Zak at the movies |
My YouTube link no longer works (maybe it just moved?) but here's a promotional scene. Made by some of the original stars and creators of the game!
These next stills are from a short promotional video from the www.zak2project.net website: It's the first ever glimpse of Zak in the flesh! Scroll down the page for Zak related YouTube videos. From 'Sollthar' of 'NoControl Cinema' (original link now dead).
Lastly, here are a few movies saved on this site just in case they disappear.
Another Zak BTAS demo (FLV format)
Zak McKracken - The Movie? |
 Help and advice needed!
This is what Steg said:
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This is was my first thought: subtle and dark
I like subtle, and I like my humor ironic. And I think the big world would have to be created in the viewer's imagination, because we don't have a budget for exotic locations, I think a successful Zak movie would be a cross between Scorsese's Taxi Driver (strange loner with a vague purpose) and Blair Witch (super-low budget mystery). Notice that the Blair Witch symbol looks like something Zak would draw with his crayon!
Justin Lund said:
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This is your chance to become RICH and FAMOUS :)
While we were discussing the Zak movie project, I saw the following news item:
 "A former rail worker
with no formal film training is heading to the Cannes
festival after his £400 short was selected for
competition. "Ben Crowe, a 27-year-old ex-GNER employee, teamed up with family and friends to make The Man Who Met Himself, about a private eye investigating a suicide. It is one of nine films selected out of more than 3,000 entries for the short-film Palme d'Or and the only British feature in the category "Crowe wrote, directed, produced and shot the film, before editing it on his Apple Mac computer at home. His brother Daniel plays the hero, while his girlfriend, Preti Taneja, cowrote and coproduced the 10-minute short. They filmed at weekends in London's Covent Garden. "... Taneja, a 28-year-old charity worker from London, said: "This is just a fairytale for us. None of us have ever been to film school and the film was made for £400 of our own money. We just decided to make it when Ben sold his mandolin to raise money to buy his camera." |
If he can do it, why can't we? Notice that he had to sell his mandolin to pay for the camera. In our case, we would need to sell a guitar to a guy called Lou...
Other areas to think about. Feel free to disagree, I'm no expert
Budget
I don't have experience with indie films, but I have seen quite a few indie games. If they have anything in common, our only hope is to do this a low budget. I think Zak would be perfect as a high quality ultra-low budget film. Think of the major locations and
events in the first game: airports, an ordinary street, a bedroom, a cave near a mountain. All these things are available free to anyone with a camcorder and a car. And the major characters - Zak, Annie, even the guru - are pretty ordinary people. And the major event - the implied war between the Caponians and Skolarians - is never shown.Headaches
A modest budget (in the tens of thousands) is possible, but I think the more money we talk, the less fun it is. See how long it took for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to come out? This is a wildly popular franchise, yet it stil took thirty years to get it made. Thirty years!!! According to one of his friends, Douglas Adams planned it as a movie before it became a radio show. He hawked it around Hollywood in 1976, and was told that sci-fi does not make any money. The Star Wars came out, but the STILL did not make the HHGG movie. It only got made after his death, and even then a lot of the quirky fun had to give way to the Hollywood style. As far as I can tell, making a movie with any kind of budget is a huge headache. But low budget movies are far more doable. HHGG needed heavy investment in sfx. Zak does not.
Copyright
Then we have the copyright issue. LucaArts have effectively abandoned Zak, and fan games are easily ignored, but a movie is more likely to be noticed. More importantly, I don't think any professional (or serious amateur) woud touch it if they thought there could be legal issues further down the road. However, the themes (conspiracies, mystery, fun) are eternal. I think we could get pretty close to the original even if we didn't use the name. Of course, the fans would all know what we meant. :)
Risks
This is probably obvious to everyone, but I think it needs saying anyway. Movies and games are different media. The first game had to do things in a certain way because of the limits of computer games at the time. But I think that a movie version of the game would have to be more subtle. My guess is darker, with the real action going on in the mind, not on screen. A lot of big budget game-based movies have flopped because things that work ina game don't always work on the screen. Think Dungeons and Dragons, Mario, Final Fantasy... But the good news is that stories work anywhere. Zak is not like other games, it is character driven, story driven, and links to a hold mine of other material. I think it would be very difficult to pull off, but well worth the effort. It all depends on the script (and to a leser extent, the editing).
Conclusion
In conclusion, I think that money is not the issue. I think the key success factors are script and (to a lesser extent) editing. I think everything else can be done on a shoestrong by any experienced amateur.
What do you think?
Let us know on the forum, or email me [email protected].
Thanks for reading!
"I think you are
getting way too eerie and violent with the blair
witch, DeNiro, x-files comparisons...to me a Royal
Tennibaums/I heart Huckabees/Being John Malkovich
style seems much more fun, and much more in line with
the spirit of the game... I would worry less about
making a "successful" movie, and more about
making a good film that truly captures the tfeeling
of the game you so adore... "