BloodSpell Development Updates

In August 2003, I was sitting in the Cameo Bar in Edinburgh, just after a screening of the Artery documentary on Strange Company. Strange Company hadn't made a film for a year or so, and we weren't sure where we were going or what we were doing next. In short, we were stuck.

I was chatting with Francoise, the hugely talented musician who scored the Artery doc. He's very into the ideas behind Machinima, and he was waving his hands and animatedly talking about where he felt we should go with our work.

"The punk!" he said.

"You have lost the punk edge!"

He was right.

We started making BloodSpell to get the punk back.



Where we are now

The BloodSpell project is 1 year 9 months old right now. It has grown into something quite remarkable - a truly independent, zero-budget animated action-adventure feature film, combining the irreverent, aggressive, DIY ethos of punk with the epic scale and power of fantasy. I don't believe there has ever been a film made quite like this.

Within a year it will be complete, and we'll prove, once and for all, that it is now possible for a bunch of guys with computers to make a spectacular, genre-breaking feature film using Machinima technology. We're the equivalent the first bands laying down tracks in their garages, away from the A&R men and expensive recording studios - and that phenomenon changed music forever.

As I write, we've just completed our 2-day production meeting to pull together our requirements for starting filming. We're still a few months off that fateful day, but we'll be using all the time between now and then to ensure that we flawlessly hit our week-by-week release schedule (approximately 18 episodes in all, combining to be the entire film) with the best possible film we can.

We're just editing the final couple of acts for the animatic, the moving storyboard which we've been working on for the past few months. It runs about 80 minutes, perhaps a bit more, as a complete rough draft of the movie, from shots to lighting to character placement. On Tuesday evening, a few people from the shooting crew will be seeing this animatic as a preparation to polishing it up into its final form - the first time we'll be able to see BloodSpell in close to its final form.

Our animatic crew have shot nearly 5 gigabytes of still images for the animatic. The pre-production guys have created over 7,000 original assets, including hundreds of original face expressions and over a dozen fully-detailed sets. Anthony Bailey has taken some initial academic research and turned it into TOGLFace, one of the most revolutionary Machinima tools I've seen. Everyone has produced amazing work.

The hard part - the immense work of pre-production - is nearly done. Now, all we've got to do is to make the thing.

Still to come

Over the next few months, we'll be:

• Working on, test-screening, re-working, test-screening - and so on - to make polish the script and storyboard as much as possible.
  
• Editing the script before recording our final voice tracks. Thanks to our hard-disk crash earlier this year, we'll have to re-record the script. However, everyone has been fantastic and very helpful about that so far, and I'm sure we'll come out with something even better in this final recording.
  
• Pulling together the remaining talent needed to make our incredibly ambitious script a reality, including a composer, sound designer and character animator for our small bits of custom animation. We'll also be looking for more people to help with filming, either regularly or occasionally for our huge battle sequences. If you are interested or you know someone who might be, watch this space!
  
• Pulling together our PR plans for getting the word out about BloodSpell. We're intent on proving that not only can you make your film using Machinima, you can get it out to TV-sized audiences too, all without the money or the politics. Again, if you want to help, you've got experience in this area, or you know someone who does, watch here or give us a call!
  
• Developing the BloodSpell website and figuring how we're going to pump tens of terabytes of movie out to our audience.
  
• Oh, yeah. And shooting the film.

We'll be having a BloodSpell party in mid-July for everyone who has been involved in the project so far - come along, watch the animatics, and meet everyone else who's putting their sweat into our film.

For people who aren't currently involved, but are interested, we're also looking into the possibility of having a public test-screening of the animatic before we start production, to get the widest possible feedback on our story. We'll have more on that soon.

I'm really proud of how well this project is going, and I'm very excited indeed to be this close to filming.

I think we've got the punk back.