Damascus

I helped my friends work on a short film for their video class in college. The name of the video was "Damascus". It was a horror flick centered around a man who is hallucinating and being followed by two mysterious figures only to awake and find he's been drugged by organ-trafficking kidnappers. Twisted, right? I figured for kicks I'd work on some ad work for the film, not for any marketing purposes, but just for fun. These were the finished products of that fake ad campaign...
I basically went through the video and took screen shots of some of the more interesting scenes and gave them a dark, grainy, poor video quality look with green/yellow tints. You'd almost think this movie was genuinely frightening... yeah, it wasn't, but it was still pretty cool for what it was...a movie done by college students who weren't film makers.

The way I see it, someone out there will see these ads someday and demand a movie for them... and in response, they will see this movie and be horribly disappointed and demand that a new one be made by its creators. Thus kick-starting a very long and prosperous 12-movie horror franchise which will contain one and a half good movies and then 10 sequels of straight-to-dvd garbage. It's the only way to measure a horror movie's worth... I mean really, does anybody watch the "SAW" films? I'm pretty sure the last 4 should have been straight-to-dvd... anybody? Anybody?

I find it to be a fun project to create ads for a movie that I suppose doesn't technically exist. It'd be cool to practice this more often and see the end results... I'd be more interested to see those end results be shown to a film production agency and see if anybody gets inspired enough to actually make something based off the ads... it'd be marketing gold, they wouldn't even have to pay for advertising fees, they'd be done! I'm sure any past film-makers are rolling in their graves right now... with laughter. But I suppose they need a good laugh too once in a while...


And with that,
~ Mark