole in the industry, like, yeah, we're just kind of figuring out funding, but yeah, figuring out funding and hopefully that can, that can go somewhere. There's a fun little horror film and a fun little thing. Yeah. Are those international? Yeah. International. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's, that's a, that's the vibe.

Does that mean you'll be moving over to LA at some point I'd imagine or doing that kind of thing? Hopefully not. It's, it's been suggested, but, but just honestly, I like love living where I live. Not to brag, I just have a great group of friends and family and I like being here. I like the idea of going over for projects and stuff. But for example, there's a film that I've written that's like a horror film and I wrote it being kind of local, but the sort of producers that we've got at the moment are like, if the leads aren't Australian, we can raise more money for it. Right, okay, yeah.

It's that kind of a thing where we're like, oh, okay, well, if we attach American cast, we could still shoot it over here because there's tax incentives. This sounds really cynical, but it's like, oh, there's tax incentives to shoot stuff over here. I mean, you look at like The Invisible Man,

you look at like Thor, Ragnarok and those kinds of things. It's not uncommon. It happens all the time, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And The Invisible Man, you look at like Thor Ragnarok and those kinds of things. It's not uncommon. It happens all the time, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And The Invisible Man is actually like, there's no reason that film couldn't have been Australian, except for the fact that it never would have gotten the financing

that it got from overseas in order to exist if it was starring David Wenham and, I don't know, I don't want to sully an actress's name. Look, you've already sullied David Wenham, I think. No, but I love David Wenham. I know, me too. But how amazing, though, that that film could come out and be the number one film in the world,

and it was shot in Sydney, made by an Australian crew, Australian writer and director. Like, that's the sort of shit that I think is awesome. And if we can't raise those budgets with Australian-accented cast, because you can still do it with kind of Australian cast doing other accents, well, then... Definitely. You know, at least keep chipping away at that until we can get to the place where

we're not embarrassed by our film releases. I think it's also, what was I going to say? Sorry. Long day. Long life. I know, right? It's going forever. That's right. I think also a lot of studios seem to be missing the idea that you can make a movie for $10, $20 million and it can make $60 million. And that's more than enough for what you're doing. Not everything needs to be $150 million. Yeah, absolutely. I'm chasing $4.6 million. If anyone wants to give me $4.6 million, I'll make you a damn good movie. That's not a bad idea. Alright, I think that's pretty much everything. But you are Tim Tim fed on all platforms. Is that the idea? Yes, that's not a bad idea all right i think that's uh pretty much everything but you are tim tim fed on all platforms is that the idea uh yes that's correct so look obviously uh people probably

would have already checked out the short when i said up top definitely go and check it out but if you haven't please do and just go through the youtube channel because there is a bunch of just hilarious and strange stuff just just hiding away in there that i just think people will really really enjoy and like you said it's kind of translates universally so I think there's anything you click on I think you're in for a pretty good time I reckon. Awesome well thanks so much James for having me this has been fun. Anytime

sorry that sounded mean. Anytime. No that's fine we've got nothing else to do right now you know we could play some online games or something. Yeah why not. Yeah okay let's do it oh Minesweeper here we go all right cheers mate all right thanks mate cheers thanks everyone for watching and or listening to this don't forget there is the video edition which is linked below and just get stay safe and just be cool just be as cool as you can just like michael shanks all

right see you later this podcast is part of the Planet Broadcasting Network. Visit planetbroadcasting.com for more podcasts from our great mates. I mean, if you want. It's up to you. As women, our life stages come with unique risk factors, like high blood pressure developed during pregnancy, which can put us two times more at risk of heart disease or stroke. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca. during pregnancy, which can put us two times more at risk of heart disease or stroke. Know your risks. Visit heartandstroke.ca.

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