A while back, an old friend of mine from grad school called me up and asked me to co-write a script for an indie film. He was out in Virginia, I was here in California. We wrote the script, batted it back and forth for a while, polished it up, and then I went on my merry way. He and some associates then did the hard part of the job. They went and shot the thing. Writing film scripts is not that hard. There’s a reasonably rigid formula to it. Shooting them? That’s a different kettle of slippery little fish.
The film is called The Fellows Hips: The Rise of the Gamers (here’s the IMDB page if you want to check out cast/crew). It’s a buddy-comedy movie about some high school gaming geeks who find meaning in life by getting into a Lord of the Rings video game contest. The story follows them as they road-trip it down to the convention and geekdom. We wrote the script to deliberately mirror events from the Lord of the Rings. And, yes, we did get the Saul Zaentz Company to sign off on the project. They’ve been known to sue people who take liberties with LOTR, as they hold the entertainment rights to the trilogy. As part of the film, we also won the collaboration of the guys at Turbine who do the MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. I haven’t seen the final cut, but they were gracious enough to allow video game footage to be used in the film.
In addition to co-writing the script, I also wrote a song for the soundtrack. You can hear a rough cut of it here. Anyway, The Fellows Hip should be released sometime later this year. Keep an eye out for it!