Here's a new real-time piece I've been tinkering with. OLITIAU is an idea I've had kicking around for a while, I've done a couple of feature outlines for it but it’s DNA can be traced back to the Batman fan-film I wrote (and storyboarded) in 2014, where I used the “Olitiau” mythology around the Man-Bat creature. As a film, it's mostly inspired by the boat scene in Nosferatu, and is sort of Alien-meets-Jaws. I was going to jump into my the first draft of the screenplay earlier this year before it got derailed by the pandemic, and other projects - such as PRAZINBURK RIDGE - jumped ahead of it.
Prazinburk Ridge, however, is currently stalled in production - it’s way more ambitious than what I set out to make and so requires funding in order to pay for actors, music, and asset artists to complete it to the standard I think it deserves. We’re waiting on a decision from Epic about a MegaGrant to finish it.
So, I wanted to make something else. And OLITIAU:PRELUDE is it, it seems!
I've given it the "Prelude" suffix as this isn't what I set out to make when I started doing the shots on Monday (Here’s the timeline on this one: started tinkering with UE4.26 and the water/bouyancy effects in the couple of days before Christmas, then paused it, and started making shots on Monday 28th). There’s actually an entire other real-time short film to come, this just sort of emerged as the prelude to it as I was tinkering, sort of an X Files-type cold open (not unlike my Foxhunt animatic).
I’ll continue into the world of OLITIAU in 2021!
Happy new year!