The demise and resurrection of BA2
Last week an email was sent out to my main BA2 investors/donators ($100 or more) informing them of Niobe’s decision to leave the cast permanently, and canvassing possible options in moving forward. The following ideas were presented:
* Re-cast the role of Calis with another actress.
* Re-write the current story, removing Calis from the film and writing in a new female lead character to work with Ruan.
* Cancel the entire production and refund everyone’s money at all levels.
* Postpone the entire production for at least 12 months to await Niobe’s (possible) return.
* Take BA2 out of the Star Wars universe completely and reformat.
* Write a completely new Star Wars fan film with all new characters (due to the impact of losing Niobe – a substantial role in BA2 - from the cast).
* With investor/donator approval, make an original sci-fi adventure short-feature. (Thus alleviating copyright problems with Lucasfilm).
The overwhelming responses from these people were to recast (58%) or to make an original sci fi feature (21%). No one voted to postpone until Niobe hopefully became available. The posts on The Force.net fanfilm forum generally also seemed to favor a re-cast.
Based on this, a few days ago I spoke to my principal cast and core producing team about exploring the option of re-casting Calis.
Everyone was in support of this, except for the actor Hadrian Jonathon (Thor).
Rather than re-cast Calis, Hadrian favoured postponement of the entire shoot for at least 12 months to await Niobe’s return to reprise her role (despite there being no certainty of when she might come back).
When the decision was made to undertake an urgent re-cast, Hadrian then told me that he had always made it clear that if Niobe wasn’t in the film, he wouldn’t be either.
As such, Hadrian informed me over the weekend he would not partipate in BA2 without Niobe Dean.
After some severe crisis management, I came to the reluctant conclusion that moving forward with a BA2 sequel in its current format is impossible.
As director I am simply not willing to postpone shooting for 12 months. Firstly, I won’t place our production team of cast and crew in limbo for that long – everyone is volunteering their time. Second, there still remains the risk that, even if we were to defer, any one of Niobe, Hadrian or Paul may ultimately become unavailable anyway.
With the story as is (Hadrian’s role is quite substantial), re-casting Calis AND Thor is not feasible. Sure, we could do a film with Ruan alone, and introduce a new supporting cast, but my feeling is having just one of the original three leads in the sequel is not in the spirit of what we wanted to do with a BA sequel.
Anything we do now is simply a salvage operation and not the film we were excited about doing.
I acknowledge we could simply start over and do an all new Star Wars fan film. But again, to replace the entire cast and have the crew start from scratch, throwing away hard work over the last 6 months, is too much to ask of unpaid volunteers who would now think twice about signing up again. It also throws any chance of a reasonable release date out the window, particularly as we were aiming to (like last time) co-incide our release around the theatrical release of the upcoming Star Wars prequel.
After this turn of events, I again e-mailed our key investors and discussed my preferred courses of action. One was to cancel the entire production, the other suggestion was to support us in an original sci-fi adventure film.
I must say the support from the investors/donators has been overwhelming under the circumstances. The almost unanimous decision from everyone that has replied to my e-mail is their willingness to stay on board and allow us to go ahead and produce an original film.
So, in conclusion, BA2 in its current format is no more. Instead, over the coming months we will be developing ideas for an original sci-fi adventure film, keeping any donor/investor informed of its progress. Everyone else who donated and requests a refund should contact me to arrange.
However, not all is lost. The good news is that, what with all the hard work put into the story and script; drawings, designs etc, last night H. Gibbens, our Lead VFX Supervisor, came up with a plan:
Rather than discarding the BA2 script and story, what if we were to still make BA2 – but as an animated film?
Much like the Animatrix shorts or Clone Wars cartoons, H is keen to make BA2 as 100% CG in an anime style 3D animation, so that all the hard work we have done over the past 6 months wont go to waste. The script and most of the design work can all be utilised. All three actors: Niobe, Hadrian and Paul, can be involved to lend their voices to the characters, and in terms of time investment for them – it can all be done in one day.
So now – we still get to tell the BA2 story to the fans in some form.
Thanks to all those who lent their encouragement and support to this project. We are equally excited about the prospect of producing an animated short that can still realize our sequel idea.
Cheers,
Nick.