If that sounds just slightly interesting, you may want to check out Stag Films' "Sex Galaxy," a sci-fi comedy making the rounds at film festivals around the world.
Stag Films is a pioneer of the so-called green movie, which uses recycled stock and public domain footage to create, as founder Mike Davis said, “something new and extremely wild.”
Davis told XBIZ that the idea of using recycled footage was one born out of necessity.
“I was on the prowl for innovative methods of low-budget filmmaking, finding that I couldn't raise the kind of money needed to make the movies I wanted to make,” he said. “I couldn't afford explosions, spaceships, riots, robots, dinosaurs, nuclear wars, that kind of thing — and all of that can be found in the grainy old footage I'd been collecting.”
Davis said that he started assembling the short pieces like fake movie trailers but had the goal of making a full feature.
“My instinct was confirmed upon a repeat viewing of the Tim Burton movie ‘Ed Wood,’ where Johnny Depp is given a stock footage reel of a swimming octopus and says, ‘What if I made a whole movie out of this stuff?’
“When my creative process mirrors that of Mr. Wood, I know I’m on the right path.”
Davis said he has collected much of the footage through the years, stockpiling them from “old industrial promos, grainy educational classroom flicks, nudie stag reels and commercials.” He noted that some of it is obtained legally because some films were never properly copyrighted.
With “Sex Galaxy,” Davis found the right mashup of copyright-free stock footage and edited it together. Adult performer Puma Swede even stars in the film.
“I stumbled on a public domain movie, ‘Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women,’ which is itself a cannibalization of a Soviet sci-fi epic ‘Planeta Bur’ and had what I needed for the main source of the images for 'Sex Galaxy,'” he said.
Davis admited that his company is trying to carve a niche out of the green movement, and he relies on MySpace, YouTube and Facebook to help promote “Sex Galaxy.”
“I have several offers for the movie, but I sense that with my next film the old way of doing these things might not work,” he said. “Technology is changing the rules, so I'm banking on green movies being the wave of the future.”
Davis’ movie screens Sunday during Another Hole in the Head, a sci-fi/horror film festival showing June 5-18 at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco.
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