Tag: The Delivery

‘The Delivery’ Graphic Novel: Rob Gunnerson’s dream made into a reality

The creative process is fun and I remember when I first met Rob Gunnerson at a film festival, it was the start of a lot of fun that has slowly trickled in over the years. I was performing a firewhip demonstration for the World Stunt Association and he and Twilight actor Peter Facinelli were watching. A few years later they invited me to Los Angeles to help make a pitch trailer for an interesting story Gunnerson had been thinking about since he was a little kid. We were all kind of the same age, so we had grown up with a love of certain types of movies. We had a lot of fun putting Rob’s vision into a short two-minute trailer introducing the main objectives of the story. Peter was producing and using his considerable fame to draw studios to the project with Real D 3D as a partner. In the back ground was Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics supporting the project so it was exciting. We captured some wonderful images and had a lot of fun. But as I’m mentioned before, it is hard to get things off the ground in today’s Hollywood, even for seasoned veterans and popular pop culture personalities with millions of Facebook contacts. To get the money men to line up to fund projects now requires more than even Peter was able to assemble leaving Gunnerson to turn toward a new direction to get his project the attention that producers now require to put up the kind of money it takes nowadays to make a motion picture. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. The three primaries on the project, Rob, Peter, and Dave Stewart turned toward a graphic novel version of their story which comes out in April of 2015 to tell their complicated, dynamic story about Angels, Demons and The Last Hour before both try to destroy Mankind. Listen to them talk about the project below.

I fell in love with Gunnerson’s vision because of the actions of his protagonist Brother U who was an Angel who uses a firewhip to perform combat. Facinelli played that character in the short and is the basis for the character in the upcoming graphic novel. I was brought in to do the firewhip work and act as a stand-in for Peter. It was a project that I have always had a lot of hope for, and still do. But it is very telling how difficult it has been for these talented guys to get their project off the ground. Needless to say, I am really looking forward to their graphic novel. Rob told me a good part of the story in my time with him, but I am really looking forward to the visual conception released in an actual printed edition. It has taken nearly 10 years since Rob and I first met at the film festival stunt show to get to this point which he talks about in the below interviews a little bit—and for the director some pieces of his puzzle fell into play during my performance which makes me happy, so I am looking forward to seeing his vision put onto a printed page finally.

The art for the graphic novel looks fantastic. We captured some really cool scenes during the trailer shoot which I’m sure Gunnerson has looked at over and over again, so there are wonderful visuals to provide a template for the artist to pull from. I have always viewed Rob’s story as a kind of modern Highlander project. If Gunnerson had been a director in Hollywood during the 1980s, The Delivery would have been made for about 10 million dollars by a major studio and would likely be a cult classic to this very day. But, in the Hollywood of today where studio executives are much more timid and the cost of a movie is much, much greater—you have to prove there’s a market for something like this before anybody will drop 50 million to 100 million into such a project for a studio release.

The journey is often an adventure in and of itself. Between shoots on the set, the producers and I had fun on Brand Blvd cracking bullwhips on the sidewalk in a part of town that was filming television shows on nearly every city block. My hotel was on the main strip down the road from the Americana shopping complex and a lot of those people had never seen a whip act in real life. Under the encouragement of the small entourage that accompanied me, I pulled out some of the big whips and cracked cigarettes out of the mouths of just casual passers-by, and curious spectators adding to the nightlife that was vibrant. Needless to say it left an impression. When I flew out of Los Angeles that time, I had the feeling I would be returning within a few months to shoot the actual movie. But the project sat around and soon months because years with still no movement. Finally, after quite a lot of time passed, Gunnerson turned toward the tools available these days—such as Kickstarter to produce the story into a graphic novel that would at least get the concept into some art that people could look at, and slowly build up a cult audience, which for something like this—is the best way to go.

I admire Rob for not giving up on his dream of bringing this story to life. He’s an accomplished director and has access to celebrity personalities, but even so, it’s a hard sell in modern Tinseltown and this idea could have died easily on the vine. But, these guys have stuck with it and are still fighting to bring this concept to an audience. If not through a movie, then through a graphic novel, which I personally will enjoy more—I love artwork like the type shown in this upcoming graphic novel and I hope it is successful for them. If they desired to step away from Hollywood there are options out there for them. But it is a tough decision. The business model of the movie business is changing before our eyes, so it’s a difficult moving target to hit. But making The Delivery into a graphic novel to bring this story to an audience more poised to enjoy it—is clearly the smart thing to do.

I am happy to have been a part of the creative process in showing in reality the kind of things that were in Rob’s mind before our meeting. Its one thing to think of something, it’s another to see it come to life. Seeing a firewhip in action obviously helped take Rob’s thought process to the next level. Now, with some footage shot to work from, artists were able to convey that over into a graphic novel with some fabulous artwork. It is the kind of artwork that I tend to treasure and know that I will enjoy immensely. It will always remind me of the time that we brought bullwhips to the streets of Hollywood and kept Burbank awake at night with fireballs and explosions that bounced off the Verdugo Mountains with the ease of unfettered sonic booms at 3 AM.

I’m looking forward to the graphic novel of The Delivery. Read more at the following link.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/172403788/the-delivery-issue-1

Rich Hoffman

CLIIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Peter Facinelli’s ‘The Delivery’: My explosive contribution to a new graphic novel–coming soon!

set2I have kept the clip shown below to myself for the most part until now so not to interfere with the development of the motion picture The Delivery of which I served as a film consultant and stunt double performing all the fire whip stunts.  (CLICK TO REVIEW and see pictures from the set.)  A few years ago I was at a film festival collecting an award for a screenplay I wrote called The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia and was in the middle of filming a film adaption to my novel The Symposium of Justice.    Peter Facinelli and director Rob Gunnerson were at the same festival promoting their recently completed indie film called Arc, which won all kinds of awards and is considered one of the best of its kind.  Facinelli is of course known as  Dr. Carlisle Cullen, from the Twilight series and is a current highly sought after actor in Hollywood.  After a firewhip demonstration I did for the World Stunt Association Peter and Rob approached me about flying out to Los Angeles to work on a project the two were working on called The Delivery.  The result of that endeavor can be seen below.  Essentially they had a high concept idea that they wanted to make a pitch trailer out of for movie studios in conjunction with RealD 3D film equipment development.  The Delivery is a highly dynamic universe of Angels and Demons who inhabit the bodies of men and fight in modern times with swords and fire whips.  Peter wanted me to do the fire whip work for his project which I gladly obliged.

The status of that film is Peter and Rob is developing the concept now as a graphic novel which is the current trend in Hollywood.  Hollywood likes to purchase proven commodities since budgets are so incredibly expensive, and film concepts must be fleshed out in advance these days.

The whip work I did was shopped around Hollywood with the RealD 3D stock footage captured during that shoot and became animation templates for films like Iron Man 2 and the Immortals.  Below Rob talks more about the future direction of The Delivery in an interview.  The entire interview can be seen at the hotlink below:

Interview with Robert Ethan Gunnerson

Producer, Director, Editor of the movie ARC

February 27th 2012

You’ve met with some artists to begin discussions of making “The Delivery” into a comic book, which is a cool idea in my opinion and we would love if you can hold us up to date about this. Back to my question… Have you ever thought about to make “The Delivery” as an animation movie?

Let me use THE AVENGERS as an example here. This summer THE AVENGERS will be released to what will undoubtedly be great success (at least from a financial standpoint, but hopefully from a critical standpoint as well.) It will feature some of today’s most popular actors. But let’s imagine for a moment that THE AVENGERS is a brand new idea that nobody has ever heard of. And imagine Stan Lee walking into a pitch meeting with a studio.Firewhips

“So I’ve got this movie about a group of superheroes,” he says. “One of them is called IRON MAN. He’s this recovering alcohol who has a fake heart of sorts and flies around in a suit of iron. And there’s this other guy called THE HULK. He’s a dude who gets angry and turns into a green, muscular giant who can pick up a car with one hand. And there’s THOR, a Norse God who walks around in the modern world with a giant hammer and wings on his helmet.”

By this point, I guarantee the executives in the room are saying, “Um…no, thanks. Too expensive. Too weird-sounding. Too much of a risk. Too much money. And we don’t get it. Sounds like fun. And maybe if you brought it to us with an audience already built-in, then we would talk. But to do this from scratch? No way.”

That’s what we have with THE DELIVERY. A new concept that needs time so people can get it and Hollywood can “see it.” We have a screenplay for the first movie. We have a 3-D pitch trailer for the first movie. We are talking to artists about creating either a series of comic books or a graphic novel to develop an audience. We have, in fact, talked about doing an animated series for the project. But we need to build from the ground up and handle things in the most reasonable financial fashion. It starts with artwork in still images, and then we will move forward to animation/feature films/etc. as we build followers.

The film adaption I had been working on with a film professor who loved my Symposium novel and wanted to try their hand at producing and directing a movie version of it disintegrated when they failed to produce a finished clip to show at a film festival, which was needed to secure investors.  The film professor learned the hard way why they teach film studies and aren’t actually in the “film business.”  So my project was put on the shelf awaiting more competent hands as the money window opened and closed.  The same thing happened to Peter Facinelli  even with his superstar status after Twilight.  Film studios are taking the safe bets for big budget action pictures with proven action stars and comic book material after the smashing success of Iron Man and the other Marvel Comic characters.  Peter and Rob made their pitch trailer just ahead of the “Marvel wave” so the funding window closed on them as well.

But that doesn’t change the fact that doing such things was and is a lot of fun.  Rob ran a great set and the project was a blast–literally.  Without question we captured the best three-dimensional fireball ever recorded in 3D.  They asked me to give them a 5 to 7 foot fireball that was as deep as it was wide, and I gave it to them.  We shot the scene at about 4 AM as we were on a 12 hour shooting schedule over two days.  When I cracked the fire whip sending a roaring air splitting explosion through the neighborhoods of Burbank, California the set gasp in awe as hundreds of people forgot to breathe for just a moment.  It was the climax of The Delivery trailer shoot and was worth the entire effort.  The RealD 3D execs in the director’s tent all rushed over to shake my hand as they realized what they had captured on film with their state-of-the-art camera system.    Director Gunnerson yelled………………”F**KING AWSOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”  His proclamation was nearly as loud as the whip explosion.img_3402

Many people ask me if it makes me angry to see that RealD 3D used that footage captured that night to shop their camera system around to studios and that those same studios did not invite me to do the same work for them on other film projects.  Instead they handed the footage over to animators to copy off of.  So the answer is no.  There is nothing like real life effects, and whenever possible real effects should be done in physical reality.  Animation never looks quite as good second-hand.  However, I cannot blame studios, as I am expensive.   If a kid can animate a fire whip on a computer screen while eating a hamburger from a Burger King drive thru window while copying stock footage of me more power to him.  I am happy to help promote whip art any way possible, and projects like The Delivery and everything that spawns off it do in very positive ways.

However, it might be a while before Peter and Rob can get their film “delivered” to theaters.  They need to build up a Comic Con following, and Peter understands how to do that.  It will take a little time, but will eventually get done.  Meanwhile I have to do the same with my own projects.  In the film business it is like a merry-go-round where the point of opportunity may be seen, but quickly passes as the ride spins around. The way to approach is to wait for that opportunity to present itself again on the upstroke instead of trying to act too late and force a project through before its ready.  Stan Lee at Marvel Comics spent decades building up the demand for his characters, and sometimes it takes that.  I am happy to see that Peter and Rob are planning to do the same, and to take their time with their idea—because it is theirs—and gives it value that is almost always missing from stories that are brought to production too quickly by industry barnacles who only care about the money they can make off a project.  A film must be able to do both, and in the end, The Delivery will “deliver.”

Peter Facinelli’s The Delivery Movie Trailer by CullensNews

Rich Hoffman

166701_584023358276159_1119605693_n“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com