Crafting an impressive short with ideas to burn is becoming an ever-more popular means for first-time filmmakers to get their foot in the studio door. Dracula Untold’s Gary Shore got his start that way, and this year’s Pixels** was born from Patrick Jean’s video game-referencing work. Now Dutch ads and short film director Mischa Rozema has scored a deal with Warner Bros. on the back of his pitch film, Sundays, which you can watch below.
Rozema’s concept, which he wrote with Kevin Koehler, finds Brian Petsos as a man who begins to realise that he himself and the world around him are not what they seem – indeed, the whole universe appears to be slowly falling apart. But can he trust even his own senses? The short definitely has overtones of The Matrix, Inception and even District 9 in its use of grungy visual style and dystopian ideas.
The short came about when Jairo Alvarado from Circle of Confusion saw one of Rozema’s ads and located him in Amsterdam. When Rozema pitched him Sundays as a potential film, Alvarado instead suggested a team up with mega-agency UTA and a Kickstarter campaign to secure the $50,000 to make the short, which Rozema then worked on with his company, PostPanic. With the short film hitting the web earlier this week, a number of the studios began trying to secure the rights to it and Rozema’s services for a feature length version, with Warners winning out over Sony and Fox.
Now, the plan is for Rozema to work on a potential film with new writers and make it his directorial debut. As cameras and digital filmmaking techniques becoming ever more accessible and affordable, expect this to keep happening.