Sometimes there are these markers of change that are unmistakable — for example, when I was a kid, people walking around talking to themselves were given a wide berth in the street, now they are just one more person jabbering into their hands-free cell phone headset — it’s the sort of thing that, if you even notice it, lets you know you’ve arrived in a new world without ever really being conscious of the journey that brought you there. I’ve just experienced another one of those moments, one of those ‘yes, it is definitely a new century’ epiphanies. Here we are at the end of the first decade of the 21 st century and I’ve just seen a film available on the web for free with a budget of £ 3,000 (!) that in many ways looks better than the multi-million dollar offerings of the last decade of the 20th. The times they are a changing.
The Hunt for Gollum (trailer below) is a great little film which clocks in at around 40 minutes, done on a shoestring budget by a group of dedicated volunteers. It deals with an episode alluded to in The Fellowship of the Ring, the quest to capture Gollum that Aragorn undertook prior to the events of The Lord of The Rings proper. The film is a direct homage to Peter Jackson’s vision of Middle Earth, with costumes, settings, and score all very consistently matching the Jackson trilogy.
Well-acted, directed, and designed, The Hunt for Gollum also boasts some impressive visual effects and make-up, definitely not the sort of thing you’d be expecting from a fan project, or something free on the web. It is of course very short, but that’s a bit less of a handicap than it could be, since we already know the characters involved. Overall it’s thoroughly enjoyable and tremendously impressive, even accounting for the inevitable rough edges of a movie of this kind, and once you’ve seen it be sure to watch the ‘Making Of’ special as well for a glimpse at how ingenuity and passion can elevate even the lowest budget film.
This little gem, along with the very cool choose-your-own-adventure style zombie movie The Outbreak, are really showing just what our age of new media is all about. Both the tools of film making, and the means to distribute them, are truly becoming democratic. While Hollywood continues to wield the bludgeon of its big budget approach in hit or miss fashion, I think we’ll be seeing more and more of these creative lindie films made to satisfy niche markets.
And it’s no surprise to me that, once again, it is genre storytelling that is leading the way, and inspiring something new.
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