You might feel like the found-footage movie market is already over-saturated, but the genre’s enduring popularity (re: box office $uccess) means it won’t be retired anytime in the near future. Earlier this year, Screen Rant‘s Rob Frappier spoke with screenwriter John Swetnam – who penned the developing found-footage films Evidence and Category 6 – about how affordability and cultural relevance are helping to keep more of these projects rolling down the production pipeline.
Case in point: Michael Bay is getting in on the craze by producing a found-footage film titled Almanac. The project is being written by newcomers Jason Pagan and Andrew Stark, with Dean Israelite, cousin of Jonathan Liebesman (who’s helming Bay’s Ninja Turtles reboot – coincidence?), attached to make his feature-length directorial debut on the film.
THR reports that Bay and Platinum Dunes co-heads Andrew Form and Brad Fuller are backing Almanac, which is ‘intended’ to be a found-footage feature – one that Paramount is developing “aggressively and swiftly” for a theatrical release. No other details have been officially announced as of yet, though insiders (hat tip to /Film) are comparing Almanac to Chronicle “except with time travel instead of superheroes” (or super-powered teens, as screenwriter Max Landis might prefer to put it).
Found-footage as a storytelling device (or gimmick, take your pick) allows films to jump back in time with relative ease, as evidenced by such films as Apollo 18 and Paranormal Activity 3. That is to say, seamlessly combining that format with the ever-popular time-travel plot device (see: Looper) seems like a feasible task; it’s almost surprising that no one’s beaten the Almanac crew to the punch on that.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis in ‘Looper’
Israelite, as mentioned before, may have industry connections that helped him land the Almanac job, but he’s also picked up prizes from the Ashland Independent and Ojai Film Festivals, as well as the ATAS Foundation College Television Awards for his short film Acholiland. Alamanc, if done well, could propel Israelite and his writers to bigger and better things, as Chronicle has done for Landis and director Josh Trank (who’s now working on the Fantastic Four reboot).
Bay, meanwhile, is putting the finishing touches on his bodybuilder crime flick Pain and Gain for release next year, before he sets to work directing Transformers 4. He’s also backing the Treasure Island prequel series Black Sails for Starz, as well as a handful of other gestating projects.
More on Almanac as the story develops.
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Honestly sounds interesting. I wonder how the time travel thing will work with this.
So basically Back to The Future if it was a found footage flick it could turn out to be, interesting but not enough to excuse the mockery that Bay has caused in this day and age of filming.
1. michael bay
2. found footage
3. time travel
Yeah I think thats everything I dislike rolled into a mismatched play-doh ball.
Then don’t watch it
I intended not to but thanks for the suggestion.
Don’t listen to matthew, I want your money so I can blow more things up in the movie I make after this one…
I was thinking a live action “Little Mermaid” but instead of a mermaid, she is an alien, and a evil woman named “octopus girl” finds some of her tech and it makes her a hybrid, both girl and octopus, so then The little mermaid grabs some of her biggest guns and blows up atlantis where octopus girl lives… I still need to find out a way for there to be fire under the water…
Signed, Michael Bay
An alien from the future, she left her home world in a vessel named FLOUNDER and got sucked in a wormhole where she finds herself in the San Fransisco Bay. Her robot friend is named “Sebastian X-42″ he is red and likes to sing…
LMAO
This guy is hilarious. Can I adopt you?
I’m sorry, but no Dazz.
But thank you for being a fan
LMAO!
oh boy, how exiting… f*** you michael bay…
Wait….did you say that because his name is attached to help make it or cause you genuinely think the concept is horrible because it really isn’t.
At least it’s not the usual “hey guys, I found an old tape with ghosts and such on it, lets watch”
Yeah, it’s “Wow, Chronicle actually made a good found footage film that wasn’t dumb horror shlock, lets just ride its ass and make an actual profit off this bandwagon. Nobody has done a found footage time travel one, right? Next we can do found footage romantic-comedy.”
I’m just trying to say that
A. It’s not as creative as you claim after Chronicle
B. He has every right to call that concept stupid.
It’s pretty creative, we don’t even know how the time travel thing will work yet but you’re writing it off already.
He does have a right to call it stupid but honestly, it’s like me ragging on idiotic movies like The Hangover for being stupid. Clearly there’s a market for it otherwise it wouldn’t have made money but it’s all opinions.
CHRONICLE. ALMANAC.
Use your head for a moment. I’m not writing it off as stupid, I’m writing it off as a ripoff, which is exactly what it will be. You’ll see.
Wow another found footage movie? This fad needs to end now. It’s purposefully crappy filmmaking that’s passing for filmmaking.
Don’t watch it then. I don’t like romantic comedies, but i don’t go around slating them, the millions and millions they take in the box office disagree with you.
Michael bay please dont allow hasbro to make a hh hippo and monoply!!they will go bankrupt and you wont be able to make 3more transformers
It’s not so much the found footage angle that bothers me, it’s that they’re usually filmed in shaky cam which drives me nuts. Cloverfield would have been awesome if they didn’t use shaky cam.
You must really hate home movies then because they have shakier shaky cam than Cloverfield did. Apart from the moments in the movie where he was running with the camera in his hand.
Does ANYONE like watching home movies? Besides, watching home movies on a TV versus a shaky cam flick like Cloverfield on the big screen are 2 different things.
actually, NONE of my home movies have shaky cam.. I use a home-made steady-cam rig.
you, too, can “just say no to epilepti-cam”.
Do you work for Paramount?
Also this is Bay. King of the constantly moving camera. Combine the two and you get a puke inducing extravaganza.Lol
is this found footage will have a slomo rolling shot around the characters? just sayin..
Sounds intresting but Michale bay is producing it. Last I checked every movie he produces is really bad. The last michale bay produced move i saw was Nightmare on elm street on MAX. IT WAS SO BORING! They took out all the coolest scare scenes that was in the original (Like the bathtub scene) and the new formula was just lame.
The Nightmare on Elm Street remake was the straw the broke the camels back for me as far as these horror remakes and Platinum Dunes are concerned.
It took everything that was great about the franchise and threw it out the window and replaced it with what’s wrong with 90% of horror movies these days.
IMO it ranks at # 2 only behind Gus Van Zandt’s Psycho as the worst horror remake of all time.
The straw that broke it for me was making horror movies PG-13…
There are three things that can potentially make a movie awful and they are: time travel, found footage, and Michael Bay. This movie will have all of them. God help us all.
I’m still interested. If it looks good, I’ll see it.
If someone goes back in time and kills Michael Bay’s mom before he is born, will we have to sit through any more of this crap?
If I could blow things up during the movie, I would direct it, make Linkin Park sing the songs and hire a hot chick to stand around doing nothing…
I would direct it
http://scriptshadow.blogspom/2012/06/travel-day-late-post.html?m=1
I think this could be good. I mean come on. . . what if this is like a government thing in the future. . . and they use cameras on soldiers helmets (think Aliens) to do the interacting with environments. As far as that goes, I think it would be the closest we would get to being in the experience. I think it sounds pretty interesting as long as it stays away from romance. Romance and Michael Bay don’t play out so well. . . the best was Armageddon and that wasn’t the greatest. But I can see this as having massive potential.
shaky cam, or what I prefer to call “epilipti-cam” has no purpose in cinema. The oft touted excuse of “making it feel real” is complete horse pucky. Your eyes don’t work that way, even when you’re running, you don’t “see” in shaky cam.
The brilliance of the film Chronicle is that they actually found an internally logical reason to REMOVE the shaky-cam effect.
And in my opinion, “found footage” is a gimmick, and has now become a means of making cheap (read: poor quality, not inexpensive.. although it DOES tend to make for inexpensive films) films. The “found footage” excuse allows the screen “writers” to abscond from their writing responsibilities.
Oh, and Michael Bay + Time Travel + Found Footage… yeah, skip.
Bay and found footage: two of the worst things to ever happen to movies. Seems right that they would find each other, except that the thing that makes found footage profitable is that the movies are extremely cheap to make, and what makes bay films profitable is that they are extremely overproduced and expensive piles of excrement saturated with fx and explosions. I guess cloverfield managed to meld the two.