I’ve never been a huge fan of fan art. Most of it is pretty crappy anyway. I love the sentiment but all it proves it that a person needs to learn to draw/paint/act/etc and get a life. However every once and a while something comes along that are just on another level. I don’t mean another level in ridiculousness (though that could be another post entirely), I mean that fans have created something truly worthy of the original. There have been a few Star Wars fan films made over the years that I think have landed their creators jobs at ILM. But having never been a huge Star Wars nerd I didn’t really pay much attention to the fan art. However I am a huge Half-Life fan. And by fan I mean snob; I basically rate any FPS as either better or worse than Half-Life 2 (which I deem to be the pinnacle of FPSs). Needless to say I don’t play many FPSs. So you can imagine how many ways my mind was blown to see this video:
If the movie doesn’t load you can watch it here.
From the YouTube page:
Directed by The Purchase Brothers.
The Escape From City 17 short film series is an adaptation based on the Half Life computer game saga by Valve Corporation. Originally envisioned as a project to test out numerous post production techniques, as well as a spec commercial, it ballooned into a multi part series. Filmed guerilla style with no money, no time, no crew, no script, the first two episodes were made from beginning to end on a budget of [$5000].
The Purchase Brothers have seriously gone to the next level. Video game movies are usually horrible and it would be very easy to turn a story like Half-Life’s into some Uwe Bowl shit storm. I will say the zombies look a bit weak but given the extremely tight budget I’ll let that slip. This looks and sounds just like the game it is eery (well, since they used the same sounds as the game I guess it isn’t THAT eery, but still). I’ve always seen Half-Life as urban exploration with guns, and now the prospect of short films, which BTW seem to deal with the other survivors and not the main character Gordon Freeman, makes me salivate. I’m not expecting Oscar worthy film making here but it is obvious this was done out of pure love. In fact if they turned HL2 into a Hollywood flick it probably would be no better than Max Payne which would be unforgivable.
Tags: fan art, film, half life, movie, youtube
There actually was a Max Payne fan film–Payne And Redemption–that the filmmakers spent 3 years making, and with only one scene left to shoot last spring, they got shut down by Fox. From what I hear, they’re still making the movie, just taking out all the Max Payne references–more power to them but that sucks. Hopefully stuff like that won’t happen to the Purchase Bros. The Half-Life fan film is getting a ton of coverage all over the net, and I’m guilty of that too–I wrote it up for my daily fan film blog, fancinematoday.com. For what it’s worth, if you want to find out more about fan films in general, I wrote the first book about the history and future of ‘em, Homemade Hollywood, which just came out.