Today was released one of the most interesting film productions hailing from Finland in the last few years – a short film called Dr. Professor’s Thesis of Evil, a dark superhero comedy made in the most interesting fashion. They call the method Motion Novel, which basically is a combination with slightly animated photos embedded with great sound design, dialogue and music. The method makes it possible to create cost-efficiently stunning visuals and great (voice) acting, two of the hardest things to grasp by a small indie film crew from a random small country in Europe, and create a polished, ultra-cool end result.

And that is what Dr. Professor’s Thesis of Evil is. Added with a successful crowd funding campaign, the film is my new favorite project from Winland, and hopefully we’ll get to see more of these Motion Novels popping up from these far reaches of the Earth.

You can watch the whole movie Dr. Professor’s Thesis of Evil …

Here!

And here’s the trailer. Enjoy:

Dr. Professor’s Thesis of Evil Official Teaser from Thesis of Evil on Vimeo.

A surprising “review” of the quite well-known independent documentary The people vs. George Lucas appeared on Twitch Film the other day, in the form of an open letter to the director of the film, Alexandre Philippe. The link started to travel around the Internet, but I wasn’t sure of the content. It’s a long rant about Alexandre skipping the payment of the artwork for the artist of the poster for the film, which is bad of course. But simultaneously, it had the smell of uninformed provocative horseshit which ended up with sharing the email address of Alexandre, suggesting people to send hate mail to him. Read the open letter here and feel the hatred towards Alexandre piling up.

The unpaid artwork.

You ready for the lesson?

Well, here’s Alexandre’s response. First, hats off to Twitch for publishing also the respond to the open letter. Alexandre jumps into the accusations written by David and goes through them very thoroughly, defending his standpoint and telling in quite detail how independent film is being financed. The bottom line is: by deferring his work as an artist, he will be getting his money back for his work if the film ever ends up making money. Way before the producers or the director sees a dime. That’s the reality of independent film – if the film becomes successful and breaks even, it will take a long time for the money to travel to the artists, and there’s nothing much the filmmaker can do about it. Other than defend himself from the accusations spat at him after 14 hours shooting day and promise that he’s working hard as hell on it. Furthermore, he goes on noting that it’s actually not very good journalism to not to call, email or try to take any contact in any way to confirm the accusations made by a third party, and then end up releasing the private email of the director in the article, and asking people to send hate mail to him.

This is a good lesson in independent film making. There’s so many people who believe the moment a distributor, whose logo they can remember seeing in front of a film, jumps on board and starts distributing the film, that the filmmakers become instantly rich big name in Hollywood. (I’ve done a distribution deal with Universal with my first film and I have now 10€ in my bank account.) So at least before making these assumptions, please make sure you know what you are talking about.

Todd Brown from Twitch Film sums it quite well in this response to the discussion. And still I think the whole Open Letter did open a very interesting discussion, so it was good to read it and even greater to read Alexandre’s response. The bottom line is: the only way to make sure the independent filmmakers get paid for doing what they love is by supporting them, and paying for their products in whatever way you feel like. A good way would be to buy the DVD. Probably as directly as possible from the filmmakers.

TL;DR: Good film discussion here, follow the links:

1. , 2. and 3.