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Black Rainbows
Throwback '70s & '80s, less CGI-focused, primary-color palette, electronically-scored independent science fiction is becoming a trend. Of the handful of trailers and footage I've seen thus far, BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW boasts the most professionally confident and curious example. (Although, I could do without the lens flare.)
It's less expensive to shoot this way, so that's attractive to indie tinkerers who dream of genre. But the audience is also onto that notion. So if you're going to shoot this way as a sci-fi artist, you have to have a story and plotting that motivates the design and form. That should be true for all movies, but certainly it's more true for low-budget genre, which is challenging and cannot be glossed over with cash (as the studios do with their faire). I can think of many low-budget genre movies that merely aggregate and knock off sci-fi tropes, are too thin in development, under-budgeted, or fail in other ways, and few that succeed. Most of the latter are not American films. (If indeed RAINBOW is successful storytelling, the laurels will go to Canada.) What are your favorite examples?
If the production budget recorded in the trade listings for this picture is accurate, then ARTEMIS ETERNAL will ring shy of a third of the price, yet this is a feature and ARTEMIS is a short. DOCTOR HORRIBLE cost more than a third but less than half of RAINBOW, and is about half the length. ANOTHER EARTH, a feature, cost just over a quarter of what RAINBOW prices (although Searchlight may have put post-production sweetening money into that picture after acquisition).
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