![]() Steven’s parents contributed most of our post-production funding. A family friend of Mark’s threw in some money and the rest of the production funding came from Kurt Anderson who has been in the business for over twenty years and has become a mentor and great advice giver. He also joined the film as an Executive Producer and ran around and witnessed all the craziness with us. He decided to contribute money that his father had left him to help make my dream come true. The additional production funding came from Aaron Fiehn, who grew up with me and heard me talk about the dream of making movies my whole life. William: The film was primarily funded by Mark Thalman, whom also served as Executive Producer and Camera Operator. The Weresmurf: The movie was apparently self funded by a group of kids with their college fund I think? (Correct me if I’m wrong by all means.) How does that affect the spending of the money, do you find it a more ‘careful’ situation, trying to stretch every dollar even further than normal because of this factor? We probably went to over 20 meetings and it eventually got routine and somewhat discouraging but we never gave up and now millions of people will see “AT” and it’s getting released by one of the big one’s. We learned a great deal about how the whole process works. Lucky for us we had something that people wanted and kept coming back and checking on. That’s the hardest thing, saying no to offers. You have so many people telling you how good your film is and I can’t believe you made it for that much but no one would make an offer that would benefit us, our the film. That’s what took so long and was the most frustrating thing. If we had wanted to we could have sold the film a year ago but we patiently waited for the right offer from the right company. I didn’t know at that time but that phone call is when the year long distribution process began. They had seen the trailer that we had put online after our first day of filming. I was sitting outside the house and my phone rang. We were shooting the scene where Jackie is in the bathroom and zombies are eating people in the other room. The only other person that agreed with me at the time was our lead actor Garrett Jones. I had been saying when we started shooting, after our first day with 500 extras running around in downtown Orlando, Fl, on Fourth of July weekend, that I wouldn’t be surprised if we started getting phone calls from major distributors. It was a lot like the Blair Witch scenario, funny thing is those guys were also from Florida. Our film was special, we made a very low budget movie that no one could tell was low budget and we were getting recognized before we even finished shooting and it steadily continued throughout the past year. There are thousands of Independent films made each year but there our only a handful that get any kind of recognition and most of those have some name actor or two in them. That’s when we decided we were going to hang onto it and test the waters. When we started shooting Automaton we realized that it could end up being bigger than we had anticipated. So we went into it with the mindset that no matter what, it would get distributed and we could make small projects until we didn’t want to anymore. Ironically, before we even went to make it we already had an offer with a very small company for distribution. William: The hardest process of making “Automaton Transfusion” has been trying to sell it. The Weresmurf: How hard has it been to ‘sell’ for lack of a better term, Automaton Transfusion to possible distributors? So here we go with part 1: Subject: Automaton Transfusion. I love it when someone passionate about their project elaborates like both Jeff and William have, it pulls you into their own little world and lets you get a better picture of what you’re gonna get yourself into if you see this movie, no matter what it is. Well guys, here I am again, fresh from my Jeffrey Reddick interview, with the first part in a 2 part interview with the Producer and the Director of a new independent zombie movie called “Automaton Transfusion”. More importantly, I hope more people agree to chat with Weresmurf in the future, especially people looking for a venue to discuss horror films that are fighting for an audience. a regular guy talking to a filmmaker who is doing it independently. This is the sort of interview I always enjoy here on AICN. And he’s working on a few others, just for the fun of it. But then he told me he’d contacted these guys, the makers of the micro-budget zombie film AUTOMATON TRANSFUSION, and that he’d be doing interviews with them. When he turned in an interview with Jeffrey Riddick a week or so ago, it seemed like a fluke. Weresmurf’s one of our regular chatters, just a normal guy living in Australia who loves indie horror.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |