Rise: A Short Film To Watch For
It started as an idea. Words brought together into a script that Warner Bros. plans to turn into a movie. However, creator David Karlak had an idea. “As the feature film script has been in development,” Karlak writes, “I’ve been independently piecing together a short film to test the idea, story, world, characters, and design of RISE.” However, he needed help. He couldn’t make this film on his own. He turned to Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site.
“The short film has been a passion project that has relied heavily on friends and favors to get it to where it is today,” he adds. His Kickstarter fundraiser’s goal was $20,000. He ended up raising more than $38,000. Now it was time to get to work. “RISE was shot in piecemeal fashion since early 2013,” Karlak continues. “We transformed skid row in Downtown Los Angeles into a robot slum, built a robot tenement set, and then trekked halfway across the world to wrap up production with a guerrilla shoot in Beijing, China!”
VFX process for lead character, courtesy of Kickstarter
Something interesting happened though.
RISE Oculus VR Experience, courtesy of Nurulize and Kickstarter
Their work on RISE led to developments in virtual reality they could not ignore. They created a virtual reality experience specifically for Oculus VR. Oculus then featured it as one of their curated selections for the Tribeca Film Festival 2014 Storyscapes. Described as one of “the most cinematic of the Oculus VR set-ups,” the review by Erik Davis on Movies.com praised the short for the full immersion experience and said, “This is most definitely the future of movies…and it’s pretty incredible to experience even it does feel rough around the edges.” This experience they gave to those who pledged $30 or more to the campaign.
This is just the beginning though. This feature film is still in development. So watch out!
In the meantime, here’s the short film:
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