Team – Director

Anthony Riazzi has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Arkansas, and an M.F.A in Film and Computer Animation from the University of Southern California’s cinema program.

He has spent fifteen years working in the VFX industry as both an artist and a supervisor on a range of projects from small indie films to the largest Hollywood tent-poles such as The Matrix Trilogy and the X-Men series.

With the entire film production process moving into the digital space in recent years, he has shifted his focus to a more comprehensive production role. He has directed, edited, or leveraged his technical background for a variety of challenges in commercials, branded content, and short-form documentaries.

The initial seed for this project came while I was working full-time in the VFX industry and there was a growing interest in using VFX to create visually outrageous YouTube content that could go viral. This eventually bloomed personally into the concept of shooting an ultra-low-budget “found footage” feature that slowly ratcheted up the VFX over the course of the film from the completely invisible and plausible to imagery so over the top that people would question the source of what they were viewing.

In fleshing out the idea, I hoped to address the love/hate aspect of found footage. For fans of the genre, they love the gritty realism that places the viewer in the story. But for others, the shaky camera and tunnel vision can become a huge turn-off. With this in mind, I wanted to combine a traditional style of cross-cutting closeup, medium, and wide shots, with a self-documented style common to modern vlogging. The solution for me was to build into the story the primary view of a full-time camera person with subjective POV angles from the other lead characters. To this, I added master shots from the god’s eye view of an overhead security camera. While the edit became incredibly complex to pull off, the hope is that we’ve created a unique cinematic experience for the audience that also places them in the midst of the action.

Due to the minimal shooting budget, the deadline for completion was very flexible, and postwork just became an elaborate sandbox for experimentation. I loved experimental animation in my college days and wanted to continue in that spirit on a live-action project, so any aspect of the film’s visuals became fertile ground for modification. A favorite example is the labeling of the camera views. This started as just a sanity check to keep me honest during the edit, but after the labels were removed I found that while not necessary, early viewers missed the additional Easter Egg embedded in the project.

In regards to the overall postwork, the final version of the film has about 500 VFX shots that involve some form of match-moving, CGI, or compositing. In addition to that work, the vast majority of the film has shots with video looks, titles, or animations that were completed during the color grade. I think this makes the film very unique regardless of the budget. Modern tools have given independent filmmakers the ability to modify, iterate, and remaster an entire film in a few hours. What excites me the most though is that while I strongly believe this trend will continue to grow as the tools for filmmakers become more streamlined, I am not sure it is something that will ever be possible for large budget projects with a decentralized labor force.

In the end, the entire project was one of the hardest, but most rewarding things I have ever completed. I had to pace the time I could spend on it, and there had to be necessary breaks. But it was always a joy when I could return to it and experiment with ideas I would never find the opportunity to pursue on a standard commercial project.