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Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

They'd better pay him off and pull him in as fast as they can because he just did for $300 what thier fancy "movie money" accounting claims takes millions to do.

Any amount of money would be would be worth it to them to keep him from making another.

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With an all volunteer cast and crew, most any CG based movie could be made for "free". Sort of how I can make an application for myself without any money but would charge someone else $20,000 for it. No funny accounting needed.

Even if it cost 30k, he still owned them pretty hard, but its the volunteer thing that they should actually be afraid of. The technology is at hand for people to start making decent films for the fun of it. Open source movies are coming. They'll be short and laughable at first, but it will only take one breakaway to change people's minds.

This technology has existed for ages. Kevin Smith made Clerks for less than ten grand, and that was back in the 90s. Cameras and special effects may be getting cheaper, but talent remains expensive, since there seems to be a pretty limited number of people in the world who are actually good at writing, directing and acting in movies. Making a good movie is really hard.

Actually, Clerks cost $27,575 to make. With most of the budget going to licencing music for the soundtrack.

Haha. Well, there's always an element of marketing when you hear tiny sums like that - if you priced in all the time of the people who participated and long nights spent designing, compositing and rendering the graphics it would be $10,000 or so. But still, very very impressive.

That was a really long list of credits at the end. I'm guessing all those people worked for free to make that short film happen. The soundtrack alone is worth much more than $300.

The guy runs a visual effects company. So.

The soundtrack seems to have been taken straight from 28 Days Later. (Legally or not, I'm not sure.)

You're right...normally that's not a big deal, since amateur films, trailers and rough cuts are often scored with 'temp music' from a similar genre and this is tolerated inside the industry.

They did credit the original composer so no harm, no foul - he'll probably get offered the job if a film goes on to be made, or else get a credit as 'music consultant' and a gratuity check without actually having to do anything.

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