BloodRayne Fan Film Interview, Part 2

Yesterday, I ran Part One of my interview with Vera VanGuard, writer / producer / star of the recent fan production, BloodRayne: A Fan Film. It was a frank discussion that included the immortal line, “I wanted to show that I can do more than…kick ass or have my ass kicked—I can be funny too.”

In today’s hard-hitting, action-packed conclusion, Vera expounds on bad hard drives, upcoming original works and blogosphere whipping boy, Uwe Boll.

So you shot for nine hours over two days; was it a relatively easy shoot or were there hurdles you had to overcome?
The shoot was great; it was a well-oiled machine. I have an MBA degree, so I am an amazing manager—I planned the preproduction phase out completely and it worked very well. We shot it with an array of high-end HD cameras—something you can’t see on YouTube because of all the site’s compression. The hurdles came later in post, where we had to make sense of every shot, and the effects and sound took forever.

So the editing wasn’t as easy as the shooting process then?
We were halfway done with the editing when the hard drive we were storing everything on had a meltdown! We had to start all over, from capturing the footage from the tapes—that set us back two months of work. It sucked, but the recapture was better quality, so go figure. In the end, it took a year to the day to complete.

What did you use for your special effects and how long did that take?
Did I mention that it took forever!? We used every piece of software available to us and nabbed what we could for all the sound. The whole movie is pretty much a complete voiceover. We didn’t use any sound when we were shooting other than what was in-camera.

Tallying it all up, how much did it cost in the end?
$1,200. The other $78,000 was donated to me with everyone’s time and talent

From what I heard, you premiered the movie on the East Coast; how did it go over?
I showed an very rough cut at the New York Comic Con in April. It needed three more weeks of post, but I ran out of time before the show, so I got on that airplane anyway and decided to make a fool out of myself. I did. Nobody threw rotten tomatoes. I guess I did OK. Next, I’m looking at getting it into film festivals.

You spent a year on this flick—how did your working on the film affect the people in your life?
I’m a freelancer and I make money when I want to make it, so I have a very free schedule to work on projects. Every day is different for me: One day, I’m hand modeling, the next day, I’m doing makeup on a set and so on…. All of the people in my life are also in the industry, so the culture is a very understanding one. We are all happy to be working in one way or another in this town.

Looking back at the last year, then, what do you feel you learned, if anything, from making this film?
I learned what it’s like to produce something. I usually walk away from the project after I’m in it and wait for the release. Now I know the monsterous amount of work that happens on the back end, and I was there through every aspect of it—and this is only 11 minutes long! I can’t imagine doing a feature. That said, I will be doing other film shorts this summer.

Is there anything you would have done differently?
I know that for the resources and people we had, we did the very best we could, and I can’t imagine it would have been any different. There was a plan and the director operated like a general. We fought bravely.

With all that in the back of your mind now, do you think you’ll still make your own movies, whether fan films or originals?
Hell yeah! We have two more film shorts we’ll do this summer which I wrote and will be producing on: The Toilet and In the Apartment Building of Good and Evil. They’re both originals, both hilarious.

That brings up a point then—why did you choose to make a fan film, as opposed to making an original movie, say with a similar plot but with new characters?
That would be boring. I wanted to have something recognizable and I wanted to show Uwe Boll that fans can blow it out their ass better than he can. My vacuum cleaner makes better movies.

And that’s why so many people—and vacuum cleaners—make their own fan films?
The big film companies are just not doing it as well as we can.

Those companies own the copyrights, though—were copyright laws and so on a concern during the production?
No, because it says “Fan Film” right on the box. As long as it is not being sold, you are basically just another crazy fan running amuck with a camcorder. Besides, both Majesco and Terminal Reality [the game manufacturers] loved the film.