I once worked on a TV series that aired on ABC. It was set in NYC, but to keep the budget manageable they shot in Vancouver. There were plenty of scenes of our heroes fleeing on foot through crowded city streets, but apparently nobody told the Transportation or Set Dressing departments that ABC had a pretty strict policy against featuring (or even showing) corporate logos in shows that did not have a product-placement deal in place. So instead of popping off all the automaker logos on set, we had to remove them all with VFX. Which got pretty surreal when we had to digitally erase the VW logo off the hood of a Beetle. Yāknow, so nobody would know what kind of car it was.
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Surprised this wasnāt mentioned before. The ad campaign was a very clever and hugely influential early example of using the internet for creating hype. Having IMDB list the actors as āMissing, presumed deadā, anyone?
Without the whole āis it real or notā buzz I doubt there would be much interest in what is essentially a zero budget, no-famous-names fake documentary with the harshest, most viewer-unfriendly aesthetic since dogme 95.
This is very true. They were very clever about not denying that the three lead actors might have actually died; the filmmakers asked them to stay out of the public eye and they did everything they could to further the rumor that Blair Witch was actually made from footage found after these kids had really died. The no-frills shakeycam aesthetic fit that story idea perfectly.
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thatās awful. But link to the topic is ā¦ ??
I stood no chance. I was only about 19 years oldā¦ We went and saw it pretty early after its release, without reading much of anything about it, and before it was too hyped-up. We genuinely had no idea about how it was made, and it was kind of the first of its type. It was an evening showing. By the time the bundle of teeth shows up weāre already pretty freaked out. When the final shot in the basement hits us, and the movie just ENDS with clipped screamingāno resolution, no gradual taking-you-out-of-the-experience denouement, just a bunch of horrible unanswered fearsā¦ well, we got to follow that up by driving home in the dark down a winding, wooded highway, to my parentsā house with a big lot of woods behind it (I was home from college for the summer). I really donāt remember how I managed to get to sleep that night, but I know I was afraid to close my eyes for a time.
Edit: At least if they had shown the āwitchā at the end my brain would have been able to say, okay, that looks fake or I can see how they did that. But no. I got to live with my imaginationās realer-than-real interpretation of all the hints and clues, which was much, much worse. 
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Iām basing that on Europa Report being a āfound footageā movie. While I really liked the non-traditional idea of how it was shown primarily from the shipās cameras, I feel pretty strongly that Europa Report would have been a better movie if it had been told in a more traditional straightforward narrative. The found footage/flashback aspect of it I thought was just a convoluted distraction without really adding any meaning. Would Alien have been better told by the CEO of Weyland Yutani reviewing video footage from the Nostromo? No. TBWP was a (very successful) one off idea. Found Footage should only be used if it adds some sort of effect or meaning you wouldnāt get otherwise, like flashbacks or voice overs.
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I can confirm number 14 for myselfā¦ I just canāt watch films shot POV like thatā¦ makes me sick. Which is a shame, because there looks like some cool films in that styleā¦
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Perhaps someday someoneāll stabilize a version for those who canāt handle the camera motion.
Me personally, itās the 3d movies I donāt like. Feels like eye-strain.
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If I really want to see something, I might try taking a dramamine or another motion sickness medication, but that tends to make me sleepy, a bit.
Iām not a huge fan of 3D eitherā¦ the last one I saw in theaters was Coraline, but for the most part, if there is a film thats 3D, I go for the 2D showing (Iām glad you usually get the option).
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Really, I think Coraline made better use of 3D than any other movie Iāve seen before or since.
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It really didā¦ It was a beautifully done film generally speaking.
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The only 3D film Iāve seen was Wrath of the Titans, which was shite. But it would have been still shite (if less shite) in 2D. We only saw it in 3D because I screwed up the theatre timingsā¦
I will not be interested in 3D until itās the same price as seeing the film in 2D, itās less murky, I donāt have to wear stupid glasses and I can control where my eyes can focus on (i.e., when itās actual 3D, and never).
Itās getting better. Even though Mad Max: Fury Road wasnāt shot in 3D (and the post conversion never works as well as shooting in 3D), the IMAX Laser 3D projection at the Chinese Theater was so good that I really enjoyed it in 3D. The picture was crisp and very bright, and the glasses were much less intrusive and heavy than they used to be. (They always bug me a lot since I wear prescription glasses too, but I didnāt mind these.)
The price, however, was nothing to sneeze at. $19.95 for an adult evening ticket (about a $3.00 markup from 2D). But the Chinese is expensive already, and that new IMAX screen is nothing to sniff at either.
I think that the āfound footageā aspect worked well (more realistic, since there would be cameras everywhere), but that inserting a lot of nonlinearity into the editing of the story served it quite poorly. And I often like nonlinear. The editing was technically decent, but my guess is that they flashed forward and back so often to make the movie feel subjectively faster-paced. When I mentally linearized what I had seen, there were long, slow stretches in the same static settings. So they scrambled it all to avoid a slow ā2001ā feeling, perhaps hoping to make it more engaging to people with a short attention span. But to me the shuffling felt superfluous, and I think it would have been a much better movie without it.
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I actually liked it, the one and only time I saw it. It was actually a novel idea at the time. What I hated was the hordes of imitators that thought that all they had to do is film with a handheld camera and their crappy horror movie would be a success.
I once saw a really good parody, with a title like, The Making of the Blair Witch Project: The Blair Witch Project Project. It supposedly was a documentary that followed the team making The Blair Witch Project as they got lost in the woods.
It got taken down from YouTube not long after I saw it, and I canāt even find a mention of it on Google ā though my Google-fu is not strong enough to handle a search string with duplicated words.
This one matey?
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Yep, thatās it. Thank you.
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Type the search string inside quotes
āBlair Witch Project Projectā
Thatāll bring up the exact phrase.
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