The New Venue

18.March.1999 Park Wars EPISODE I - The Little Menace the directors' cut During March the New Venue is the official online screening venue for the New York Underground Film Festival, bringing you subversive, twisted and underground films only available for viewing over the Internet. To close the festival, the New Venue presents a special directors cut of the much ballyhooed South Park Star Wars Teaser Trailer. Cutting and pasting the original audio from the "Star Wars Episode I" trailer to new animation based on the characters from "South Park", the animators offer an "evil Peanuts" take on that galaxy far, far away. Directed, Edited and Animated by Ayaz A. Asif Directed, Written and Produced by Lincoln Gasking Art and 3D Design by Ted Bracewell Additional Art by Jaz Grewal Special Thanks to Chris Roberto Stills from "Park Wars" (reduced size) This digital flick pays homage to the quintessential pop culture icons of 1999. It was originally produced for countingdown.com, 1998's "Cool Site of the Year" and the organizing force behind the a group of well over one hundred die hard fans who will be camping out for the 30 days prior to the release of "Star Wars Episode I". If obsessive fans and long lines turn you on, check out 1997's award winning cult documentary "Tatooine or Bust" directed by New Venue creator Jason Wishnow (shameless promotional plug). And now, back to the New Venue. Interview with the filmmaker. New Venue: What is the appeal of digital filmmaking? Asif: Creating films in the digital format has many appeals. Working with so many people on different corners of the globe, wouldn't have been feasible if not for this medium. It's also, faster, and cheaper. Of course, most important of all it's easier, being non-linear. New Venue: How do you take into account the constraints of the Internet? Asif: We didn't do the project with them in mind too much.... It was intended for Internet distribution, but was done from the get go in broadcast quality, to get the best results. New Venue: What technology did you use? Asif: We did all the drawing in Adobe Photoshop 5. 2D Animation and compositing was done in Adobe After Effects 4.0 Pro. The 3D animation was all done in 3D Studio Max. Final edit was done in Discreet Logic *edit. All done in on a Pentium II 450, with 256 MB of RAM, running Windows NT but optimized for the web with Movie Cleaner Pro and the Sorenson Codec on a Mac. New Venue: How did you come together to make this digital flick? How did technology facilitate the production? Asif: I live in Long Island, NY, and do computer programming consulting. Ted lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and is an art student. Lincoln, lives in Melbourne, Australia and runs countingdown.com. We all collaborated together via the internet, long ICQ chats, a hidden password protected website, and email. New Venue: Appropriating other media is popular in web and underground aesthetics. Any concerns about copyrights? Asif: Well since this was a parody, we figured the parody clause would protect us... also, we never did or intend to make a dime off this. It was all done just for fun. New Venue: Where else can we see your work? Asif: http://www.countingdown.com/ Most of my work has not been released to the public but I have a couple other "Star Wars" related videos on the site. View this movie. You can find out about other digital flicks in the New Venue Archives.