NEWS ARCHIVE
MAIN - IN THE PRESS - CAST - CREW - SHOOTING LOCATIONS - PHOTO GALLERIES
- RUMORS FROM THE SET
- MEDIA - CONCEPT ART - LINKS - DISCUSS
MAY 2007
05/23/07 Speaking of Wild Bunch,
they just happen to have a fantastic gallery of Outlander concept art
online. Check out their gallery HERE! There’s a few neat character concepts and
some interesting images of the Moorwen’s planet, among others. In total there are 14 new images, which
include at least one better quality version of one of the images seen in the
Space Channel featurette.
05/22/07 Go
ahead and back up:
Piecing together
the future sometimes requires we look into the past. In Outlander’s case, it’s struggle to get
made, and the efforts to get it distributed are a strange yet interesting
tale. It begins with Howard McCain and
Dirk Blackman and Patrick Tatopoulos almost 10 years ago and then takes a twist
when it gets picked up by Production Company Ascendant Pictures
somewhere
around 2002 to 2004. Mostly using German
funding, the company fully intended to start shooting the movie in July 2005
with a reported budget around 45 million dollars. With that they brought on Wild Bunch to handle the
movies international distribution and they immediately set up shop to sign on
various more regional distributors.
Enter The Weinstein
Company. The Weinsteins then buy the north American
rights to the movie (and hence the movie is since known as The Wienstein
company’s Outlander) Karl Urban gets
signed on, Ninth Ray studios works hard on the
concept art, and Weta starts planning the special effects for a shoot in New
Zealand that reportedly will cost upwards of 70 or 80 million dollars.
In the meantime
Wild Bunch continues to sell the distribution rights and the buzz is hot. They get multiple offers that at times are
even more than the asking price.
Eventually Pan Europeene (now wild bunch distribution) aquired the
rights for france, J-net is in line to distribute the movie in Korea, Monolith in eastern Europe,
and Central Partnership in Russia. Then, somewhere along the way, some of the
funding falls through, and the plug gets pulled on the New Zealand shoot mid
2005.
Karl Urban drops
out of the production and goes off to shoot Pathfinder, and the production
looks at various other actors for the lead role. According to VIP, the company behind much of
Outlander’s financing, For quite a while Thomas Jane is in line to play the
main Character, Kainan.
Late in 2005 Wild
Bunch is still hard at work selling the international rights for the film,
selling the rights to to Planeta in Spain, Paradiso in Benelux
(Belgium and Luxemburg) and Frenetic in Switzerland.
The production
looks for ways to shoot on a smaller budget and relocates to Eastern Canada in
2006. Around August/ September 2006,
sets and props are being built in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and Jim
Caviezel signs on near the end of September.
Ascendant Pictures starts shooting the movie in October 2006 and
finishes in January of 2007. The movie’s
final cost is estimated around 42 million dollars. In may 2007 Wild Bunch is still busy
shopping the film in the Cannes Marketplace.
Reportedly they even have some film footage in their arsenal this time
around.
Throughout all of
this, the movie gets described as many things.
Wild Bunch chief Vincent Maraval called Outlander a "cross between
Lord Of The Rings and Alien Vs. Predator." Sometimes it’s described as
something akin to Predator meets Braveheart, Vikings meet Predator, and
Highlander meets Braveheart. It’s
described as a hardcore monster movie that “follows a space ship that crash
lands on Earth during the time of the Vikings - battles, wrongful imprisonment,
a vengeful alien predator and love abound.”
From this, we can
start to piece together what we can expect when the movie is finally
released. Here’s a list of distributors
and their respective regions:
North
america: The Weinstein Company
France: Pan
Europeene (AKA wild bunch Distribution)
Korea: J-Net
East
Europe: Monolith
Russia: Central
Partnership
Spain: Planeta
Switzerland: Frenetic
Belgium/Luxemburg: Paradiso
Turkey: Umut Sanat
05/20/07 When Outlander’s production team
needed a life-size longboat replica that would not only look good on screen but
would be manageable in the water, they turned to Apex Digital
Craftsmen.
Apex provided the
design schematics that the builders in Frenchman’s Cove used to put the ship
together. The boat was then trucked to
the filming site in Lark Harbour where, using different masts and sails, it was
burned twice to represent at least two different ships during the funeral
scenes.
05/19/07 Wild Bunch
has posted their Cannes Screening Schedule
and today is the day sloted for them to show promo reels in the Cannes
Marketplace. Presumably members of the industry
will be able to catch scenes from Outlander at that event which starts (or
perhaps started already) at 10a.m. in the Star2 theater.
While most of us
may not be able to catch a sneek peek at the Viking movie, and it remains
unknown about which scenes are being shown and whether that includes any
finished CG of the Moorwen, hopefully there will be some impressions of the
footage to report on soon.
05/16/07 BREAKING
NEWS: Outlander footage to be screened
at Cannes!
As the Cannes film festival
kicks in to high gear today, Wild Bunch is busy in the marketplace making deals to
distribute outlander in various international markets. Cineuropa is reporting that
amidst other screenings and promo reels the company will be showcasing, they
will also be screening Outlander footage!
You can read the whole article here.
Hopefully more will
surface on this as the festival progresses.
We’ll do our best to keep you up to date.
05/13/07 Beginning Wednesday, May 16 and
running until the 27th, the prestigious Cannes film
festival plays in France. While Outlander most likely won’t be making
an appearance in any screenings, international distributor Wild Bunch
will be promoting the film at the festival.
Check out http://www.cannesmarket.com/
to visit the website of the Cannes film Market.
Variety’s coverage of the
festival had this to say in article about people they
expect to be involved in the future outworking of the event.
Philip Elway & John Ptak
Ex-CAA agent Ptak and former VIP
Medienfonds U.S. topper Elway formed Arsenal last year to help producers and
distributors assemble pic slates and tap financing opportunities. Their roster
includes Baldwin Entertainment, Endgame, Kadokawa USA, Maverick, Studio Hamburg
and Wild Bunch. They'll have "Che," "Outlander," "The
Stanford Prison Experiment," "Luna" and "Push" in the
market mix at Cannes this year.
In other site news,
we’ve added a few other names to the crew page, including a Goran Delic who
did a few months of Illustration and production design at Spin Productions at
the end of 2006. Check out some of his
other work at his website, here.
05/06/07 Check out the webpage for the East Coast Cine Services Inc. The company is owned and run by Kelsey Smith,
who himself works as cinematographer and steadicam operator on various
projects. Apparently he also worked as
steadicam operator on Outlander along with François
Perrier. We’ve thus added him to the crew page.
Interestingly Kelsey has two separate entries at the IMDB and you can find them here and here.
05/04/07 We spent a little time rearranging
the crew page. In the process we added a
few names that we had been aware of as being involved, but hadn’t gotten around
to including in the list. Among the new
entries are Patsy Chalmers-Gow (an assistant production
coordinator), Russel Cate (a special makeup & physical
effects artist), and Allison Klein (an assistant at Tatopoulos
Studios).
It’s actually kind
of surprising how Outlander news surfaces in the oddest of places. The Atlantic film
festival association recently held an international film festival for
youths. You can download the festival guide here. Apparently, one of the workshops called
Trading Faces: Special FX Make-Up was helmed by an Amanda O’leary. Amanda is a make-up artist that worked on
Outlander, possibly even applying fake wounds to many of the cast and
extras. So, she marks another recent
addition to the crew page.
MAIN - IN THE PRESS - CAST - CREW - SHOOTING LOCATIONS - PHOTO GALLERIES
- RUMORS FROM THE SET
- MEDIA - CONCEPT ART - LINKS - DISCUSS