Fire Assault Productions

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Commentary:

Aw, geez, I had BIG plans for this one.

In late 2005, we were all sitting around wanting to make another real movie. Not one of these 3-6 minute student film-y type things we'd been doing, which are fine, but it was time for something bigger and important...er. More important. There you go. We hadn't really done that since Curse of the Wolf, and, you know, every year or so you get the urge to work on a big project. I guess to help define the meaning of your own existence or something. I don't know. I'm rambling a lot in this commentary. But I refuse to proofread it. Proofreading is for the weak. So, after much deliberation, I decided that a movie about "robots" would be fun. Enter: Robot Season.

This was originally going to be a 90-minute, genuine (pronounced "jen-you-ein") feature film, combining live action footage with CGI robots, fashioned by me and Mark Wilhelm, and hopefully others. You can read the first draft of the script here, if'n you like.

Now, very quickly, we realized three very important things:

We in NO WAY had enough free time to film a feature anymore. Seriously, somewhere in between high school and college, we all got social lives. Or just more homework. Or lazy. The point is, filming 90 minutes of anything was beyond our present capabilities.
I had no idea how to do CGI, and didn't really have time to sit down and learn.
Other people didn't really want to help us, because, admittedly, we had 3/4 of a first draft script, and it was about Robotbusting.

And so, the decision was made to split the thing up into a series of 5-8 minute shorts that we could, concievably, combine into a feature later, but if things didn't work out, we'd still have a product to show off. Plus, it takes advantage of the new frontier of film-making, the INTERNET, where attention spans are short, and youtube is king. Although, it wasn't king yet back then. It was more of a duke. Duke YouTube of Loxley. I'm rambling again, hang on.

I re-wrote parts of the script to be the first three episodes of a series, and we filmed about one and a half episodes. What you see here is the best of both.

After we filmed, it sat on the shelf for a year and a half, as I half-heartedly tried to figure Maya out in my spare time. It didn't work out. But then, winter quarter of '07, I took a special effects class where I learned Adobe AfterEffects, which taught me just enough to make crude-but-disbelief-suspending robots for this thing.

So I did.

And, uhh...this is Robot Season, such as it ended up being. Enjoy.