The Necronomicon - the new movie by up coming Welsh filmmaker Dave Thomas.

Necronomicon, or Necro for short, is my latest dark vision to hit the small screen.

The movie, which was in production for 4 months, is my most ambitious project to date, sporting a full soundtrack, shot on MiniDV for the first time and includes many special effects, lighting and... has had money spent on it!

Dont be decieved though, Necro has NO budget and had NO crew.. as with all of my movies, apart from atmosphere and a neat twist, Necronomicon is full of blood, sweat and tears when it comes to the production of this mammoth movie.

History

The movie came into being as I wanted to create a short 2 minute film based on 2 Prodigy tracks from their album Music For The Jilted Generation entitled Intro and Break And Enter.
The two tracks sounded like something from a movie, and I had a few shots in my mind as to what that story could develop into.
I tried to get the rights to use the music, but XL Recordings demanded £300 per track, money I simply didnt have.. especially since this wasnt a commercial venture.

I then thought long and hard and came up with a few more ideas and organised a meeting with Mark Prosser, a local musician and aspiring amateur filmmaker for help and ideas. We revamped the story and came up with a weird film. In later meetings the film ideas were tossed around more and I decided to call the movie Necronomicon after my inspirator, H.R Gigers art-book. The rest of the film wrote itself around the book, changing certain things along the way.

After numerous brain-storming sessions, the film was down on paper, storyboarded and then was set to go into production.

Production

To be honest, it was a long and hard process with just two people doing the work of dozens. Saying that though, most of the shoot went smoothly, building sets for 8 hours, filming for 9 hours and one day even a 14hr shoot occured, of course, the techno music got me hyped - and the obligitory pizza of course!

Saying that, not everything goes swimmingly, the camera broke even though it was only 5 months old, the lighting guy dropped out, so did 3D animators. Locations became unavailable and shots were lost. All the usual frustrating filmmaking hassles really.

The most infuriating aspect of the shoot was my first attempt at using BLUESCREENS. Now, obviouslly without having a budget means the REAL bluescreens couldnt be used, so we used blue paper, boards, tarpaulin - anything blue really... and it worked. There were shadow and lighting problems, but the overal finished scenes look pretty good for a first attempt.

Post production

Hassles, and lots of them.
Lots of rendering times because of the multiple effects used, music dubbed on, lots of foley which wasnt previously used. All this ammounted to a whopping 100hrs+ of editing time alone, combined with the 50+ hours we already had from shooting and building sets etc.

Again though, saying all that - editing was FUN, learning how to do bluescreen was a challenge, and using Adobe After Effects and all the other plugins were a nice addition too, everything made the movie BETTER,
which was a good thing.

I even managed to make a trailer which is available to download here, I sat back in awe at what I had created one night, for it even surpassed what I thought I was capable of, with so little resources.

I had posters made up, video covers and had BIG plans for Necronomicon. Why, I dont know - maybe its simply because EVERYTHING in the movie was MINE, I had accomplished it all. The music all be it others, was granted for ME, I could FINALLY spread this movie without fear of being sued because of copyright infringment.

As it turned out, Necronomicon would be seen in cinemas, by production companies such as the BBC, sent to every online film site, get distributed by former Mob Daze actor Ari Bavel, get sent to EVERY film festival imaginable and even get sent to the one person who influenced me.... H.R Giger himself.

Necronomicon never started out to be SO big, and it IS big.... its the biggest thing I've ever done, it surpasses
Mob Daze, simply because its all me this time. My money, my work, my time, my risks.

March 4th it gets released to an unsuspecting public. March 4th is the date that people will FINALLY wake up and realise that I, David Thomas deserve a shot at the film industry, sure... you may not understand the movie, some may think its trash... but one thing NO ONE can deny... is that the time, money, and sheer dedication I have shown with this movie makes me a prime candidate... to go far in the film industry.

The only question after Necronomicon is.... what the hell can I do to top this?