Everyone knows it costs a lot to shoot a movie, and just paying for mockups and models can run a movie budget over the edge. It is difficult shooting movie scenes, and it's not cheap to make props. The other day, I was discussing this with a movie editor at our local Starbucks here. He works in around Hollywood with several service companies that are vendors for the large studios there. Often the studios will need a bridge, building, or something destroyed as part of the movie.
He explained to me that some of this could be done with special effects, Photoshop, a few mockups, and borrowing old footage from previous movies; docudramas, science fiction flicks, and what have you. Since everything is now digitized it makes it quite a bit easier to do. As we got to talking I asked him about science fiction genres and apocalyptic type films. He said; "oh, you mean like those 'end the world' Armageddon movies?" Yes, that's exactly what I meant.
Indeed I asked; why can't the movie studios merely use the Disaster Footage from CNN or other news reports. For instance we had major floods in Pakistan, and Columbia in the last couple of years. We've had just horrific tornadoes in Alabama, and Joplin Missouri this year. We've had floods in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and they have been labeled major disaster areas. Then there were major earthquakes in Chile and another one in Haiti - not to mention the biggie in Japan with a tsunami wall of water to go along with it.
Isn't there enough footage to work from that? He indicated that all of that stuff is now digitized and available, and many of the news companies and studios in Hollywood are in some way either connected, or willing to distribute those images, photos, and movie clips. He told me that now it's even better with all of the social networking handmade videos, because they tend to show the complete chaos and disarray at a very personal level.
He explained to me it was much better using home movie clips of disasters, which were taken firsthand, and that they didn't cost Hollywood much of anything. He also told me you can bet anytime you see a natural disaster movie or something in that science fiction genre of "the end of the world" that you can bet that much of what was used in the various scenes and sequences was previously generated and not necessarily for that particular movie before it was reedited. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.
Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 23,323 articles by May 26, 2011 is difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off..
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