Roger Ebert reviews 'B R O K E N'
http://www.whatisbroken.com
A festival like Toronto attracts hopeful filmmakers eager to pitch projects and find financing. Here, for example, are Alex Ferrari and Jorge Rodriguez, the director and producer of “Broken,” a 19-minute, $8,000 horror film containing, by their count, more than 100 visual effects.
“We’re here to talk about a development deal for a feature based on the short,” Rodriguez tells me, before the screening of “Twelve and Holding.” “Who you talking to?” I ask. “We’d better not say,” Ferrari says.
He gives me a DVD of their short: “We’ve already sold 1,000 copies online. It contains six commentary tracks and like three hours of information on how to shoot low-budget digital films and how to do the special effects. It’s like a training course.” They refer me to their web site, www.whatisbroken.com, and back at the hotel I view the film and visit the site.
The film is effective and professional and the ominous sound track works with the images to create the desired effect. Whether the plot quite rises above the level of “it was only a dream” I am not prepared to say. Whether the short will someday grow into a good film we will know only if the development deal goes through.
But that’s not really the point. The point is that gifted and ambitious young filmmakers can, with very little money, use the new digital technology to make a presentation that gets attention from industry pros. Kerry Conran’s “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” (2004) was floated the same way, with a home-made demo made on his Mac. Whether this is better than the old-fashioned method of submitting a screenplay is a good question; “Broken” is essentially a demonstration of the mastery of horror imagery and techniques. A screenplay has to also have dimensional characters (one, two or three dimensions, depending on its ambition) and a story. In an industry so impenetrable for newcomers, any way you break in is the right way. Then it depends on what you do. Looking forward to “Broken: The Feature.”
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050915/FILMFESTIVALS03/509150301/1023