GSA TEAMS UP WITH DIRECTOR DAVID SANDBERG ON HIT FILM “KUNG FURY”
One of the most exciting projects on our slate this month was the internet sensation, “Kung Fury“.
It’s always great to work with a director on their first film but we were really excited to contribute to one of the coolest projects out there. An 80’s style martial arts comedy with laser raptors and barbarians on wolves, how can you go wrong?
“Kung Fury” already had huge hype when Swedish director David Sandberg first approached us. The project was originally conceived as a half-hour short and its Kickstarter campaign had a $200,000 target. It ended up raising a jaw-dropping $630,000 and became one of the year’s most anticipated releases, premiering at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
David found GreenScreen Animals through an organic Google search when he typed in the words green + screen + wolf. It’s fortunate that we have a strong hold on the animal footage sector, especially in the area of blue and green screen. Google SEO is key in bringing us new international clients, which represent over a third of our business.
David was looking for the perfect way to introduce Barbarianna a Nordic barbarian-viking hybrid. Barbarian rescues the hero, a Kung Fu fighting cop with special powers who travels back in time to destroy Adolf Hitler. After considering various CG options David decided to choose a live action animal and settled on a black timber wolf from our stock footage library. It provided David with the 4K resolution his visual effects team needed and proved to be a great alternative to CG, saving both time and money.
David first contacted GSA’s President, Mark Shockley to discuss his vision and the idea of a collaboration. After a compelling conversation Mark was convinced he wanted to participate in this groundbreaking project and offered David a choice of clips. Shortly after, James Knapp, our director of sales and operations, and the film’s producer and co-star, Eleni Young worked out the details of the transaction and the rest is history.
We supplied a total of 4 wolf clips from the green screen animal library. The wolf was a beautiful black timber wolf who was featured Richard Verrier’s glowing LA Times article back in April 2013 and had starred in HBO’s “True Blood” as well as numerous other films and TV shows.
We delivered raw RED 4K files to David and his team who were working with Fido, one of Europe’s best Visual Effects company. Fido had 20 visual effects artists working on the project using a combination of Maya for the 3D, Nuke for compositing and After Effects. This high resolution video footage gave David and the effects team a tremendous amount of freedom when compositing. It allowed them to crop, color correct and manipulate with minimal concerns. They were really impressed with the quality of the video, as well as the lighting and diversity of the animal actions we supplied.
On the Kickstarter campaign, David promised to release the film for free on YouTube. Since its release on June 3rd more than 15 million viewers have enjoyed this amazing achievement.
Next, Laser Unicorns will release bonus content on the making of “Kung Fury.” They will share some tricks of the trade and demonstrate how they composited the movie. All of us at GSA are thrilled that our footage will be featured in this video as well.
Check out the entire Kung Fury film on YouTube
