It’s the biggest event in the fan film world at the moment: The unveiling of the long-awaited Lord of the Rings fan film, The Hunt For Gollum. The 45-minute movie, being hosted on Dailymotion, will simultaneously debut onscreen and online Sunday, May 3, at 4 PM GMT (11 AM EST in the U.S.).
Will it meet the public’s high expectations? Will it be a disaster? Will Dailymotion crash at 4:01 PM?
Ever since word started spreading about the flick, a prequel based on appendices to J.R.R. Tolkein’s classic trilogy, anticipation have been building among fans, and more recently, the press. Fan Cinema Today began following the story last July and has watched as buzz began building from a few scattered posts around the net to raised mainstream media interest to a full-on at the moment. Pretty impressive—almost as notable as the fact that 160 people pooled their talents to make the flick for a mere £3,000.
Folks who are guaranteed to see it sans proverbial system failures will be the audience at Sci-Fi London, the film festival where the flick will premiere Sunday on the big screen. While most of us won’t be there with the cast and crew, we’ll make due with the extra online offerings at hunt4gollum.com, which will include a 30-minute production documentary, the soundtrack and info on writer/director Chris Bouchard’s next project.
Speaking of Bouchard, he definitely has something planned up his sleeve, as he noted on his blog:
So – how does it feel? Exciting – relieving – but I’m most looking forward to celebrating with all the talented people I’ve met on this journey when we have our premiere and party. A year ago we were on location filming an Orc battle, and a year before that I was writing out the script. So it’s been a pretty intense time (can’t count how many all night editing sessions!) and I for one am looking forward to a little break before I start the next project… which may (I can reveal) be something related to the concept of Human Residue.
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It will be an original feature film which we’re hoping to do with the same kick-ass team, but this time we’ll be looking for industry funding to get it off the ground as a low budget feature. We’ll see where that goes…
I’ll be planning to watch this Sunday. The trailer looks awesome! And I think I may even recognise some of the locations, since I’m from Wales – where they filmed parts…
I’m really excited to watch it after the awesome trailers.