Color us intrigued by the prospects of Andrew Mackenzie's Hired Guns, a rotoscoped Western. Though no plot details were released Andrew did share with us a mighty fine pedigree of actors and production talent he is lining up for his film. He has an in-talks cast of Will Patton, Jeff Fahey, Karl Urban, Danny Trejo, Tom Savini and Zoe Bell. The score will be provided by Andrea Morricone, the son of the legendary composer Ennio Morricone. Andrew also has Sergio Donati on board as an Executive producer, offering his insight and experience in Western films.
Andrew has shared with us some great news. His production has been given a few dollars more and they will now be going as a live action shoot in New Mexico moved back to mid-August. In the mean time he thought it would be neat to share a few words from Sergio and we have that clip as well as the pre-viz teaser to show what he's got in mind for this project.
cant wait
Does that mean that because of the budget infusion, they're doing this as live action now? If so, yay money!
Or is that just the filming of the footage to be rotoscoped? That'd be... far less exciting.
I do have faith in Sergio Donati. He's done some great stuff. But the pre-viz still looks like crap shot with a sheap in-camera filter-effect. And if they're going to rotoscope it then I say that a full-blown liveaction-shoot with 4k red is a terrible waste of money...
The beauty of rotoscoping like in scanner darkly is that you can shoot on DV and rotoscope with vectors and output anything up to the limit of cinema-standards resolution-wise. Save the vector-files and you can output even larger resolutions as standards progress. You can even shoot the whole epic actioner in your back-yard with something that just barely blocks out distractions on set. No need for perfectly lit green screen or something like that.
I say, if you gonna shoot for rotoscope. Then put the extra money into where the grunt-work will be done. In the rotoscoping.
Now, if the're going fully liveaction, that's another story entirerly off course...