Not Yet Famous Monsters

SlashFilm.com has a terrific look at a movie I am absolutely dying to see, called, simply enough, Monsters.

Former UK visual effects artist turned writer/director Gareth Edwards has made the movie on a budget that would make Robert Rodriguez proud: approximately $15,000. The movie is set a few years after giant monsters, mutated from life forms brought back from space, have set up shop across Central America, basically taking over much of Mexico. They're real, they're here, and the only way to deal with them so far is to quarantine the areas in which them lumber about and leave them alone. Two people, a journalist and a tourist, must make their way across this alien-infested forbidden zone to the safety of the United States border.

Edwards shows you what you can do with a "prosumer camera," Adobe AfterEffects on a home computer, and a lot of imagination and creativity (not to mention old-fashioned sweat).

Here's another link, again via SlashFilm.com, to a look at what Edwards was able to do for a one hour UK production on Attila the Hun. His visual effects work is first rate, and it makes you wonder where all the money goes in big budget effects-driven Hollywood movies like Clash of the Titans and Percy Jackson & the Olympians.