What’s taking so loooooong?

Godkiller has definitely been taking us longer than we originally anticipated, but we’re making progress. The comic book started being illustrated in late 2007 with the first pages coming in at the beginning of 08, so technically it’s been in production for a year and a half already… and the pages aren’t even done yet (almost, Anna’s probably 90% done). The voices are almost all recorded… the only leads left to record are Lydia Lunch and Nicki Clyne (which is why their voices aren’t in the trailer). The animation is going *very* slow, mostly because Brian has multiplied the level of production value I’d originally envisioned by pretty much a million-fold. I really just wanted to transliterate the comic book to video with simple pans & scans & zooms, etc. Brian said ‘fuck that’ and developed a whole new language of visual storytelling from the ground up. It knocked me on my ass when he first showed me what he had up his sleeve, but sheesh it takes forever.

The production crew on this project is literally three people. Hmm… well not entirely, for the VO sessions we have an awesome audio engineer named Mike. Also Katie is fantastic reading lines off the other actors during their sessions. And Jones has done some animation sequences for us that are fucking incredible and beautiful. And Daniel is clutch at editing the images during the animation process. So I guess it’s 7 production crew. Here’s a tip for indie filmmakers out there: when your cast outnumbers your crew, you’re in trouble.

Things are coming together nicely though and we’ve established a new street date for Episode 1: the DVD is currently slated for Sept 29, 2009.

“What the fuck happened to the June street date?”

Well… a couple of things. Maddy mentioned to some news sites that there was festival/theatrical interest, and that’s true but it’s not the full reason for the release push. There’s too main things:

a- We have this crazy idea to release the movie in short-form, episodic DVDs like a comic book, and then collect them into one feature length DVD–like when a comic book mini-series is collected into a graphic novel. We were racing to finish Episode 1 in time for the June street date, but we were so far behind schedule that it would literally be 6 months before we’d be able to release Episode 2. That seemed like a terrible idea. I’m a comic book geek, and I get pissed when there’s a long lagtime between issues. We figured we’d be better off pushing back Episode 1 to a point where we could realistically schedule the Episodes as bi-monthly releases.

b- Our main distributor to retail is a fantastic company called Ryko Filmworks. Scratch that: *was* a fantastic company called Ryko Filmworks. Ryko was bought by Warner Music Group a few years ago and during restructuring last month Warner folded Ryko into ADA (Alternative Distribution Alliance, who distributes record labels like Epitaph Records and SubPop). I know people at ADA and they’re awesome, so we’re hopeful & optimistic about the transition… but it is definitely a transition and Godkiller’s June street date was smack-dab in the middle of that transitionary period. Being that it’s a crazy idea in the first place to release short-form, episodic DVDs to retail, we thought it was best to hold off.

The plan right now is to screen Godkiller at some upcoming theatrical events we have planned that will tie in a few of our upcoming releases (notably Pop Skull and In A Spiral State), show it at some really cool festivals if we can coordinate the dates right, and then release the short-form DVDs on this schedule: Episode 1 on 9/29/09, Episode 2 on 11/24/09, Episode 3 on 1/26/10.

We’re going to have to play the film festivals by ear, we can’t really schedule around them. The problem with a traditional festival run is that if we focus on a schedule of festival premieres, we have to finish the entire movie and then submit it to festivals that start months after that… which would mean we couldn’t get Godkiller Episode 1 out on DVD to the fans until late 2010 at the earliest and more likely early 2011 (and that’s just 1 year before the end of the world!). We can’t really roll like that, the whole point of building a distribution infrastructure is so we can make shit we think is cool and get it right out to you and then get right back to making more shit we think is cool. Hopefully some of our favorite festivals will be into it and can coordinate with us to screen it because they’re awesome, but the most important thing is for us to get it to the fans as quickly as possible.

So if you happen to live in one of the cities we’ll be hitting with theatrical events, you’ll be able to see Godkiller Episode 1 pretty soon, and if not you can see it on DVD and online in September.

Unless we change our minds again. Power corrupts.

Non Serviam- Pizzolo