December 10, 2025 • 50 mins
In this episode, Damien speaks with filmmaker Christopher, the creator of Princess Hally and the Jester, a groundbreaking ultra-low-budget fantasy feature made with a hybrid workflow of green screen, virtual production, traditional VFX, and AI-enhanced imagery.Christopher shares how he went from NYU Tisch to building an animation studio, mentoring artists who would later work on Avatar and with Christopher Nolan, and ultimately pioneering new methods of independent filmmaking.
Highlights From the Conversation
Currently available on Amazon Prime (director’s cut), with releases on additional platforms coming soon.
TRAILER: https://vimeo.com/1112925787
📌 Three Words Christopher Uses to Describe the Film“21st century filmmaking.
Highlights From the Conversation
- Early Beginnings: From birthday-party camcorder experiments to applying (twice!) to NYU Tisch.
- Film School Insights: NYU in the early 2000s — shooting on 16mm, learning craft over tech, and being ahead of the digital curve.
- First Company Success: His Nashville-based interactive animation studio where future Oscar-level talent got their start.
- The Birth of Princess Hally and the Jester:
- Conceiving a classical fairytale inspired by Technicolor films like The Wizard of Oz.
- Shooting an epic fantasy for under $100k — often as a literal one-man crew.
- Convincing actors the project wasn’t impossible (many initially thought it was).
- Managing set builds, lighting, and performances inside a garage turned green-screen stage.
- AI + VFX Hybrid Workflow:
- Completing 600 new VFX shots in 30 days with no crew.
- How AI expanded existing handmade work rather than replacing it.
- Why this approach will likely become the norm for independent and studio filmmaking alike.
- Casting & Performance:
- Building the relationship between Princess Hally and Henry.
- Working with actors who sometimes never shared the stage in real life due to the shooting constraints.
- Challenges on Set:
- A near-disastrous second day of filming.
- Emotional moments of doubt — and how the director’s wife kept the production alive.
- Sound recording issues leading to 90% of the film being looped in post.
- The Role of Family:
- Christopher’s wife made every costume — essential for elevating the world-building.
- Tools for Indie Filmmakers:
- Emphasis on Unreal Engine 5, Maya, freelance marketplaces, and early experimentation with AI prompts.
- Where Independent Film Is Headed:
- How YouTube, TikTok, and gaming have shifted audience habits.
- Why indie filmmakers will soon match studio visuals thanks to evolving tools.
- What’s Next:
- A new period adventure film in early development.
- Hopes of working with a full crew after this one-man epic.
Currently available on Amazon Prime (director’s cut), with releases on additional platforms coming soon.
TRAILER: https://vimeo.com/1112925787
📌 Three Words Christopher Uses to Describe the Film“21st century filmmaking.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more
amazing filmmaking and screenwriting podcasts, just go to ifhpodcastnetwork dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Christopher, how are you today.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
I'm doing well. How are you?
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm doing fine myself. Thanks very much, Thanks for asking.
I'm doing well. I've had the pleasure of watching your
work and I'm reading a lot about you the last
few days. I'm really happy that you on the podcast. Yes,
it's a privilege. Like I said, I'm very grateful to
be here.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
So let's start at the beginning. What drew you to
filmmaking and how did your journey from NYU Tish lead
you here.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Well, I think it's something that you know, you kind
of catch that bug early on at birthday parties and
things like that. I used to grab the family camquorder
and start filming and make my dad nervous because it
was very expensive at the time, and I would start
experimenting with you know, little in camera tricks. Every now
(01:05):
and then, see before the internet, before DVDs, occasionally you
would see a making of special tied to, you know,
a big movie like Superman or Star Wars or something
like that. So every now and then you'd get a
little glimpse behind the camera about how things were made,
but not much. So I just would play around experiment
models on you know, fishing wire and that kind of thing,
(01:26):
and I loved it so much that when it came
time to decide what I thought I wanted to do
with a living I figured this would be pretty much perfect.
So I did initially apply to NYU Film School my
senior year of high school, and then I didn't get
in at first. They wrote back and they said, you
never sent us your portfolio. And I called them, I said,
(01:49):
what's the portfolio? And I said, well, you got to
submit some examples of filmmaking work. So I went to
a smaller liberal arts college my first year of college,
and then you know, started making short films, sent those
back into NYU, then got accepted. So then I spent
the next three years there.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
And what was your three years at NYU? Like, it's
an amazing place I wish I had gone to.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah, it was. This was early two thousand, so like
two thousand and two to two thousand and five. It
was kind of interesting because the films I made for
my portfolio to apply there were shot on mini DV
which was really like the first sort of pro sumer
breakthrough digital format, and those tapes, you know, I guess
(02:36):
anybody old enough to remember you could edit on your
home computer as much easier than any other format that
required Telesini or things like that. So it was a
little odd at first because I got there and we
weren't really using any kind of digital cameras at NYU
at the time, and it was still you know, you
shot sixteen millimeter black and white with these old World
(02:58):
War two era cameras. Those your first year you did
do some videotape based recording for like you know, TV
production classes, and the folks who graduated up and certainly
in the graduate level classes, they would shoot on you know,
full color thirty five milimeter film. So at first it
was really less about the technology of the day and
(03:19):
it was just more about the basics of craft, right,
basics of storytelling, writing, character lighting, acting, and so that
was that was the fun part. The technology part, though,
was something that was always always really forefront of my
mind because I just had this unshakable belief that digital
(03:39):
tools were going to allow independent filmmakers. And you remember,
you know, n YU USC UCLA, they each kind of
have a certain sortain bend, right, and so USC was
considered much more of the industry kind of film school,
and NYU was considered more independent, even though there's a
lot of cross pollination. So I was very determined to
(04:00):
be an independent filmmaker, and I thought between digital effects,
digital sets, that would kind of free us up to
tell stories that you could normally do on an independent
film budget. And I started experimenting with some of those
things while I was at NYU, and I gotta say
it was probably more confusional to the rest of my class,
(04:23):
because I don't think they really understood what I was doing,
and it wasn't really considered proper independent filmmaking at the time.
You know, those those types of filmmakers wanted to focus on,
you know, grittier, darker, more, you know, films dealing with
societal plight. And yeah, I was making kind of silly stuff,
(04:44):
but I was doing it to sort of advance the
technology part of it. So it was great in many
senses because I got to learn a lot about the
craft and do some networking. But at some point it
wasn't exactly what I wanted in terms of the technology,
so I kind of branched.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Out on my own and at your time at NYU,
did you get to meet many people you'd go and
to collaborate with that may have worked on huge projects.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Well, not at NYU per se, but my first company
out of college, which was an interactive animation studio called
Wizard Animation Studio back in Nashville. That's where my family was.
So after I finished NYU sort of moved back to
the area. And the whole concept of that was that
(05:35):
we were going to basically do something like a theme
park attraction. So it ended up being like kids and
birthday parties, but it was conceived to be kind of
more than that originally. But they would basically come in
and we had this very elaborate blue screen stage and
we could film them and in not quite real time
but almost real time, replace the blue screen backgrounds and
(05:55):
other kind of you know, stand in props with full
digital sets for digital characters that we had developed some
software to sort of help automate that compositing and integration
into short films and so like. To sum it up,
like kids could come in for the birthday and be
in a dinosaur hunting movie or be in a Wonderland
(06:16):
movie and that kind of stuff. And some of my
collaborators through my company, we were all kind of freshly
out of college, and so I gave a lot of
folks their kind of first professional job, and those people,
like my sound designer, went on to he's now Christopher
Nolan's sound designer. One some of my digital effects artists
(06:39):
later went on to have prominent roles on Avatar. I mean,
just so many blockbusters. So that was really fun because
we didn't have much money compared to sort of a
well healed Hollywood startup, but the quality we were producing
was pretty remarkable for the budget we had. And yeah,
(06:59):
just got to work with a lot of great artists
who've gotten to do just incredible work.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And speaking of great quality, tell us about Princess Halley
and the Jesta.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
So that was originally conceived around that period. I just
like the idea of kind of a classical fairy tale,
you know, a little bit of Disney, a little bit
of Grims, but that maybe focused a little bit more
on the class disparody between the two protagonists. I just
(07:33):
I like the idea of kind of a poor working
class guy finding himself thrust into an adventure with a
sort of erudite princess, and and always wanted to make
that movie as sort of a test and ground for
taking some of the digital techniques we were pioneering in
short film content and basically extrapolay and then out and saying, hey,
(07:55):
we can make a whole movie this way. Didn't really
happen fast, though. We had a couple of fits and starts.
Did try to do one feature and kind of abandoned
it after a couple of days of shooting because the
technology wasn't really quite there to go all in on it.
And I actually ended up taking a pretty significant break
(08:16):
from filmmaking about ten years, and when I came back
to it, having I think more life experience, So I
think I had a little bit more meat on the
bomb with the script. I think I had a little
bit more to say, and we thought it'd be fun
to kind of do it like Pride and Prejudice and
goblins about that. That'd be kind of an interesting mix.
(08:37):
So I went back and we said, Okay, we're going
to do this now, but again it's still an independent film.
So we set out with the budget of about one
hundred thousand dollars to tell this grand fairy tale with
lots of locations and castles and dungeons and goblins and
dragons and all these kinds of things that you're not
supposed to do as an independent filmmaker. And we went
(09:01):
back to my parents' garage where I had done some
of my short films in NYU during the summer breaks
and just set up a little bit of a green
screen and found some local cast that was crazy enough
to try this. And that's funny because you know, a
couple of actors kind of turned. They were like, what's
(09:21):
the budget? They would ask their agent, like, what's the
budget this thing? And she'd be like, I mean it's
like under two hundred grand and they were like, there's
no way this is not happening. This is nuts. So
that was actually kind of difficult, was convincing. You had
to just get somebody that you didn't not only thought
was right for the role, but also like it had
some kind of faith that this was going to work
out because really hadn't been done before. And bit by bit,
(09:45):
you know, we worked our way through it and got
to a point with the original cut pre AI that
we were able to at least finish something to watch,
but it was falling pretty significantly short of our goals,
and just about that time, the generative AI stuff started
to come online and which we can certainly get into.
(10:08):
But we had done so much prep work and built
so much some of the digital assets, and had so
much material to work with that we sort of accidentally
found ourselves perfectly primed to be among the first people
to use this technology to finish the film properly.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
And the film itself, from what I saw, it feels
like a classic Hollywood fantasy film, a love letter to
it in many ways. What were some of your stylistic
or cinematic inspirations.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
What's so nice that you picked up on that? I
would I love the thirties, late thirties, you know, Technicolor films,
you know, Wizard of Oz probably if I had to
pick my all time favorite movie, that would probably still
be it. But I mean, all the greats of that era,
and I just thought, you know, I'd love to shoot
(11:01):
kind of an old Technicolor movie. And because I didn't
have a crew either, I mean, that's the thing is,
you know, it was one man band, so I had
to you know, yeah, yeah, I'm seeing there was no crew.
I mean every now and then the actors took pity
on me and they would like be like, do you
want me to move this light for you? And they'd
be like, yes please. You know I had to operate
(11:22):
a camera, pull focus, hold the boom, order lunch. I mean,
you know, set up the stage, move the lights, you
name it.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
I have said to interrupt, because you know, I love
the whole one man person sorry self shooting on narrative
feature film, I mean when it's kind of interviews or
short documentaries, I think it's a lot more doable in
my opinion. I'm currently doing it making a short film
and I'm shooting it by myself, and I'm absolutely knackered.
(11:56):
And the amount that goes on in my head and
many when we do this, but yours is admittedly so
much bigger and broader. So I really would say to
anyone listening to this podcast, in the show notes, still
be there's a link to the trailer of his film.
If you haven't already watched it, watch the trailer so
(12:16):
you get an idea of what Chris has done by himself.
Because I think a lot of us when we make
our films or short films when they're by ourself, when
we make them by ourself, we kind of we don't
expand our imagination. And I can say maybe that's the
(12:37):
case with me quite a bit a lot, if I'm honest,
when it comes to one man band solo filmmaking. But
Chris has really given us a great example of what
is possible and what is capable when you really put
your heart into it and think about the bigger picture.
So sorry interrupting you, Chris, I just thought I had
to say that.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
No, you know, I'm so glad that you said that,
because that was really one of the motivating factors here,
was to kind of inspire people to say, hey, you know,
the technology is there, and you know, I don't know
about you. I have a hunch I know the answer,
because you're a filmmaker as well, and most of us
tend to have this problem, which is that we have
(13:19):
these stories that are stuck in our head that sometimes,
you know, we just were desperate to get out, get
out into the world, sometimes even just for ourselves to
watch them. And when you don't have the resources to
do it, it can be a little tortuous at times.
At least that was for me, so yeah, I'm with you.
I thought, let's prove to the world here that the
(13:39):
time has come where we can do almost anything you
set your mind to, and do it in a way
too that you know, filmmakers, if you know they're they're savvy,
if they save their money, if they can get a
little bit of family and friend support, you know, can
really do almost anything that they want. You have to
be so driven and passionate, a little bit crazy, to
(14:00):
be honest with you, and and it was so physically grueling,
and and you know, and there's there's trade offs, right,
Like I think the actors could have, you know, benefited
from me being able to give them almost my sole focus, right,
but I was wearing so many hats, couldn't do that.
And so you know, you look back at certain things
(14:21):
you're certain, you know, how'd you do this lighting setup?
And and that was the other thing. So we I
realized two things, going back to your question about the
stylistic intentions. One of the things about those older Technicolor
movies was, you know, those cameras were the size of refrigerators,
so they couldn't really move. They couldn't move too much.
So while occasionally, yeah, you did have some nice dolly
(14:41):
shots and everything like that. A lot of it was
very much still rooted in theater, so it was a
lot of static imagery and kind of a painterly like,
you know, approach to the compositions. And so I thought, well,
that's perfect too, because I actually can't move the camera
that much because I don't have a crew. So well,
we ended up doing was through a lot of digital
trickery and later through some you know, CGI shots and
(15:04):
AI assisted shots really freed up the camera compared to
like the original cut. But that was another intentional stylistic
decision because I knew I just really I couldn't move
the camera that much. And so, you know, you look
back on it, it's like, would I do certain different
things with the blocking if I had a crew? Sure?
Or would you need to follow yet the lighting? Yeah? Maybe.
(15:27):
We built our digital sets in advance because I thought
I got to have the actors knowing roughly where in
space they're going to be. So we had these kind
of printouts of or on the iPad actually, and we
can kind of like flip through the digital sets and
I'd be like, okay, so you're standing here, right, and
that's going to translate it there on the set, and
then that also helped kind of guide the lighting. So
(15:49):
sometimes we just like you put up a flag or
you close one of the garage doors, and then you
move some lights around. You're like, okay, that kind of
matches where the light should be coming from from the
digital set. And it was raw. That part was kind
of primitive, but it worked, you know well enough. I
think everybody overall had been blast making it. It was
it was physically taxing and grueling, but it was so
(16:10):
invigorating at the same time that it's like you've never
been so tired and so full of energy at the
same time.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
And how did you do the sound by yourself?
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Not well? So we ended up well, you know that
we were also in a garage, so like you know,
you'd be in the middle of this kind of dramatic
scene and then you know, the neighbor's lawnmower would be
going off or something you're like, oh my gosh. So
about ninety percent of the movie was actually looped, so
we came back in and I mean, if you want
to look for like the hardest way to make a movie,
like watch Princess Hallie. It's like I wouldn't fully recommend
(16:44):
it to anybody, but yeah, we ended up looping about
ninety percent of the movie, and I had some really
good sound engineers who came in post production and were
able to help massage all that and polish it up.
So I actually am proud, proud of the sound and
speaking sort of up sound the music for the Director's Cut.
That's so right now, the Director's Cut is kind of
(17:07):
being rolled out to other platforms. The biggest platform it's
on right now is Amazon Prime. It should be on
Tube later in the month. For right now, it's just
the original cut on two B so some of the
stuff I'm we're talking about doesn't fully apply to the
original cut, but the Director's Cut at the end of
this month will basically be the only version of it
in circulation. Enzo de rosa wonderful Italian composer who immigrated
(17:33):
to Canada. He came in and gave us such a lush,
beautiful score for the movie. I told him that, you know,
his score made the whole movie worth making. And I'm just,
I just I love film film music. I listened to
it every single day, and so that was sort of
(17:54):
the best present of all, and how.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Many people looked in post production on the film, Oh gosh, I.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Would probably say if I had to put a number
on it, you know, maybe like twenty five total. Very small.
We had a crew over in Asia that did the
virtual sets for us, and we built those originally in
three D Max. And then we had incredibly talented, sorry
(18:25):
talented modeler named Eduardo Porcelli down in Brazil and he
did these wonderful character designs. I just like the goblins
and the giants, and it all had a sort of
a little bit of a Jim Henson kind of look,
a little bit more of a European kind of look,
(18:46):
and he modeled those beautifully. We had, you know, kind
of a rotating group of animators whoever had time to
come in, which just would hop on in. And so,
like I said, with the music, some two really good
sound engineers, So I would probably we say about yeah,
about twenty five people all in, so not a big crew.
And when we came back to do the director's cut,
(19:08):
I mean, this is the staggering, Like there's there's some
issues with AI and we can kind of lightweight touch
on those that if you want to. But in terms
of the speed. We're able to go back and redo
six hundred shots, six hundred visual effect shots, no crew,
just me wow in a month, six hundred in a month, yeah,
(19:30):
six hundred a month, wow Yeah, and fourteen hundred total
in the original film. And you know, it's so seamlessly integrated.
If we were to sit down and play a game
and be like, you know, okay, tell me which shot
in this movie is you know, fully live action, which
shot is live action with CG, which shot is totally AI?
(19:53):
Nobody would get it right because it's an absolute hybrid
and it's constantly intercutting between all types of shots.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
AI is making me. You know, it's just amazes me
every day, you know, doing this podcast or a second
speak to lots of filmmakers and the things that I
don't know that I find out that they're just amazing.
And the tagline in the film life's more complicated than
in the storybooks. It's intriguing. What does that mean to
(20:26):
you in the context of this film.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Well, you know, when we're younger, we watch movies and
read stories that are very sort of black and white
in their morality, and we tend to look at people
as you know, all good or all bad. You know,
you're the hero, you're the villain, and that kind of thing.
(20:51):
And I think as we get older, we realize, you know,
the world is full of nuance. And one of the
things I just wanted to do in a small way
with this story was to kind of gently start introducing
some more kind of you know, grown up themes into
(21:12):
a fairy tale. I mean, if you go back and
read the original Grim's fairy Tales, I mean, they're they're
kind of horrifying. So nothing that Disney was certainly gonna make.
I mean, he put his own spin on it and
put a nice and the brilliant movies and just the
artistry and those especially the Waalt era hand drawn animation
and then later on the nineties Renaissance era, I mean,
(21:34):
just unparalleled artistry. But they did kind of shy away
from some of the darker themes of the source material,
and so you know, I wanted to maybe just have
the corners just painted just a little bit darker, a
little more shadow in there, and just maybe get maybe
even some adolescents, some older kids just thinking a little
bit more about the characters, their choices and the consequences
(21:56):
of those choices.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
That will make sense. The sequentis of choices. Sometimes younger
people don't think that. Then again, sometimes older people don't
think about that. Yeah, and you wrote, directed, and produced
his projects. Have we've basically said, had you managed those
overlapping creative roles, especially on an independent film of this skill?
(22:19):
And what I mean when I say, how do you
manage outside of the film, outside of the shoot days?
What are you doing to cope with such an amount
of rigor in your work in life?
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Oh? Well, you know, having I wrote the script kind
of on my own quiet time before we got into
all this, so at least that was kind of, you know,
off my plate, per se, you know, outside of little
minor rewrites you we do here in the air, sometimes
even on set. But you know, like most independent filmmakers,
(22:53):
you know, I have another job. I have another career.
So after I took you know, a couple of weeks
off and was able to shoot the thing, we later
came back for a couple of days of reshoots. But
you know, after you have to First of all, you
have to have a job that you know affords you
some free time. You have to have if you have
(23:14):
a family, you have to have an understanding family, because
it does take away, you know, time and energy from
other pursuits. The flip side to that is that and
I'm sure you have a whole podcast dedicated to filmmaking,
so you clearly have a love and passion for it.
In addition to being a filmmaker yourself. You also know
(23:36):
it's very much it's very inspiring. It can nourish the soul.
It's you know, those who are born to create want
to create. And so while it's while it can be work,
it's also doesn't feel like work, you know what I mean.
And that's how that's how you do it. I mean,
it's kind of you know, and so much of it
(23:57):
was just done, you know, whether it was the editing
or the compositing. I composited every shot going back to
the Wizard animation days, you know, I learned how to
do compositing. So every shot in Princess Hallie, you know,
I did the compositing on. So that's like fourteen hundred shots.
But that's kind of like a zen like activity, I mean,
it really is. It's quiet. It's just you. You're removing green,
(24:19):
you're color balancing, you're rodoscoping, you're listening to some music.
It's hard work, but it's kind of relaxing at the
same time. And you you know, your your job is
the shot, so you have a goal like I need
to finish this shot, and then you do it. And
you can do a shot in whatever an hour or
so and you look at it and you're like wow,
and then it's done and you have a very almost
(24:39):
immediate sense of accomplishment, even though it's just like one
out of fourteen hundred shots. And so that's also very rewarding,
and you know that's hard to stop doing once you
get into it. So yeah, you just find the time
and you know it speaks to you. And if you
have people around you that are understanding of what you're
doing and supportive, then you can make it work.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
And I'm glad you've got those people around you, those relationships.
But how did you approach building the relationship between Halle
and Henry, the princess and the Jesta that they had
built both mythic and human.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Now, the first one we cast was Emma. She sent
in a tape and she just seemed to have a
sort of I don't know, Judy Garland or like a
young Jennifer Connolly, labyrinth kind of thing. I mean, she
she seemed like just sort of on the cusp. She
was just on the cusp of going to college. Ironically,
she also was accepted to n YU the Tisch School
(25:37):
of the Arts while we were filming, so there was
a nice, yeah, there was a nice little kind of
symmetry there where, you know, then it was her turn
to kind of go, and so she was very gracious
and auditioning with different different Henry's and you know, in
terms of establishing the relationship between them, we wanted her
(26:02):
to be kind of like I feel like Emma was
in real life, you know, where she was really on
the cusp of adulthood and was sort of, you know,
about to experience a lot of things for the first time.
Whereas Duncan Novak, who played Henry, he was just about
to finish college, so it'd kind of been out there.
You know. He was a couple of years older than her,
(26:22):
so hit a little bit more of that life experience,
and so I think that translated into characters. I think
he's a little more direct. I mean, I think the
character of Henry is more I guess attuned or sort
of open and sort of communicating his feelings to Hallie
or pursuing her even as a romantic kind of interest,
(26:43):
whereas she's sort of just discovering a lot of things
for the first time. So she's a little more, a
little more tenuous, certainly in the first half of the movie,
a little more childlike. Some of what she considers her
obstacles or stressors in the first half of the movie
turned out to be minor compared to what she deals
with in the second half of the movie. And so
I think that kind of dynamic between the two of them,
(27:06):
both where they were really in their real lives and
where the characters were, was a pretty good fit.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
And what do you enjoy about the cost and process?
Speaker 1 (27:16):
I think what I enjoy the most is watching strangers
come in and hearing and seeing their interpretations of characters
you've written on the page, and sometimes being pleasantly surprised
or you know, deciding to go in a different direction
than you envision because when you write these things, you
know usually have you conjure something up in your head.
(27:38):
It could be a very clear kind of character, like
maybe based on someone you know or an actor you've
seen in other projects, or it could be sort of
a vague kind of you know, mosaic kind of thing
where you can't really it's more of a sense of
who they are versus anything specific. And so having people
come in and read and bring your character to life,
(28:00):
and then also hearing what maybe works and what doesn't work,
and then also deciding to take things. And I'll give
you an example. My so in the original script, Santini
was Henry's father, and just making our way through the
casting process, we ended up rewriting it right before we
filmed so that he would be his grandfather. And and
(28:20):
you know, I kind of looked at some of the
people I know, me certainly my dad, his relationship with
his grandfather, and then just me knowing so many grandparents
now and hearing how important your grandkids are to them.
I thought, you know, that's also a dynamic we don't
necessarily see all the time, and I thought, I thought
that would be good. Is just you know, it also
gets you into more sort of intergenerational conflicts, because now
(28:42):
you know, your two generations removed from from these people,
and you get to really then have a contrast of
you know, how does how does the the you know,
the older gentleman want to deal with things and how
does the kind of the young buck want to deal
with things? And I thought that was kind of an
interesting contrast too.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Again I'm standable. Have you ever thought about acting yourself?
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Uh No, I think I'm gonna spare the world that. No.
The Uh it's fun. You know, when you're in film
school and uh, you're desperate for actors and you know,
and there's only so many, you know, so you get
everyone gets kind of booked up really early and stuff,
and then you end up asking your friends to do
a lot of things. And I got twenty years ago.
(29:24):
So my friend was like, hey, I gotta I gotta
film this recreation of a scene from Raging Bowl and
wanted the two of us to be I was like,
are you kidding me? Like, you know, Raging Bull, like
one of the great movies of the eighties with a
master director, with some of the greatest actors who've ever lived.
You want us to have to right, just like absurd stuff.
So God, somewhere there's a tape out there of me
(29:45):
just absolutely butchering a scene from Raging Bull. But uh no, no,
I really am more comfortable kind of behind the camera.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
And you worked with a mixture of experience and emerging.
What was the atmosphere like on set, given the blend
of fantasy and intimate character drama.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Well, you know, so many of these actors have very different,
you know, sort of day jobs, so we actually had
a lot of there are a lot of like there
were doctors and lawyers, and I mean it was just
kind of interesting watching these people who have these very
different professional personas and then come in and you're in
a garage and these kind of silly costumes. But you know,
(30:29):
I will say, I mean too like a tea. I mean,
almost everybody was really game to figure this thing out
and very very trusting, and I really appreciated that. I
think one of the things I wanted to do in advance,
you know, in building like some of the digital characters
in the sets, was also to show them the quality.
It's like, I mean, it's one thing to come into
(30:52):
just a green screen in a garage. You'd be like, hey,
don't worry, this is all going to look like, you know,
fantasy movie, and you're like, I'm not so sure about this.
There's another thing when you come in and you show
them like you've already got a lot of the digital
assets built and how good they looked, so that put
at them, I think, at ease. But because of the
nature of the shoot, you know, I mean there are
(31:12):
a lot of scenes where actually you see two people
playing a scene together and they never even met in
real life. And yeah, that happened a couple of times.
And that was just due to scheduling. I mean, we
just only had so many resources in so many days,
and it was hard as a one man kind of
band to figure out like, Okay, I gotta basically make
this is streamlined as possible, and so sometimes, like you know,
(31:35):
it's just like anything an any visual effects movie. You know,
you just shoot it on the day and you're like, oh,
don't worry, we'll rotoscope that out later. We'll fix it
and post and you know, and then you're fixing and
post list grows to be as long as your arm,
and you're wishing, like, well, if I can go back
in time and do a little more prep on that day,
I probably would, because I ended up paying for it
down the road. Always, yes, it's like the plight of
(31:56):
us all, but I have to say it was it
was really kind of intimate. It was very much like
theater because we had no crew and just a handful
of actors at a time, and they had to really
use their imagination, so it felt more like theater, and
you know, I think I think that also made the
actors more comfortable because there weren't twenty people, you know,
surrounding them staring at them doing silly things. It was
(32:19):
just me and them and you know, when the lunch
showed up, and so it was very relaxed. It was
very it was very it was very intimate. It was
a lot of fun. And because as you asked earlier
about being producer too, you know, it was my money
and my time and everything like that, so I wasn't
really like, you know, I wasn't being very harsh. People
(32:43):
had time to kind of you know, goof off and unlined,
and yeah, it was it was a blast.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
And how did you direct acts through the sequences that
combined live action with AI enhanced visual effects.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Well, you know, it would sometimes be as simple was
you know, putting a ping pong ball on the green
screen and then kind of telling them, Okay, this is
what this is going to look like eventually. Sometimes it
was I think kind of just watching them kind of
go through it. Once instinctively and then me saying, okay,
(33:17):
now that I can see that, and I'm going to have to
you know, change X or change y, but I gotta
say like they you know, I tried to give something
physical for them to always interact with. And so one
good example was when my wife was pregnant with our
first son, she had something I think it's called like
a pillow pod or something. Anyway, you know, when at
the end of your pregnancy, pretty uncomfortable, right, so she
(33:37):
had this wrap around pillow that she could kind of
sleep with in bed and it helped her out a lot.
And we just had that old thing lying around and
we ended up using it to be the giant's hands.
So we kind of had like this pole and we
had this old pregnancy pillow that would wrap around Emma
playing Holle and so at least had that kind of
you know, ripping her waist so that she could feel
(34:00):
something akin to what the giant's hand would be as
he wrapped his hand around her. So when you could
do that kind of stuff, it brings them a little
bit more into the fantasy world and helps out, you know,
instead of a horse, we didn't have a horse there
were no horses, right, So there's a lot of horses
in the movie, but none of them are real. So
we'd have them on like a sawhorse, and they'd have
(34:22):
to sort of feign galloping, which looks and feels ridiculous
to do until it's in the movie. And so what
we were able to do was kind of get basic
compositing shots done kind of you know, even sometimes primitive
versions of the shots, and then with AI ingest those
kind of into the software, and then through prompts and
(34:45):
other imagery, really then expand it. And that's the one
thing that this software is really good at doing. It's
really good of expanding upon what you give it. So
everything we gave it basically we created, and it was
either kind of like tweak existing shots or extrapolating the
information and existing shots into something new, or occasionally we
(35:06):
would give it a bunch of elements that didn't have
a shot, the elements we created, and then asked it,
you know, to do an amalgam of all those elements
into into a new shot. And the actors were, i mean,
probably to the point of annoyance, were sent updates as
we went into posts because I just didn't want this
to be an abandoned thing, because the risk of this
being an abandoned green screen movie that you shoot the
(35:29):
green screen, which is, oh, by the way, probably the
easiest part of it all is the actual shoot, and
then you get into your you know, computer later and
you realized, oh my gosh, what have I done? This
is impossible to finish. And I didn't want that to happen.
And I, you know, and the actors invested so much
emotional energy into the project that I didn't want this
to be an abandoned movie. So I was like, one
(35:50):
way or the other, this thing was, this thing was
going to get finished. And so I'd send them updates
too is as we went along in post production, so
they were they were always kind of aware of, at
least the ones that wanted to be of where we
were at and how it was all coming together. And
it's just a very different type of movie. I mean,
it's not this is not like cutting together a dramedy
or a drama or comedy or I guess and dramedy. But
(36:11):
it's very different. You know, you're doing you're making each
shot and it's got a bunch of different elements to it,
and it's a big gamble because you don't know if
it's all all the puzzle pieces are going to fit
together at the end.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
You mentioned about spending your own money and being your
own boss on this film, which is a lovely thing
in both ways. With a budget of one hundred thousand dollars,
you achieved visuals that look like a studio production in
my opinion. So how did the hybrid work flow make
that possible?
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Well? Uh, first of all, thank you. That's that's extraordinarily
kind of you to say. Well, you know, I kind
of went back to what I did with the old
Wizard days. You know, I believe me. You know that
I could not afford Christopher Nolan's sound designer now, but
I could afford them when we were both college kids
(37:02):
and so, and that was the same thing with some
of my visual effects artists. You know, I couldn't afford
them now, you know now that they're working on Spider
Man for or whatever. So I said, well, let me,
I guess. I basically said, I gotta go do this again.
I gotta go find new young Emerson talent who are
looking really for their first professional jobs. So I've been
pretty good at that, and so finding finding people who
(37:25):
you know, and everybody got paid. That's the other thing.
This is not like no favors were called in on
this movie. Oh by the way, I mean I didn't
get paid. Everybody else who worked on the movie got paid,
and they got paid what they they got paid what
they asked too. I mean, so we just we had
to work kind of quickly, and I had to wear
a lot of hats. But the talent, the raw talent
(37:45):
and so many of these these young artists was there,
and so being able to select for that and then
just have an experience and knowing, okay, you know, like
I can build this virtual set and then I can
get you know, one hundred and fifty background plates out
of it, or give me this a little bit of animation,
and then I could actually kind of probably reuse or
(38:06):
repurpose this, you know, into a couple of different shots.
The truth of the matter is though that you know,
the original the original cut released in twenty twenty four,
which was one hundred percent handmade, so no AI, there
are stretches where the film is very similar to the
to the new cut, and then there's stretches where it's
(38:27):
just completely different, and the completely different part. That part
is really due to, you know, the use of this
emerging generitive AI. And again we it was just like
the Little Cherry on Top at the end of this
was already such a pioneering kind of movie. The fact
that this came along right at the end, we said, well,
(38:48):
we're going to have to pioneer one last step here
and go for it. We felt a little bit better
about the fact that it was all produced using our
own asset from a movie that we had already finished,
a one hundred percent handmade version of, So we were
really just enhancing our own stuff. And I feel like,
(39:10):
I know, there's a lot of debate about, you know,
using generative AI and things like that, so I tried
to use it in a way that I think is
the way it's going to be used even by big studios,
which is you know, yes, I mean, it did cut
down the labor and that ends up being artists in
their time. There's a lot of other previous technological advances
(39:33):
that have done the same thing, and certainly in filmmaking,
but we never had generative AI create anything for us
at a whole cloth. It was really about just heightening
the quality of what was already there, and I hope
people when they watch it can see that because it's
a pretty big distinction. That's a pretty big distinction. This
(39:53):
is still this is a human movie. This is driven
by human performances, human talent. You know, there was no
involved in the script. And I will bet you know,
dollars to donuts that the way we've made this movie
and integrated with AI is the way that it's going
to be integrated from this point forward.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
What tools or techniques would you recommend to other independent
filmmakers who wanted to explore the same type of visual storytelling.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Well, I would say that, you know, the virtual sets
are I think probably the biggest thing that can really
add scope, because you know, you're otherwise, if you're not
going to be able to afford to build a physical
set and you have a movie that's very grand, ambitious
or fantastical, it's all about, well, there's got to be
(40:41):
a you know, what's the location? And I would say
Unreal Engine Oh yeah, yeah, Unreal Engine five is unbelievable.
And the great thing about being able to do real
time renders or even if you want to really crank
up the visual quality, it still renders. It so quickly.
May not be real time, but it's still pretty close
to it. You know, engaging with artists who are really
(41:06):
really masters at unreal Uh. That's probably your first step
for the locations character model wise. You know, we use
Maya for our digital characters, our creatures. Maya is still
I mean, I would guess the gold standard. But one
of the things that you can do is you can
start to also experiment with the AI part. So like
(41:26):
you know, you can take a still frame of say
a creature in a forest, and you know, use one
of the there's so many of them. There's there's runway,
and there's sore, and there's claying, and there's all these
things VO three. But you can start by practicing how
those programs can extrapolate from an image using your prompt,
you know, a new shot. And then when you kind
(41:49):
of it's just like muscle memory, kind of get a
feel for what the current limitations are. And there are many,
by the way, like there's so many times in this movie,
like the prompts, it would just not want to do
what I asked to do. I just wouldn't do it.
Some of it just may be because they don't want
to you know, if you if you have a battle scene.
I think some of the programs are a little leery
of generating violence, and that's totally understandable. So there were
(42:11):
a lot of times where we had to find creative
workarounds and that there's no touatorial line. You just kind
of have to feel that out as you become very
adept at the software. But yeah, I would tell people
just start, you know, experimenting with prompts from images and
you can kind of get a sense of, oh, this
is how I could expand my own work, and then
you know, Unreal Engine five for virtual sets totally awesome
(42:35):
place to start. Maya for for digital characters been the
gold standard forever. I don't think that's changing. Things like
upwork and Fiverr, you could find a lot of good
freelance artists and you can just you know, submit a
job and say, hey, listen, I need you know, I
need three minutes of a character animation, and then you'll
(42:57):
describe it and then you'll get bids from people and then
and some of them are very affordable. You know, you
got to be open to working virtually with people all
over the world. I mean, we probably this movie was
probably made in fifteen different countries, so you've got to
be open to that and get a feel for that.
But you know, that's another great resource.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
And without being too negative, but I think a lot
of us feel this way, and certainly some of the
lists certainly do. There are moments when you're making a
film when you say to yourself, is this gonna work?
Were there any moments during production where you thought this
might actually not work?
Speaker 1 (43:34):
Yeah? So the second day of filming, ohful. We were
shooting the element of the flashback or I guess the
prologue that opens the movie of Howie's parents when they
were younger and she's a baby, and you know, it
was it was probably not planned exceedingly well. I think
(43:55):
the actors were really hot. The sun was just glaring
down on them. I think they were really not sure
if this was going to work. They were kind of fatigued.
We only got a handful of shots that was really rough.
The first day was a wild success, and then we
got a little more ambitious the second day and it
was kind of a disaster. And so I kind of
(44:16):
went home and I said now with my wife and
I said, okay, whatever we did Ryan the first day
like we have to go back, like that's how we
have to shoot the rest of the movie. And so
we did that and then and I won't mention any names,
but like I know a couple of producers, you know,
who have done some notable things, and so you know,
I one in particular, I sent a very kind of
(44:36):
rough assembly cut of just the green screen footage. And
you know, it's like, you know as a director what
that thing's going to look like eventually, but you know,
a person who's movie that is not could watch that
and go like it's a bunch of kids just walking
around garage, Like what is this? And I thought, after
(44:56):
I started showing some of the early unfinished stuff and
having very confus used reactions, I thought like, okay, maybe this,
maybe this isn't gonna work. But you know, then I'll
give credit to my wife. My wife is like, you're
gonna finish this thing. You know, this is not going
to be an abandoned movie. And so, you know, we
just if something wasn't working, we cut it out, or
(45:17):
if something was close to working, we just figured out
what extra bit it needed to get it over the
finish line.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
That's really nice is your wife are creative as well.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
Well, not really, but one thing she did contribute to
the movie, which was a major contribution, was she made
all the costumes.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Ah, that's a huge contribution, especially considered in the side of.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Film, Yes, because the last thing you want to do
in making a low budget fantasy movie is having all
the actors looking like they just walked out of Halloween
express Like, it's just it's a huge risk. And so
she made some just luxurious costumes that were appropriate to
(46:02):
the setting, you know, and visually meshed with the style
of the movie. And we had just had our third
son at the time, so when he would go down
for naps, she'd get back to sewing. So she had
so much love and dedication for this movie too. And
she's obviously she's very talented at what she does.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
And where do you see independent film going in the
next ten years, especially with tools like AI continue to evolve.
Speaker 1 (46:27):
You know, I think I'm not an expert on some
of the challenges, but I think anybody who kind of
pays attention to what's out there knows that YouTube and
TikTok and video games and sports, these things have generationally
kind of shifted people's focus from Hollywood, you know, towards
(46:47):
these other endeavors and you know, pursuits, and I think
that the line is going to continue to blur between
independent or even you know, I don't love this term
content creator per se. I mean, yeah, but but I
think you know what I mean, you know, kind of independent, small,
(47:08):
small scale artists and then you know, the big, the
big studio output. I think it's going to start to
kind of meet in the middle and look more and
more similar because the tools are just the tools are
just there, you know, the studios have and that's it.
Let me, this is the thing too, You can't forget this.
The studios have the marketing power and the marketing dollars.
(47:28):
So like you could create some amazing movie or show
or whatever, but if people don't know it exists, well
that's that's a pretty big barrier to get over. It's
sort of if you want widespread adoption of your movie.
And so the studios still have that, and they also
still control a lot of the intellectual properties that people
(47:51):
have loved for fifty to one hundred years. So I
don't think they're going anywhere. But what I do think
is going to happen is that they're also going to
have to either start you using these tools themselves, or
which I think would be wonderful, you know, engage with
other filmmakers who have figured some of this stuff out
to be able to produce things less expensively because the
(48:14):
audiences are getting so fragmented that they's just it's harder
and harder to bring in the same amount of revenue
when now the audience is literally a billion places that
they can be looking, you know, at any one moment.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
And what's next for you? Any upcoming projects or stories
that you're excited to tell.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
There is another movie sort of a you know, old
grand you know, action adventure type movie with I think
maybe some more complex characters than you would typically see
in that kind of story. We'd love to do that. Uh,
that's kind of a period piece. It would be amazing
to build upon what we did with just one hundred
hundred and fifty thousand dollars here and do something, you know,
(48:56):
the next level up. You know, maybe have a name actor,
have a crew, which would be that's like, I want
anybody who's a who happens to be a you know,
a below the line crew member out there. I love
you all and I wish, I wish I could work
with you one day. So yeah, I think that would
(49:16):
be that would be fantastic to actually have a crew.
I've had crews before on little things, and you know,
it's always it's always fun and you know, and you
need them, honestly to bring any project for you to life.
I mean, you're never gonna realize the full potential of
what you're shooting without talented crew. But yeah, I think
maybe slowly developing that project, see what comes along. And
just's been very excited to get the director's cut of
(49:38):
this movie out there because you know, we're proud of
what we did. Is a perfect No, nothing is or
the things I wish I could go back and redo
or improve upon. Absolutely, it even goes back to the script.
I'm sure we all look back and go, you know what,
this thing needed another scene in the first twenty minutes
of you know whatever. But yeah, but I mean in
the totality of it. Yeah, very proud of it. And
(50:01):
it's on Amazon Prime right now, and then, like I said,
maybe two b in the next week or two, the
director's cut will be rolled out to there and then
we'll see.
Speaker 2 (50:09):
What happens and Finally, if you could describe Princess Hallie
and the Jester in three words, what would they.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
Be twenty first century filmmaking.
Speaker 2 (50:25):
Spot on. I couldn't top that. Well done, Chris, Thanks
so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate
you taking the time to come and speak to me
and telling me about your brilliant film, your film that
certainly will inspire and encourage and people will enjoy watching
it too, so it's a perfect package right there.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Well, thank you so much for having me on. It's
been an honor.
You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more
amazing filmmaking and screenwriting podcasts, just go to ifhpodcastnetwork dot com.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Christopher, how are you today.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
I'm doing well. How are you?
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm doing fine myself. Thanks very much, Thanks for asking.
I'm doing well. I've had the pleasure of watching your
work and I'm reading a lot about you the last
few days. I'm really happy that you on the podcast. Yes,
it's a privilege. Like I said, I'm very grateful to
be here.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
So let's start at the beginning. What drew you to
filmmaking and how did your journey from NYU Tish lead
you here.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
Well, I think it's something that you know, you kind
of catch that bug early on at birthday parties and
things like that. I used to grab the family camquorder
and start filming and make my dad nervous because it
was very expensive at the time, and I would start
experimenting with you know, little in camera tricks. Every now
(01:05):
and then, see before the internet, before DVDs, occasionally you
would see a making of special tied to, you know,
a big movie like Superman or Star Wars or something
like that. So every now and then you'd get a
little glimpse behind the camera about how things were made,
but not much. So I just would play around experiment
models on you know, fishing wire and that kind of thing,
(01:26):
and I loved it so much that when it came
time to decide what I thought I wanted to do
with a living I figured this would be pretty much perfect.
So I did initially apply to NYU Film School my
senior year of high school, and then I didn't get
in at first. They wrote back and they said, you
never sent us your portfolio. And I called them, I said,
(01:49):
what's the portfolio? And I said, well, you got to
submit some examples of filmmaking work. So I went to
a smaller liberal arts college my first year of college,
and then you know, started making short films, sent those
back into NYU, then got accepted. So then I spent
the next three years there.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
And what was your three years at NYU? Like, it's
an amazing place I wish I had gone to.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
Yeah, it was. This was early two thousand, so like
two thousand and two to two thousand and five. It
was kind of interesting because the films I made for
my portfolio to apply there were shot on mini DV
which was really like the first sort of pro sumer
breakthrough digital format, and those tapes, you know, I guess
(02:36):
anybody old enough to remember you could edit on your
home computer as much easier than any other format that
required Telesini or things like that. So it was a
little odd at first because I got there and we
weren't really using any kind of digital cameras at NYU
at the time, and it was still you know, you
shot sixteen millimeter black and white with these old World
(02:58):
War two era cameras. Those your first year you did
do some videotape based recording for like you know, TV
production classes, and the folks who graduated up and certainly
in the graduate level classes, they would shoot on you know,
full color thirty five milimeter film. So at first it
was really less about the technology of the day and
(03:19):
it was just more about the basics of craft, right,
basics of storytelling, writing, character lighting, acting, and so that
was that was the fun part. The technology part, though,
was something that was always always really forefront of my
mind because I just had this unshakable belief that digital
(03:39):
tools were going to allow independent filmmakers. And you remember,
you know, n YU USC UCLA, they each kind of
have a certain sortain bend, right, and so USC was
considered much more of the industry kind of film school,
and NYU was considered more independent, even though there's a
lot of cross pollination. So I was very determined to
(04:00):
be an independent filmmaker, and I thought between digital effects,
digital sets, that would kind of free us up to
tell stories that you could normally do on an independent
film budget. And I started experimenting with some of those
things while I was at NYU, and I gotta say
it was probably more confusional to the rest of my class,
(04:23):
because I don't think they really understood what I was doing,
and it wasn't really considered proper independent filmmaking at the time.
You know, those those types of filmmakers wanted to focus on,
you know, grittier, darker, more, you know, films dealing with
societal plight. And yeah, I was making kind of silly stuff,
(04:44):
but I was doing it to sort of advance the
technology part of it. So it was great in many
senses because I got to learn a lot about the
craft and do some networking. But at some point it
wasn't exactly what I wanted in terms of the technology,
so I kind of branched.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Out on my own and at your time at NYU,
did you get to meet many people you'd go and
to collaborate with that may have worked on huge projects.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
Well, not at NYU per se, but my first company
out of college, which was an interactive animation studio called
Wizard Animation Studio back in Nashville. That's where my family was.
So after I finished NYU sort of moved back to
the area. And the whole concept of that was that
(05:35):
we were going to basically do something like a theme
park attraction. So it ended up being like kids and
birthday parties, but it was conceived to be kind of
more than that originally. But they would basically come in
and we had this very elaborate blue screen stage and
we could film them and in not quite real time
but almost real time, replace the blue screen backgrounds and
(05:55):
other kind of you know, stand in props with full
digital sets for digital characters that we had developed some
software to sort of help automate that compositing and integration
into short films and so like. To sum it up,
like kids could come in for the birthday and be
in a dinosaur hunting movie or be in a Wonderland
(06:16):
movie and that kind of stuff. And some of my
collaborators through my company, we were all kind of freshly
out of college, and so I gave a lot of
folks their kind of first professional job, and those people,
like my sound designer, went on to he's now Christopher
Nolan's sound designer. One some of my digital effects artists
(06:39):
later went on to have prominent roles on Avatar. I mean,
just so many blockbusters. So that was really fun because
we didn't have much money compared to sort of a
well healed Hollywood startup, but the quality we were producing
was pretty remarkable for the budget we had. And yeah,
(06:59):
just got to work with a lot of great artists
who've gotten to do just incredible work.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And speaking of great quality, tell us about Princess Halley
and the Jesta.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
So that was originally conceived around that period. I just
like the idea of kind of a classical fairy tale,
you know, a little bit of Disney, a little bit
of Grims, but that maybe focused a little bit more
on the class disparody between the two protagonists. I just
(07:33):
I like the idea of kind of a poor working
class guy finding himself thrust into an adventure with a
sort of erudite princess, and and always wanted to make
that movie as sort of a test and ground for
taking some of the digital techniques we were pioneering in
short film content and basically extrapolay and then out and saying, hey,
(07:55):
we can make a whole movie this way. Didn't really
happen fast, though. We had a couple of fits and starts.
Did try to do one feature and kind of abandoned
it after a couple of days of shooting because the
technology wasn't really quite there to go all in on it.
And I actually ended up taking a pretty significant break
(08:16):
from filmmaking about ten years, and when I came back
to it, having I think more life experience, So I
think I had a little bit more meat on the
bomb with the script. I think I had a little
bit more to say, and we thought it'd be fun
to kind of do it like Pride and Prejudice and
goblins about that. That'd be kind of an interesting mix.
(08:37):
So I went back and we said, Okay, we're going
to do this now, but again it's still an independent film.
So we set out with the budget of about one
hundred thousand dollars to tell this grand fairy tale with
lots of locations and castles and dungeons and goblins and
dragons and all these kinds of things that you're not
supposed to do as an independent filmmaker. And we went
(09:01):
back to my parents' garage where I had done some
of my short films in NYU during the summer breaks
and just set up a little bit of a green
screen and found some local cast that was crazy enough
to try this. And that's funny because you know, a
couple of actors kind of turned. They were like, what's
(09:21):
the budget? They would ask their agent, like, what's the
budget this thing? And she'd be like, I mean it's
like under two hundred grand and they were like, there's
no way this is not happening. This is nuts. So
that was actually kind of difficult, was convincing. You had
to just get somebody that you didn't not only thought
was right for the role, but also like it had
some kind of faith that this was going to work
out because really hadn't been done before. And bit by bit,
(09:45):
you know, we worked our way through it and got
to a point with the original cut pre AI that
we were able to at least finish something to watch,
but it was falling pretty significantly short of our goals,
and just about that time, the generative AI stuff started
to come online and which we can certainly get into.
(10:08):
But we had done so much prep work and built
so much some of the digital assets, and had so
much material to work with that we sort of accidentally
found ourselves perfectly primed to be among the first people
to use this technology to finish the film properly.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
And the film itself, from what I saw, it feels
like a classic Hollywood fantasy film, a love letter to
it in many ways. What were some of your stylistic
or cinematic inspirations.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
What's so nice that you picked up on that? I
would I love the thirties, late thirties, you know, Technicolor films,
you know, Wizard of Oz probably if I had to
pick my all time favorite movie, that would probably still
be it. But I mean, all the greats of that era,
and I just thought, you know, I'd love to shoot
(11:01):
kind of an old Technicolor movie. And because I didn't
have a crew either, I mean, that's the thing is,
you know, it was one man band, so I had
to you know, yeah, yeah, I'm seeing there was no crew.
I mean every now and then the actors took pity
on me and they would like be like, do you
want me to move this light for you? And they'd
be like, yes please. You know I had to operate
(11:22):
a camera, pull focus, hold the boom, order lunch. I mean,
you know, set up the stage, move the lights, you
name it.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
I have said to interrupt, because you know, I love
the whole one man person sorry self shooting on narrative
feature film, I mean when it's kind of interviews or
short documentaries, I think it's a lot more doable in
my opinion. I'm currently doing it making a short film
and I'm shooting it by myself, and I'm absolutely knackered.
(11:56):
And the amount that goes on in my head and
many when we do this, but yours is admittedly so
much bigger and broader. So I really would say to
anyone listening to this podcast, in the show notes, still
be there's a link to the trailer of his film.
If you haven't already watched it, watch the trailer so
(12:16):
you get an idea of what Chris has done by himself.
Because I think a lot of us when we make
our films or short films when they're by ourself, when
we make them by ourself, we kind of we don't
expand our imagination. And I can say maybe that's the
(12:37):
case with me quite a bit a lot, if I'm honest,
when it comes to one man band solo filmmaking. But
Chris has really given us a great example of what
is possible and what is capable when you really put
your heart into it and think about the bigger picture.
So sorry interrupting you, Chris, I just thought I had
to say that.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
No, you know, I'm so glad that you said that,
because that was really one of the motivating factors here,
was to kind of inspire people to say, hey, you know,
the technology is there, and you know, I don't know
about you. I have a hunch I know the answer,
because you're a filmmaker as well, and most of us
tend to have this problem, which is that we have
(13:19):
these stories that are stuck in our head that sometimes,
you know, we just were desperate to get out, get
out into the world, sometimes even just for ourselves to
watch them. And when you don't have the resources to
do it, it can be a little tortuous at times.
At least that was for me, so yeah, I'm with you.
I thought, let's prove to the world here that the
(13:39):
time has come where we can do almost anything you
set your mind to, and do it in a way
too that you know, filmmakers, if you know they're they're savvy,
if they save their money, if they can get a
little bit of family and friend support, you know, can
really do almost anything that they want. You have to
be so driven and passionate, a little bit crazy, to
(14:00):
be honest with you, and and it was so physically grueling,
and and you know, and there's there's trade offs, right,
Like I think the actors could have, you know, benefited
from me being able to give them almost my sole focus, right,
but I was wearing so many hats, couldn't do that.
And so you know, you look back at certain things
(14:21):
you're certain, you know, how'd you do this lighting setup?
And and that was the other thing. So we I
realized two things, going back to your question about the
stylistic intentions. One of the things about those older Technicolor
movies was, you know, those cameras were the size of refrigerators,
so they couldn't really move. They couldn't move too much.
So while occasionally, yeah, you did have some nice dolly
(14:41):
shots and everything like that. A lot of it was
very much still rooted in theater, so it was a
lot of static imagery and kind of a painterly like,
you know, approach to the compositions. And so I thought, well,
that's perfect too, because I actually can't move the camera
that much because I don't have a crew. So well,
we ended up doing was through a lot of digital
trickery and later through some you know, CGI shots and
(15:04):
AI assisted shots really freed up the camera compared to
like the original cut. But that was another intentional stylistic
decision because I knew I just really I couldn't move
the camera that much. And so, you know, you look
back on it, it's like, would I do certain different
things with the blocking if I had a crew? Sure?
Or would you need to follow yet the lighting? Yeah? Maybe.
(15:27):
We built our digital sets in advance because I thought
I got to have the actors knowing roughly where in
space they're going to be. So we had these kind
of printouts of or on the iPad actually, and we
can kind of like flip through the digital sets and
I'd be like, okay, so you're standing here, right, and
that's going to translate it there on the set, and
then that also helped kind of guide the lighting. So
(15:49):
sometimes we just like you put up a flag or
you close one of the garage doors, and then you
move some lights around. You're like, okay, that kind of
matches where the light should be coming from from the
digital set. And it was raw. That part was kind
of primitive, but it worked, you know well enough. I
think everybody overall had been blast making it. It was
it was physically taxing and grueling, but it was so
(16:10):
invigorating at the same time that it's like you've never
been so tired and so full of energy at the
same time.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
And how did you do the sound by yourself?
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Not well? So we ended up well, you know that
we were also in a garage, so like you know,
you'd be in the middle of this kind of dramatic
scene and then you know, the neighbor's lawnmower would be
going off or something you're like, oh my gosh. So
about ninety percent of the movie was actually looped, so
we came back in and I mean, if you want
to look for like the hardest way to make a movie,
like watch Princess Hallie. It's like I wouldn't fully recommend
(16:44):
it to anybody, but yeah, we ended up looping about
ninety percent of the movie, and I had some really
good sound engineers who came in post production and were
able to help massage all that and polish it up.
So I actually am proud, proud of the sound and
speaking sort of up sound the music for the Director's Cut.
That's so right now, the Director's Cut is kind of
(17:07):
being rolled out to other platforms. The biggest platform it's
on right now is Amazon Prime. It should be on
Tube later in the month. For right now, it's just
the original cut on two B so some of the
stuff I'm we're talking about doesn't fully apply to the
original cut, but the Director's Cut at the end of
this month will basically be the only version of it
in circulation. Enzo de rosa wonderful Italian composer who immigrated
(17:33):
to Canada. He came in and gave us such a lush,
beautiful score for the movie. I told him that, you know,
his score made the whole movie worth making. And I'm just,
I just I love film film music. I listened to
it every single day, and so that was sort of
(17:54):
the best present of all, and how.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Many people looked in post production on the film, Oh gosh, I.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Would probably say if I had to put a number
on it, you know, maybe like twenty five total. Very small.
We had a crew over in Asia that did the
virtual sets for us, and we built those originally in
three D Max. And then we had incredibly talented, sorry
(18:25):
talented modeler named Eduardo Porcelli down in Brazil and he
did these wonderful character designs. I just like the goblins
and the giants, and it all had a sort of
a little bit of a Jim Henson kind of look,
a little bit more of a European kind of look,
(18:46):
and he modeled those beautifully. We had, you know, kind
of a rotating group of animators whoever had time to
come in, which just would hop on in. And so,
like I said, with the music, some two really good
sound engineers, So I would probably we say about yeah,
about twenty five people all in, so not a big crew.
And when we came back to do the director's cut,
(19:08):
I mean, this is the staggering, Like there's there's some
issues with AI and we can kind of lightweight touch
on those that if you want to. But in terms
of the speed. We're able to go back and redo
six hundred shots, six hundred visual effect shots, no crew,
just me wow in a month, six hundred in a month, yeah,
(19:30):
six hundred a month, wow Yeah, and fourteen hundred total
in the original film. And you know, it's so seamlessly integrated.
If we were to sit down and play a game
and be like, you know, okay, tell me which shot
in this movie is you know, fully live action, which
shot is live action with CG, which shot is totally AI?
(19:53):
Nobody would get it right because it's an absolute hybrid
and it's constantly intercutting between all types of shots.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
AI is making me. You know, it's just amazes me
every day, you know, doing this podcast or a second
speak to lots of filmmakers and the things that I
don't know that I find out that they're just amazing.
And the tagline in the film life's more complicated than
in the storybooks. It's intriguing. What does that mean to
(20:26):
you in the context of this film.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Well, you know, when we're younger, we watch movies and
read stories that are very sort of black and white
in their morality, and we tend to look at people
as you know, all good or all bad. You know,
you're the hero, you're the villain, and that kind of thing.
(20:51):
And I think as we get older, we realize, you know,
the world is full of nuance. And one of the
things I just wanted to do in a small way
with this story was to kind of gently start introducing
some more kind of you know, grown up themes into
(21:12):
a fairy tale. I mean, if you go back and
read the original Grim's fairy Tales, I mean, they're they're
kind of horrifying. So nothing that Disney was certainly gonna make.
I mean, he put his own spin on it and
put a nice and the brilliant movies and just the
artistry and those especially the Waalt era hand drawn animation
and then later on the nineties Renaissance era, I mean,
(21:34):
just unparalleled artistry. But they did kind of shy away
from some of the darker themes of the source material,
and so you know, I wanted to maybe just have
the corners just painted just a little bit darker, a
little more shadow in there, and just maybe get maybe
even some adolescents, some older kids just thinking a little
bit more about the characters, their choices and the consequences
(21:56):
of those choices.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
That will make sense. The sequentis of choices. Sometimes younger
people don't think that. Then again, sometimes older people don't
think about that. Yeah, and you wrote, directed, and produced
his projects. Have we've basically said, had you managed those
overlapping creative roles, especially on an independent film of this skill?
(22:19):
And what I mean when I say, how do you
manage outside of the film, outside of the shoot days?
What are you doing to cope with such an amount
of rigor in your work in life?
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Oh? Well, you know, having I wrote the script kind
of on my own quiet time before we got into
all this, so at least that was kind of, you know,
off my plate, per se, you know, outside of little
minor rewrites you we do here in the air, sometimes
even on set. But you know, like most independent filmmakers,
(22:53):
you know, I have another job. I have another career.
So after I took you know, a couple of weeks
off and was able to shoot the thing, we later
came back for a couple of days of reshoots. But
you know, after you have to First of all, you
have to have a job that you know affords you
some free time. You have to have if you have
(23:14):
a family, you have to have an understanding family, because
it does take away, you know, time and energy from
other pursuits. The flip side to that is that and
I'm sure you have a whole podcast dedicated to filmmaking,
so you clearly have a love and passion for it.
In addition to being a filmmaker yourself. You also know
(23:36):
it's very much it's very inspiring. It can nourish the soul.
It's you know, those who are born to create want
to create. And so while it's while it can be work,
it's also doesn't feel like work, you know what I mean.
And that's how that's how you do it. I mean,
it's kind of you know, and so much of it
(23:57):
was just done, you know, whether it was the editing
or the compositing. I composited every shot going back to
the Wizard animation days, you know, I learned how to
do compositing. So every shot in Princess Hallie, you know,
I did the compositing on. So that's like fourteen hundred shots.
But that's kind of like a zen like activity, I mean,
it really is. It's quiet. It's just you. You're removing green,
(24:19):
you're color balancing, you're rodoscoping, you're listening to some music.
It's hard work, but it's kind of relaxing at the
same time. And you you know, your your job is
the shot, so you have a goal like I need
to finish this shot, and then you do it. And
you can do a shot in whatever an hour or
so and you look at it and you're like wow,
and then it's done and you have a very almost
(24:39):
immediate sense of accomplishment, even though it's just like one
out of fourteen hundred shots. And so that's also very rewarding,
and you know that's hard to stop doing once you
get into it. So yeah, you just find the time
and you know it speaks to you. And if you
have people around you that are understanding of what you're
doing and supportive, then you can make it work.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
And I'm glad you've got those people around you, those relationships.
But how did you approach building the relationship between Halle
and Henry, the princess and the Jesta that they had
built both mythic and human.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Now, the first one we cast was Emma. She sent
in a tape and she just seemed to have a
sort of I don't know, Judy Garland or like a
young Jennifer Connolly, labyrinth kind of thing. I mean, she
she seemed like just sort of on the cusp. She
was just on the cusp of going to college. Ironically,
she also was accepted to n YU the Tisch School
(25:37):
of the Arts while we were filming, so there was
a nice, yeah, there was a nice little kind of
symmetry there where, you know, then it was her turn
to kind of go, and so she was very gracious
and auditioning with different different Henry's and you know, in
terms of establishing the relationship between them, we wanted her
(26:02):
to be kind of like I feel like Emma was
in real life, you know, where she was really on
the cusp of adulthood and was sort of, you know,
about to experience a lot of things for the first time.
Whereas Duncan Novak, who played Henry, he was just about
to finish college, so it'd kind of been out there.
You know. He was a couple of years older than her,
(26:22):
so hit a little bit more of that life experience,
and so I think that translated into characters. I think
he's a little more direct. I mean, I think the
character of Henry is more I guess attuned or sort
of open and sort of communicating his feelings to Hallie
or pursuing her even as a romantic kind of interest,
(26:43):
whereas she's sort of just discovering a lot of things
for the first time. So she's a little more, a
little more tenuous, certainly in the first half of the movie,
a little more childlike. Some of what she considers her
obstacles or stressors in the first half of the movie
turned out to be minor compared to what she deals
with in the second half of the movie. And so
I think that kind of dynamic between the two of them,
(27:06):
both where they were really in their real lives and
where the characters were, was a pretty good fit.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
And what do you enjoy about the cost and process?
Speaker 1 (27:16):
I think what I enjoy the most is watching strangers
come in and hearing and seeing their interpretations of characters
you've written on the page, and sometimes being pleasantly surprised
or you know, deciding to go in a different direction
than you envision because when you write these things, you
know usually have you conjure something up in your head.
(27:38):
It could be a very clear kind of character, like
maybe based on someone you know or an actor you've
seen in other projects, or it could be sort of
a vague kind of you know, mosaic kind of thing
where you can't really it's more of a sense of
who they are versus anything specific. And so having people
come in and read and bring your character to life,
(28:00):
and then also hearing what maybe works and what doesn't work,
and then also deciding to take things. And I'll give
you an example. My so in the original script, Santini
was Henry's father, and just making our way through the
casting process, we ended up rewriting it right before we
filmed so that he would be his grandfather. And and
(28:20):
you know, I kind of looked at some of the
people I know, me certainly my dad, his relationship with
his grandfather, and then just me knowing so many grandparents
now and hearing how important your grandkids are to them.
I thought, you know, that's also a dynamic we don't
necessarily see all the time, and I thought, I thought
that would be good. Is just you know, it also
gets you into more sort of intergenerational conflicts, because now
(28:42):
you know, your two generations removed from from these people,
and you get to really then have a contrast of
you know, how does how does the the you know,
the older gentleman want to deal with things and how
does the kind of the young buck want to deal
with things? And I thought that was kind of an
interesting contrast too.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
Again I'm standable. Have you ever thought about acting yourself?
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Uh No, I think I'm gonna spare the world that. No.
The Uh it's fun. You know, when you're in film
school and uh, you're desperate for actors and you know,
and there's only so many, you know, so you get
everyone gets kind of booked up really early and stuff,
and then you end up asking your friends to do
a lot of things. And I got twenty years ago.
(29:24):
So my friend was like, hey, I gotta I gotta
film this recreation of a scene from Raging Bowl and
wanted the two of us to be I was like,
are you kidding me? Like, you know, Raging Bull, like
one of the great movies of the eighties with a
master director, with some of the greatest actors who've ever lived.
You want us to have to right, just like absurd stuff.
So God, somewhere there's a tape out there of me
(29:45):
just absolutely butchering a scene from Raging Bull. But uh no, no,
I really am more comfortable kind of behind the camera.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
And you worked with a mixture of experience and emerging.
What was the atmosphere like on set, given the blend
of fantasy and intimate character drama.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Well, you know, so many of these actors have very different,
you know, sort of day jobs, so we actually had
a lot of there are a lot of like there
were doctors and lawyers, and I mean it was just
kind of interesting watching these people who have these very
different professional personas and then come in and you're in
a garage and these kind of silly costumes. But you know,
(30:29):
I will say, I mean too like a tea. I mean,
almost everybody was really game to figure this thing out
and very very trusting, and I really appreciated that. I
think one of the things I wanted to do in advance,
you know, in building like some of the digital characters
in the sets, was also to show them the quality.
It's like, I mean, it's one thing to come into
(30:52):
just a green screen in a garage. You'd be like, hey,
don't worry, this is all going to look like, you know,
fantasy movie, and you're like, I'm not so sure about this.
There's another thing when you come in and you show
them like you've already got a lot of the digital
assets built and how good they looked, so that put
at them, I think, at ease. But because of the
nature of the shoot, you know, I mean there are
(31:12):
a lot of scenes where actually you see two people
playing a scene together and they never even met in
real life. And yeah, that happened a couple of times.
And that was just due to scheduling. I mean, we
just only had so many resources in so many days,
and it was hard as a one man kind of
band to figure out like, Okay, I gotta basically make
this is streamlined as possible, and so sometimes, like you know,
(31:35):
it's just like anything an any visual effects movie. You know,
you just shoot it on the day and you're like, oh,
don't worry, we'll rotoscope that out later. We'll fix it
and post and you know, and then you're fixing and
post list grows to be as long as your arm,
and you're wishing, like, well, if I can go back
in time and do a little more prep on that day,
I probably would, because I ended up paying for it
down the road. Always, yes, it's like the plight of
(31:56):
us all, but I have to say it was it
was really kind of intimate. It was very much like
theater because we had no crew and just a handful
of actors at a time, and they had to really
use their imagination, so it felt more like theater, and
you know, I think I think that also made the
actors more comfortable because there weren't twenty people, you know,
surrounding them staring at them doing silly things. It was
(32:19):
just me and them and you know, when the lunch
showed up, and so it was very relaxed. It was
very it was very it was very intimate. It was
a lot of fun. And because as you asked earlier
about being producer too, you know, it was my money
and my time and everything like that, so I wasn't
really like, you know, I wasn't being very harsh. People
(32:43):
had time to kind of you know, goof off and unlined,
and yeah, it was it was a blast.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
And how did you direct acts through the sequences that
combined live action with AI enhanced visual effects.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
Well, you know, it would sometimes be as simple was
you know, putting a ping pong ball on the green
screen and then kind of telling them, Okay, this is
what this is going to look like eventually. Sometimes it
was I think kind of just watching them kind of
go through it. Once instinctively and then me saying, okay,
(33:17):
now that I can see that, and I'm going to have to
you know, change X or change y, but I gotta
say like they you know, I tried to give something
physical for them to always interact with. And so one
good example was when my wife was pregnant with our
first son, she had something I think it's called like
a pillow pod or something. Anyway, you know, when at
the end of your pregnancy, pretty uncomfortable, right, so she
(33:37):
had this wrap around pillow that she could kind of
sleep with in bed and it helped her out a lot.
And we just had that old thing lying around and
we ended up using it to be the giant's hands.
So we kind of had like this pole and we
had this old pregnancy pillow that would wrap around Emma
playing Holle and so at least had that kind of
you know, ripping her waist so that she could feel
(34:00):
something akin to what the giant's hand would be as
he wrapped his hand around her. So when you could
do that kind of stuff, it brings them a little
bit more into the fantasy world and helps out, you know,
instead of a horse, we didn't have a horse there
were no horses, right, So there's a lot of horses
in the movie, but none of them are real. So
we'd have them on like a sawhorse, and they'd have
(34:22):
to sort of feign galloping, which looks and feels ridiculous
to do until it's in the movie. And so what
we were able to do was kind of get basic
compositing shots done kind of you know, even sometimes primitive
versions of the shots, and then with AI ingest those
kind of into the software, and then through prompts and
(34:45):
other imagery, really then expand it. And that's the one
thing that this software is really good at doing. It's
really good of expanding upon what you give it. So
everything we gave it basically we created, and it was
either kind of like tweak existing shots or extrapolating the
information and existing shots into something new, or occasionally we
(35:06):
would give it a bunch of elements that didn't have
a shot, the elements we created, and then asked it,
you know, to do an amalgam of all those elements
into into a new shot. And the actors were, i mean,
probably to the point of annoyance, were sent updates as
we went into posts because I just didn't want this
to be an abandoned thing, because the risk of this
being an abandoned green screen movie that you shoot the
(35:29):
green screen, which is, oh, by the way, probably the
easiest part of it all is the actual shoot, and
then you get into your you know, computer later and
you realized, oh my gosh, what have I done? This
is impossible to finish. And I didn't want that to happen.
And I, you know, and the actors invested so much
emotional energy into the project that I didn't want this
to be an abandoned movie. So I was like, one
(35:50):
way or the other, this thing was, this thing was
going to get finished. And so I'd send them updates
too is as we went along in post production, so
they were they were always kind of aware of, at
least the ones that wanted to be of where we
were at and how it was all coming together. And
it's just a very different type of movie. I mean,
it's not this is not like cutting together a dramedy
or a drama or comedy or I guess and dramedy. But
(36:11):
it's very different. You know, you're doing you're making each
shot and it's got a bunch of different elements to it,
and it's a big gamble because you don't know if
it's all all the puzzle pieces are going to fit
together at the end.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
You mentioned about spending your own money and being your
own boss on this film, which is a lovely thing
in both ways. With a budget of one hundred thousand dollars,
you achieved visuals that look like a studio production in
my opinion. So how did the hybrid work flow make
that possible?
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Well? Uh, first of all, thank you. That's that's extraordinarily
kind of you to say. Well, you know, I kind
of went back to what I did with the old
Wizard days. You know, I believe me. You know that
I could not afford Christopher Nolan's sound designer now, but
I could afford them when we were both college kids
(37:02):
and so, and that was the same thing with some
of my visual effects artists. You know, I couldn't afford
them now, you know now that they're working on Spider
Man for or whatever. So I said, well, let me,
I guess. I basically said, I gotta go do this again.
I gotta go find new young Emerson talent who are
looking really for their first professional jobs. So I've been
pretty good at that, and so finding finding people who
(37:25):
you know, and everybody got paid. That's the other thing.
This is not like no favors were called in on
this movie. Oh by the way, I mean I didn't
get paid. Everybody else who worked on the movie got paid,
and they got paid what they they got paid what
they asked too. I mean, so we just we had
to work kind of quickly, and I had to wear
a lot of hats. But the talent, the raw talent
(37:45):
and so many of these these young artists was there,
and so being able to select for that and then
just have an experience and knowing, okay, you know, like
I can build this virtual set and then I can
get you know, one hundred and fifty background plates out
of it, or give me this a little bit of animation,
and then I could actually kind of probably reuse or
(38:06):
repurpose this, you know, into a couple of different shots.
The truth of the matter is though that you know,
the original the original cut released in twenty twenty four,
which was one hundred percent handmade, so no AI, there
are stretches where the film is very similar to the
to the new cut, and then there's stretches where it's
(38:27):
just completely different, and the completely different part. That part
is really due to, you know, the use of this
emerging generitive AI. And again we it was just like
the Little Cherry on Top at the end of this
was already such a pioneering kind of movie. The fact
that this came along right at the end, we said, well,
(38:48):
we're going to have to pioneer one last step here
and go for it. We felt a little bit better
about the fact that it was all produced using our
own asset from a movie that we had already finished,
a one hundred percent handmade version of, So we were
really just enhancing our own stuff. And I feel like,
(39:10):
I know, there's a lot of debate about, you know,
using generative AI and things like that, so I tried
to use it in a way that I think is
the way it's going to be used even by big studios,
which is you know, yes, I mean, it did cut
down the labor and that ends up being artists in
their time. There's a lot of other previous technological advances
(39:33):
that have done the same thing, and certainly in filmmaking,
but we never had generative AI create anything for us
at a whole cloth. It was really about just heightening
the quality of what was already there, and I hope
people when they watch it can see that because it's
a pretty big distinction. That's a pretty big distinction. This
(39:53):
is still this is a human movie. This is driven
by human performances, human talent. You know, there was no
involved in the script. And I will bet you know,
dollars to donuts that the way we've made this movie
and integrated with AI is the way that it's going
to be integrated from this point forward.
Speaker 2 (40:12):
What tools or techniques would you recommend to other independent
filmmakers who wanted to explore the same type of visual storytelling.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Well, I would say that, you know, the virtual sets
are I think probably the biggest thing that can really
add scope, because you know, you're otherwise, if you're not
going to be able to afford to build a physical
set and you have a movie that's very grand, ambitious
or fantastical, it's all about, well, there's got to be
(40:41):
a you know, what's the location? And I would say
Unreal Engine Oh yeah, yeah, Unreal Engine five is unbelievable.
And the great thing about being able to do real
time renders or even if you want to really crank
up the visual quality, it still renders. It so quickly.
May not be real time, but it's still pretty close
to it. You know, engaging with artists who are really
(41:06):
really masters at unreal Uh. That's probably your first step
for the locations character model wise. You know, we use
Maya for our digital characters, our creatures. Maya is still
I mean, I would guess the gold standard. But one
of the things that you can do is you can
start to also experiment with the AI part. So like
(41:26):
you know, you can take a still frame of say
a creature in a forest, and you know, use one
of the there's so many of them. There's there's runway,
and there's sore, and there's claying, and there's all these
things VO three. But you can start by practicing how
those programs can extrapolate from an image using your prompt,
you know, a new shot. And then when you kind
(41:49):
of it's just like muscle memory, kind of get a
feel for what the current limitations are. And there are many,
by the way, like there's so many times in this movie,
like the prompts, it would just not want to do
what I asked to do. I just wouldn't do it.
Some of it just may be because they don't want
to you know, if you if you have a battle scene.
I think some of the programs are a little leery
of generating violence, and that's totally understandable. So there were
(42:11):
a lot of times where we had to find creative
workarounds and that there's no touatorial line. You just kind
of have to feel that out as you become very
adept at the software. But yeah, I would tell people
just start, you know, experimenting with prompts from images and
you can kind of get a sense of, oh, this
is how I could expand my own work, and then
you know, Unreal Engine five for virtual sets totally awesome
(42:35):
place to start. Maya for for digital characters been the
gold standard forever. I don't think that's changing. Things like
upwork and Fiverr, you could find a lot of good
freelance artists and you can just you know, submit a
job and say, hey, listen, I need you know, I
need three minutes of a character animation, and then you'll
(42:57):
describe it and then you'll get bids from people and then
and some of them are very affordable. You know, you
got to be open to working virtually with people all
over the world. I mean, we probably this movie was
probably made in fifteen different countries, so you've got to
be open to that and get a feel for that.
But you know, that's another great resource.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
And without being too negative, but I think a lot
of us feel this way, and certainly some of the
lists certainly do. There are moments when you're making a
film when you say to yourself, is this gonna work?
Were there any moments during production where you thought this
might actually not work?
Speaker 1 (43:34):
Yeah? So the second day of filming, ohful. We were
shooting the element of the flashback or I guess the
prologue that opens the movie of Howie's parents when they
were younger and she's a baby, and you know, it
was it was probably not planned exceedingly well. I think
(43:55):
the actors were really hot. The sun was just glaring
down on them. I think they were really not sure
if this was going to work. They were kind of fatigued.
We only got a handful of shots that was really rough.
The first day was a wild success, and then we
got a little more ambitious the second day and it
was kind of a disaster. And so I kind of
(44:16):
went home and I said now with my wife and
I said, okay, whatever we did Ryan the first day
like we have to go back, like that's how we
have to shoot the rest of the movie. And so
we did that and then and I won't mention any names,
but like I know a couple of producers, you know,
who have done some notable things, and so you know,
I one in particular, I sent a very kind of
(44:36):
rough assembly cut of just the green screen footage. And
you know, it's like, you know as a director what
that thing's going to look like eventually, but you know,
a person who's movie that is not could watch that
and go like it's a bunch of kids just walking
around garage, Like what is this? And I thought, after
(44:56):
I started showing some of the early unfinished stuff and
having very confus used reactions, I thought like, okay, maybe this,
maybe this isn't gonna work. But you know, then I'll
give credit to my wife. My wife is like, you're
gonna finish this thing. You know, this is not going
to be an abandoned movie. And so, you know, we
just if something wasn't working, we cut it out, or
(45:17):
if something was close to working, we just figured out
what extra bit it needed to get it over the
finish line.
Speaker 2 (45:23):
That's really nice is your wife are creative as well.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
Well, not really, but one thing she did contribute to
the movie, which was a major contribution, was she made
all the costumes.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Ah, that's a huge contribution, especially considered in the side of.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
Film, Yes, because the last thing you want to do
in making a low budget fantasy movie is having all
the actors looking like they just walked out of Halloween
express Like, it's just it's a huge risk. And so
she made some just luxurious costumes that were appropriate to
(46:02):
the setting, you know, and visually meshed with the style
of the movie. And we had just had our third
son at the time, so when he would go down
for naps, she'd get back to sewing. So she had
so much love and dedication for this movie too. And
she's obviously she's very talented at what she does.
Speaker 2 (46:20):
And where do you see independent film going in the
next ten years, especially with tools like AI continue to evolve.
Speaker 1 (46:27):
You know, I think I'm not an expert on some
of the challenges, but I think anybody who kind of
pays attention to what's out there knows that YouTube and
TikTok and video games and sports, these things have generationally
kind of shifted people's focus from Hollywood, you know, towards
(46:47):
these other endeavors and you know, pursuits, and I think
that the line is going to continue to blur between
independent or even you know, I don't love this term
content creator per se. I mean, yeah, but but I
think you know what I mean, you know, kind of independent, small,
(47:08):
small scale artists and then you know, the big, the
big studio output. I think it's going to start to
kind of meet in the middle and look more and
more similar because the tools are just the tools are
just there, you know, the studios have and that's it.
Let me, this is the thing too, You can't forget this.
The studios have the marketing power and the marketing dollars.
(47:28):
So like you could create some amazing movie or show
or whatever, but if people don't know it exists, well
that's that's a pretty big barrier to get over. It's
sort of if you want widespread adoption of your movie.
And so the studios still have that, and they also
still control a lot of the intellectual properties that people
(47:51):
have loved for fifty to one hundred years. So I
don't think they're going anywhere. But what I do think
is going to happen is that they're also going to
have to either start you using these tools themselves, or
which I think would be wonderful, you know, engage with
other filmmakers who have figured some of this stuff out
to be able to produce things less expensively because the
(48:14):
audiences are getting so fragmented that they's just it's harder
and harder to bring in the same amount of revenue
when now the audience is literally a billion places that
they can be looking, you know, at any one moment.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
And what's next for you? Any upcoming projects or stories
that you're excited to tell.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
There is another movie sort of a you know, old
grand you know, action adventure type movie with I think
maybe some more complex characters than you would typically see
in that kind of story. We'd love to do that. Uh,
that's kind of a period piece. It would be amazing
to build upon what we did with just one hundred
hundred and fifty thousand dollars here and do something, you know,
(48:56):
the next level up. You know, maybe have a name actor,
have a crew, which would be that's like, I want
anybody who's a who happens to be a you know,
a below the line crew member out there. I love
you all and I wish, I wish I could work
with you one day. So yeah, I think that would
(49:16):
be that would be fantastic to actually have a crew.
I've had crews before on little things, and you know,
it's always it's always fun and you know, and you
need them, honestly to bring any project for you to life.
I mean, you're never gonna realize the full potential of
what you're shooting without talented crew. But yeah, I think
maybe slowly developing that project, see what comes along. And
just's been very excited to get the director's cut of
(49:38):
this movie out there because you know, we're proud of
what we did. Is a perfect No, nothing is or
the things I wish I could go back and redo
or improve upon. Absolutely, it even goes back to the script.
I'm sure we all look back and go, you know what,
this thing needed another scene in the first twenty minutes
of you know whatever. But yeah, but I mean in
the totality of it. Yeah, very proud of it. And
(50:01):
it's on Amazon Prime right now, and then, like I said,
maybe two b in the next week or two, the
director's cut will be rolled out to there and then
we'll see.
Speaker 2 (50:09):
What happens and Finally, if you could describe Princess Hallie
and the Jester in three words, what would they.
Speaker 1 (50:17):
Be twenty first century filmmaking.
Speaker 2 (50:25):
Spot on. I couldn't top that. Well done, Chris, Thanks
so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate
you taking the time to come and speak to me
and telling me about your brilliant film, your film that
certainly will inspire and encourage and people will enjoy watching
it too, so it's a perfect package right there.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Well, thank you so much for having me on. It's
been an honor.
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