Happy Festivus

Hey Happy Festivus for the rest of us from Bish and the Pissweak Superheroes team. Our proof of concept shorts are coming together nicely and we have plans for a lot of very cool stuf including the abilty to create your own Pissweak Superheroes charcater online, a Pissweak mobile application and even Pissweak Superhero Pokemon where you can pit your own Pissweak Superhero against another and see who really is the piss-weakest.

We will be posting some shorts not too far into the New Year but for now we hope you have a safe, relaxing and enjoyable end to 2011 and a stellar start to 2012.

 

It Begins

I think it was Goethe who said, "just start working, dumbass" or words to that effect. Having said that I have no idea who Goethe was. I mean with a name like that he sounds like like an evil wizard. Also on the list of people I quote who I have no idea about; Voltaire and Francis Bacon. Although I belive the latter was a pioneer of short cut pork products.

Anyway the point is. I've started putting some character designs to show our potential investors. I'm going to do a couple of sample scenes as well. So far Crusader and Megadude are looking okay-ish. I'm basing Crusader on a combination of Batman and Midnighter and Megadude on a combination of Superman and every other flying cape dude there has ever been and I'm starting to get a good model for how to draw them with minimal lines and corners. The real surprise packet is UltraBabe, the first design came out kind of awesome.

 UltraBabe

MegaDude

MegaDude Head DesignsCrusaderCrusader Leg Compnents

City of Ghosts

If you haven’t seen this awesome little film it’s well worth a watch. Get something else with it, something thrillish or funny as your main feature for a DVD night and keep this one for the … “shall we watch something else or go to bed” moment and don’t get me wrong sometimes going to bed is by far the better option but if you do watch this before you go to bed you’ll still go to bed happy especially as one of the last faces you’ll see is Australia’s own Rose Byrne (in her blonde and short phase) and she’s freaking amazing in a quiet way in it.

The whole film is freaking amazing in a quiet way. It’s Matt Dillon’s directorial debut and tragically the last film he’s directed. Still if I ever directed something that was a thousandth as awesome as this I’d be nervous about getting back up to bat for a second time because you either hit it out of the park again or you’ve taken a step backwards.

Holy sh1t … that was Ross Woodhams, who was one of our 2 amazing score composers asking me to shoot him a music video. This should be fun. I have some phone calls to make … no wait … it’s late on a Sunday … email and Facebook it is.

Pissweak Superheroes is coming for all those who have been emailing - thanks heaps for the support by the way. It's a painfully slow crawl to get there in terms of budget but we're getting there.

Have a great one.

Happy Easter

Hope you had a satisfying chocolate frenzy.

It's been busy times. We're trying out some new web and social media advertising so welcome everyone who has found us through the web and thanks so much to those of you who have generously recommended us on Facebook. We've also just put up a new digg link. By the way, if you are looking for a good fun podcast check out diggnation with Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht. And while we're on the subject the Totally Rad Show (for movies and entertainment) and ifanboy (for comic books) are both great fun as well.

We've put a low-res version of the film up on the site for free and thanks to all those who sent in emails saying they enjoyed. We really appreciate the feedback.

I've been working a crazy day job to save up some cash to make the next film as well as continuing to transfer peoples old VHS and Video-8 home movies & cassette tapes to DVDs on the weekends and finishing the script for Pissweak Superheroes and I can tell you the combined workload has taken some years off me but all the parts I've ever wanted to play are basically all the parts Sam Elliot has played since Roadhouse so grey hairs ain't such a bad thing.

And things are slowly moving. The script for Pissweak Superheroes is done. We've got a couple of investors starting to look like they may come on board. We may end up having to go with a fully animated film but that could really work for a superhero film. Kind of SouthPark meets the SuperFriends. If anyone knows anyone who may be interested do us a huge favour and spread the word. We're hoping to do all kinds of fun things like put a free Pissweak Superhero - Pokemon game online and let people generate their own Pissweak Superhero characters, some of which we may use in the film.

Anyway have a safe happy and generally awesome Easter.

If any of you sons of bitches calls me grandpa, I'll kill you

Less than super heroes

This could be a lot of fun. Slightly bigger budget, massively bigger concept and hopefully a cast of thousands ... but we'll settle for hundreds.

The concept is simple, a world where superheroes exist but their powers totally suck ... like massively suck in their sucking suckorific suckingess.

The script is also panning  out pretty decent. There's still a lot of work to be done but one thing we know for sure is coming up with ideas for amusing bad superheroes is not going to be a problem. Take any group of people, add a few drinks and the concept and you get at least a dozen good ideas of which one or two are corkers.

We're looking at setting up a system whereby people can create their own Pissweak Superhero character online and submit a line of dialogue for them and if it's good enough, we'll put them in the movie. We've also got some "potential" investors who may be keen to buy themselves a speaking part. Naturally we have to show them a finished script first but that's coming along reasonably nicely.

With any luck it should just be another fun project with big groups of extras like the zombies. This time we're going to go slightly bigger with a whole lot more slightly less pissweak special effects and it will be a real ensemble piece - lot's of characters not just one deprived, moustachiod wise ass talking to camera for half of it ... thank everything that is holy.

We're probably still at least 6-9 months away from getting anything together but maybe just maybe we may be looking at starting pre-production sometime around Christmas ... that's the plan.

DVD oi oi oi

It's been kind of a massive year for what could be described as possibly one of the stupidest low budget concept films of all time. I’m still kind of stunned by this, but over the course of the year we’ve been screened as an Official Selection by 6 International Film Festivals and received 7 awards.

We’ve had some interest in the U.S. but in order to pursue that we really need to do a proper NTSC (U.S. DVD format) re-master and we’re way out of cash. I spent about ten grand (on top of the original ten grand budget) on all the Festival Marketing (that doesn’t include any of us actually attending any of the festivals – we just couldn’t justify doing that when the crew still haven’t received their tiny deferred fees) and I’m still a couple of grand in the hole on the credit cards paying that off … and we need to get international clearances for the stock footage and blah blah blah.

But I did promise a DVD for Christmas so we’ve put together a special Pre-Release Double DVD (feature, making of and extras) and it’s currently being pressed in Singapore. I should have it by the end of next week, ready to ship for Christmas.

The extras are half decent too. We've put together a Making Of Documentary and included some of our earliest short films. Including one of the first shorts we ever made, which went on to become one of the first ever Western Australian films to get into the finals of Tropfest (the world's largest short film competition) and Dead by Dusk by Brendan Dee, one of our zombies and a damn fine director in his own right. I played one of the main parts (another cowardly bogan - talk about typecasting) and the film went on to be selected for the new Tropfest - Best of The West screenings and won best film in the category.

It hasn’t been cheap and I’m funding it out of my own pocket so if you've seen the film at the premiere or at any of the festivals please spread the word. At this stage we can only sell within Australia but if we can sell enough of the pre-release we might just be able to put something together.

Please note that the final film is definitely MA15+

Once again thanks from the bottom of my heart to everyone who helped get us this far. Even if we get no further it's been a pretty decent showing for a film made for ten grand and marketed for another ten. In fact it's kind of unbelievable really. Ten grand, 300 awesome zombie volunteers and the work of a truly awesome independent (and as yet completely unpaid) crew and we've managed to turn heads on the international festival circuit.

We've still got a long long way to go before we can start thinking about seriously making another film but if we get there the script for Pissweak Superheroes is already coming together nicely.

9 Leafy Festival Things

G’day everyone,

It’s been a big 6 months.  In that time our little, ten thousand dollar, film has become an Official Selection of 5 International Film Festivals and has won 4 Awards.

So even though none of the local distributors have come to the party (and so we’re going to have to save up and produce the DVD ourselves) – the DVD is going to have 9 of those little leafy laurel things on it;

• ·      Official Selection – Edmonton International Film Festival
• ·      Official Selection – Southern Winds Film Festival
• ·      Official Selection – Charlotte Film Festival
• ·      Official Selection – Riverside International Film Festival
• ·      Official Selection – Detroit Windsor International Film Festival
• ·      Golden Palm Award – Mexico International Film Festival
• ·      Silver Lei Award – Honolulu International Film Festival
• ·      Award of Merit – The Indie Fest
• ·      Award of Excellence – Twin Rivers Media Festival

So things are good but I do have to apologise to those who are eagerly awaiting the DVD (especially our awesome zombies). We’re doing well in terms of critical reception overseas but I still haven’t managed to get a dollar in other than the tickets we sold for the premiere.

I’ve had to get myself a day job to pay off the debt for the film and the cost of all these festival entry fees. But we are hopefully looking forward to a DVD release this Christmas.

We’re also working on the next project and the script for Pissweak Superheroes is really starting to come together. We’re going to take a big step up for this next one and look to make it for five times the budget of I am Bish, which is still only 50, grand. But for that we are going to do stunts, fight scenes, car chases and special effects (in our very low budget style of course). 

So have a great couple of months and we’ll be in touch in late spring, hopefully with news of a DVD release.

May the force be with you.

Dave Bishop

Okay this is now oficially crazy ... good!

Unbelievable.

I'm oficially speechless and anyone who knows me knows it takes a lot to do that.

Have an awesome weekend.

Bish

Our DVD is going to look awesome

Well just about every Aussie festival we've entered has turned us down, including all the big ones and all the Perth ones. Local distributors have responded to our DVD with a chorus of silence (except for a couple of the smaller ones who were very positive but just could not afford to take the risk). But we continue to hit runs on the US indie festival circuit so even though we'll have to pay to put it out ourselves, our DVD is going to have so many little leafy things on it that I could care less about the lack of local support.

Plans and script for Pissweak Superheroes (the next film) continue to bubble.

Another US Festival!

How's this for an awesome email to get on a shocker of a day at work.

> Hello Dave,
> Thank you again for your submission. We have provided “I Am Bish” with the festival's most coveted time-slot...OUR MIDNIGHT OFFERING.
> Saturday, September 25th.

And why didn't I think of a midnight screening. That would be awesome. Sadly I'm not going to make it to beautiful Charlotte. I'm still paying off the budget (and the local festivals and distributors remain unmoved by all our success on the overseas festival circuit) but in about another month I should be in the black and saving up for our next film "Pissweak Superheroes" ... oh yes I am as serious as a heart attack. This time we're doing stunts ... be afraid.

Hope you are all fantastic.

Bish