Rakka

Neill Blomkamp's (director of District 9) Oaks Studios has just released the first of a three-part short film he directed (this one features Sigourney Weaver) called Rakka, about an alien invasion.

It's really pretty good and would make a cool feature film.



I really liked it.

Here is a bit about what Neill is trying to do...

"The goal is to see ‘if’ the audience likes them and ‘if’ they would be willing to pay for volume 2, the director said. They are too short to charge now. 

So after thinking about it for a while, I came up with the idea. I needed a place that I could sell short films, and it felt like iTunes or any of the obvious outlets were massively lacking in any other avenues besides the films themselves. In other words: they don’t give users the ability to look at all of the behind the scenes artwork in any real way. 

The more I thought about that, the more it became, What if the users had access to all of the 3D files that we used for the visual effects? If we just gave that away with any one-time purchase and you could render stuff yourself? Or what if we just give away all of the raw footage of one of the pieces, and anyone in the audience could they recut the the entire thing themselves? Stems from all of the music, or voiceovers from the actors; I just wanted to open it up and let people remix it. 

After realizing that iTunes and stuff wasn’t the right avenue for that, I started thinking about a game platform like Steam. I felt like Valve is a really awesome company and I’ve always had a massive level of respect for Valve. So we started moving in the direction of putting stuff on Steam, and that’s the road that we went down for two years.”

If his future short film releases are as high-quality and enjoyable as this one is, I'd consider paying to see more.

Enjoyable.