Photo credit: Steam
What can you do if you happen to have the kind of computer equipment you want and just $500 Canadian (US$400)? Do what two indie filmmakers did: make a movie!
This is what gamer-filmmakers David and Ian Purchase did when they came up with a short film called Half-Life: Escape from City-17 in 2008. Using machinima and Valve’s Source engine, they managed to create a movie that combined CGI, photographs and traditional video.
The result? A sci-fi action adventure flick of a bleak dystopian future set in the universe of Half-Life that runs at five minutes and 30 seconds. And all of it was shot with just a Panasonic AG-HVX200 handheld video camera in Toronto, Canada.
Ironically, the movie’s genesis stemmed from the Purchase Brothers being avid Half-Life fans. However, even though they exported assets from the Half-Life video game, they managed to blend this with human actors that gives the movie a quite distinctive filmmaking aesthetic.
“What we’re doing doesn’t quite fit completely under the machinima realm because of the live-action element and because we didn’t render the elements within any of the game engines,” says David. “Perhaps Escape is a new type of film.”
Released last February, the Purchase brothers’ film—similar to the look and feel of Neill Blomkamp’s alien sci-fi movie District 9—was supposedly one way to advertise their visual effects skills. “We became commercial directors to help our independent work,” David explains.
But thanks to Youtube, the word-of-mouth of video gamers, and the enthusiastic support of game developer Valve, the brothers got more than they bargained for. The movie became so popular, it got a million of views within a few of days of its release on Youtube (with three million views as of October). Likewise, Valve promoted the movie on their Steam news user community channel and flew the brothers to their headquarters in Bellevue, Washington.
Ironically, despite having the feel of a special-effects laden Hollywood movie, most of their budget went to the live-action elements of the film like the costumes and the airsoft guns. Likewise, the brothers didn’t have crew support and local actors chipped in for free.
“We shot Escape from City-17 extremely cheaply,” Ian says. “Next to no budget. We were going for this mix of indie-guerrilla roughness, yet we still want it to have a perceived production value of something much greater.”
What’s next for the Purchase Brothers? They’re planning to release the second part of the film even while working on another film project.
Chalk up another one for grass-roots moviemaking, a DIY attitude and a distinctive vision all of their own. (Joseph N)
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