SF Movie

[lsanderson]

From a Suburban Garage, a New Take on Time Travel
By A. O. SCOTT

"Shane Carruth's "Primer," a debut feature shot on 16-millimeter for a budget of around $7,000, is an ingenious movie about the perils of ingenuity. Two would-be inventors, Abe and Aaron, working after hours in their suburban garage, stumble onto an invention whose application is not obvious at first but whose ethical and metaphysical implications quickly become enormous. Abe (David Sullivan) describes it to Aaron as "the most important thing that any living organism has ever witnessed," which may be a slight exaggeration. To call the gizmo a time machine, which it more or less is, would be to create a slightly misleading impression, evoking splashy Hollywood confections like the "Terminator" and "Back to the Future" franchises, which "Primer" does not resemble in the least."

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Yikes! $7k? 16mm runs at 1.5 feet per second. A 400-foot spool costs about $160. Processing is not cheap.

Let's see. I don't see the length given, but it says "feature", so let's say 90 minutes, or 5400 seconds. They'll need an *absolute* minimum of 8,100 feet, or about 20 rolls at 400 feet. That's $3,200 at the prices I find on the web at the moment.

Actually shooting as little as 3 times what you use is nearly impossible, 5:1 is more likely (still very tight), so that runs the cost up even more. And in reality there are costumes and lighting and equipment and such. Crew working essentially as volunteers is normal at this level, but then you at least have to feed them.

So I'm kinda skeptical about this price. That may be the number of dollars that left their wallet, but they must have had *massive* contributions of material to achieve it.

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

"Amazingly, given the film’s impressive production values, PRIMER cost about $7000, or, as Carruth says, “the price of a used car.” Consequently, the crew was very small and very versatile. Like their multi-talented director, members of the production team had to wear many different hats, operating sophisticated equipment one day and moving furniture the next. The film was shot over a period of five weeks in Dallas, where Carruth depended on the kindness of family homes and friends’ apartments for his locations,"

http://www.primermovie.com/story.html

I suspect he may have had a few donations along the way...