watch Blade of the King (Beowulf and Grendel teasers)

Hello every one!
Here are a couple of teasers for a concept film that I am the producer on. I actually did all the editing on both of these teasers. Feel free to let me know what you think, but be gentle because I have never done any editing before. In fact, this is my first film project altogether. This teaser is made with raw footage that was converted into mpg before editing and then compresses, so the picture quality is not really what it could be. We shot on a Sony XL2 in 16:9, and our finished concept film will reflect that.

There are actually two teasers, one about the protagonist of our story, and one about the antagonist.
The antagonist is Grendel and the protagonist is Beowulf.

Enjoy them, and let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Robin

This is the link to the Beowulf teaser.

http://beowulf-themovie.com/mini-trailer1-large.html

This is the link for the Grendel teaser. (a brief warning...there is a scene in this Grendel teaser that is not suitable for children because of gore.)

http://beowulf-themovie.com/mini-trailer2-large.html

Hi adalia. Were these clips exported as widescreen? They are only showing up in 4:3. Probably just an export issue. As you mentioned, the compression wasn't too good. I'd recommend exporting at a smaller frame size. It's easier to get better compression and smaller files that way. The files just take too long to load now.

On a similar note, is there any chance we can get a quicktime version?

As for the editing - it wasn't bad. I would suggest cropping some length off the end. There isn't really need to go through the actors one by one in a trailer. Usually a brief screen listing the production company and the actors (all at once) is tacked onto the end.

The first was better than the second IMO. The second was very hard to see as the images were so dark. It's probably a monitor and gamma thing but I suspect others will have the same problem.

I'm a big Beowulf fan as I've studied Anglo Saxon in the past. Fascinating language really. Any chance the movie will include some Anglo Saxon lines?

Gah! I watched these a while back, and I forgot to comment.

I think they look great.

Audio had a lot of hiss, but that seems to be compression rather than bad audio in general.

Why are you breaking the story into two seperate films, btw?

Would have been great to see Grendel in one of the two teasers, mind you.

Looked up your website:

http://www.beowulf-themovie.com/

Carry on, good adalia73, and tell one of the greatest tales ever written.

Good to see yet another Austinite on the boards.

I'll have to echo Zenner and ask why we didn't see Grendel, or at least Grendel's arm or something.

Poke

RE: poke and zensteve

Hi,
This is Robin. I wanted to respond to the last two comments.

Thanks for the kind words about our teasers. They show just a tiny taste of the hard work our people have put into this project. Get this; our warriors were out in the hot Texas sun in long sleeved costumes wearing chain mail and other armor on a day that was 104 degrees to shoot some of our scenes. That day it was supposed to rain, did it? NOT IN TEXAS! THAT WOULD BE TOO EASY! If you live in Texas, you just gotta love the weather here. lol

These teasers are not the concept film that we are making, they were just teasers of that film. The reason why I broke it into two teasers was because we has a clip of music from our composer that I wanted to use, but it was not long enough to really show both parts in one. Besides I was editing to the music clip rather than composing the music to the edit, or finding music that would match, so I couldn't see a way to combine the two and make it fit the music well. If you go back and watch them again listening to the music closely, you will see how hard I tried to make the music match the images. (on the actual concept film, a composer in Austin, Tx by the name of Joe Basquez will be composing music for the finished film)

About why you do not see Grendel in these teasers:

The first reason is that this is all raw footage, and there has been no touch ups to it at all. Our concept of Grendel will most likely be a combination of prosthetics, and CGI.

Second, we have several sketches at the moment of what our grendel will look like, but have not chosen the exact one as of yet. Also, we will not be unveiling Grendel until the feature film, because we do not want to show all in the concept film. This concept film is only designed to get our funding to do the actual film.

Third, we worked with a budget slightly over $3k. We didn't want to show something that we might have been able to afford at the moment that would be unimpressive.

We really want to make him really kick ass and scary, but we want to do it right with out giving him away before we have a chance to make the feature. That is basically it in a nutshell.

So, in our concept film we are going more for the way they did it with "the village” where you never see the monster until you watch the movie. Only ours will actually be a monster.

The concept film we are working on is still in postproduction at the moment, but there will be some CGI and FX in it that should be cool.

My favorite will be this painting from this artist in South Africa that our GCI guys are 3D modeling to make it like a real forest. It will still look like painting though; it is a bit artsy I guess. n-e-way the camera will dolly across the painting then go inside of it as our intro. There are several more things that we are working on, not to give it all away.

We have a new version of the Grendel teaser on the site now in the place of the old one that actually shows the painting we are using as the intro to that teaser. It is a bit darker than the original on that intro, but you can see what it looks like.

Ok my response has been a bit long winded, but just wanted to thoroughly answer all the questions. If you have any more questions or comments about our production please do not hesitate to let me know.

Thanks a lot,

Robin Blesch
Producer