Synopsis

In two and-a-half minutes, the title sequence tells the story of one aspiring filmmaker and his journey through the creative process of writing, directing, and distributing a movie outside the Hollywood studio system.

Production

Chris Gore of Film Threat - who has been an enthusiastic and vocal supporter of my work for several years - wrote the story and is the film's producer.

Chris and I had lunch in early-2003 about this pet project and gave me an early draft of the script with which I used to generate initial design concepts.

Frankly, some of the initial design concepts sucked - and Chris wasn't afraid to tell me so and pointed me toward the classic Pink Panther series.

Working off the temp music track for the opening song by Joe Kraemer, I kept generating storyboards and pitching them to Chris - and Phil Zlotorynski, the film's director - until finally something clicked and we had a good direction.

As is my style, Adobe Illustrator is used to create the graphics which are then animated using Adobe After Effects. Rendered sequences are then edited together in Final Cut Pro.

Because this project is geared toward the big screen and not the web or television, the animation required some hefty processing power - but my iMac running Mac OS 10.3 pulled it off. Each frame was rendered at a resolution of 1920x1080 - more than 4 times larger than my usual 720x480.

Running at 800mhz with 1GB of RAM, some of the frames took up to 10 minutes each to render. And at 24 frames per second, the entire rendering process - including adding the credit text and "film look" process - took about three weeks running 24/7.

Film Info

Credits

Other

Buzz

Directed by Philip Zlotorynski from a script by Chris Gore and Adam Schwartz, "My Big Fat Independent Movie" has a knowing, insider quality that could generate a modest cult following. But the best reasons to see it are Evan Mather's animated title sequence and a dead-on Christopher Walken impersonation by Neil Hopkins.
The New York Times

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