Saw that movie when it came out. It was disappointing. Incredibly cool and creative idea, but not well delivered... I mean, a hammerhead shark is the "scary" killer in the film. I'll upvote because it's so unique, but wow, bad movie and I was SO excited to see it. It killed me that it was so badly made. VERY VERY low budget, low resolution CG. If you want this sort of thing, but good, see Mirrormask. Though I'll again give you that it was profoundly creative. I'd love to see more of this sort of wild stuff coming out of the film industry. So props for a great idea, but downs for poor delivery. Heck, the "gods" in this film are slow and boring. It's video-game quality CG... just not good enough for the silver screen imo. Anyway, this makes me want to watch it again. Good sift.

wow, nice letter, and nice work eric... this blog is worth checking for sure. i work with musicians and filmmakers on low budgets, and it's definitely interesting to note how much the big studios oppose file sharing... as if they instinctively know it will be their undoing...

however, most of the time if you hear a project got big because of myspace or whatever, it's a flat out lie propagated by a PR company... and films and music still cost money to make. My main argument is that UNPROFITABLE stuff should become viable, and wildly profitable stuff is only a tiny fraction of the world's creative output. We need more variety, not more superstars.

i don't think we have reached a meritocracy yet, and the only future I will be happy with is one where a lone independent artist can make a reasonable living or even just beer money from his work, without the filter of big media.

the future is not 1000000 bands making it big on the internet, there's still only 10 people in the top 10. if we are levelling the playing field, that means less money for successful artists (and more for niche acts with cheap worldwide diy distribution). It might still be impossible for 99.9% of artists to give up their day jobs.

I wanna see this movie now...never even heard of it before. I just hope by claiming that it's "a bit too smart and a bit too weird to please everyone" you don't mean it's "low budget and too obscure to really understand but I say I like it because as I was going to 7-11 to get another 40oz of 'Olde English', I overheard two people wearing ivy league university sweatshirts talking about how much they liked it as they got into their eco-friendly giggle-powered vehicle."

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

very nice low-budget way to make a cool music video.

Wonder if this is where low budget 1960s Batman and Robin got their batmobile?

The amazing thing about a low budget is that it is a great incentive for actual creativity.

He raps like an awkward CEO on a low budget commercial from the eighties.

My first post, kinda, was http://www.videosift.com/video/Ann-Coulter-gets-hung-up-on-by-Adam-Carolla-119-worth-every-second . Then I discovered how this crazy site works and had http://www.videosift.com/video/Spock-shows-low-budget-FX published.

low-budget red-head too.....B R U N E T T E !

Well it was a low budget film. The gun kata premise is supposed to allow you to anticipate what your opponents will be doing in a combat situation. The idea doesn't really work because in order to apply any statistics to a gun fight you would require such superhuman senses that the statistics are redundant. However no one complains when heros have seemingly infinite ammo cheats enabled and it looks pretty cool.

And I'm not sure how the premise of the film is dumb. It follows neatly in the path of many iconic sci-fi books such as 1984 and A Brave New World.

Acting was a bit stiff but then I guess that was the point

The premise of this film is pretty dumb and it suffered from what looked like a low budget. Still some of the fight scenes are cool but if alot of people are shooting at you I don't see how "gun kata" is going to help.

Well strange but really kind of fun.

Amazing what you can squeeze out of a basic concept on a low budget with some interesting visual effects, costumes and good editing.

I think I remember Singer pointing out the engine one somewhere for the film Usual Suspects. It was a fairly low budget movie, and they left it. For us to talk about.

I agree with dag and James. I enjoy interacting with other sifters but I think forums should be an offsite thing. (i.e. like Ladybugs coffee house) I'm here to watch videos. And get ideas for my low budget college films that always end with the words 'fin' in white letters on a black backgroud and involve deeply emotional visuals like, drugs, or violence. Then I expect people to say "My what a unique film that was." Ok, now I'm off topic.

Not a TV-series but a series nonetheless, the director explains they're very low budget shorts he's been selling on DVD and touring the Québec short films festival circuit with. This episode has been seen 500,000 times on YouTube before the whole series was pulled out, so maybe it was worthy of the front page eventually.