Neill Blomkamp Embarks On Experimental Film Project Oats Studios; Watch The Trailer
By Hoai-Tran Bui/May 30, 2017 10:00 am EST
After making the modestly-to-poorly received sci-fi films Elysium and Chappie, Blomkamp may be stepping away from trying to live up to early praise of him as the next exciting sci-fi director, and going back to his roots: short films. Blomkamp has been teasing his mysterious Oats Studios project for a while, but a new teaser reveals a hint of what the director’s experimental short film initiative will look like.
The cryptic trailer opens with a shot of a dilapidated Eiffel Tower, as a voiceover says, “We were once mankind. We were humanity. They came here to exterminate us.”
The trailer continues with shots of a woman (played by Dakota Fanning?) shooting an alien in a red-lit corridor, American soldiers facing zombie creatures in Vietnam, and a few more shots of warfare against aliens, complete with exploding tanks and terrifying creatures. The trailer announces that the series of short experimental films called “Oats: Volume 1” will be available to stream on Steam in the next couple months.
Blomkamp has been teasing the prospect of Oat Studios for some time now, asking if fans would be interested in buying films off Steam, Valve’s PC distribution service best known for being a cheap distributor of PC games. Blomkamp later posted some mysterious images to Twitter, showing off one of the aliens seen in the trailer, as well as a Vietnam-era soldier. Earlier this month, he posted a 15 second teaser of a soldier shooting down an unknown something.
If I sold experimental short films on @steam_games as tests for potential full feature films, would people watch them?
— Neill Blomkamp (@NeillBlomkamp) April 9, 2017
With this project, it seems like Blomkamp is trying to utilize Steam as a go-to place for experimental art and as an outlet for his own wacky and bizarre alien invasion ideas without the limits of studio expectations.
Nevertheless, the teaser is intriguing, and could give Blomkamp the creative boost to once again reach the heights of the magnificent District 9.
