A Blade Runner For The Singularity - True Skin Picked Up By Warner Brothers

 Film

True Skin a science fiction short film set in the not-too-distant future where augmentation is the way of life went viral online last month and netted director Stephan Zlotescu a full-length picture deal.  The new futuristic movie could end up being a contemporary Blade Runner for our exponential times.

I t only took a week, for a big Hollywood producer to option a full-length version of writer-director Stephan Zlotescu's True Skin after it appeared online and went viral last month. Zlotescu is an FX savant who has worked on videos for Kanye West, Lady Gaga  and Nicki Minaj but always planned for bigger things.

With his FX background, Zlotescu made the short film on a minimal budget, hoping to use it as a showcase for his style and ideas. It worked really well, and now the studio hopes to make a project that has an underlying big concept but on budget similar to the sci-fi found-footage hit Chronicle.

True Skin is set in the not-too-distant ubiquitous augmented reality future where everyone is augmenting themselves. The story’s protagonist heads to the black market of Bangkok, where he gets hold of a mysterious chip that he discovers is slowly turning him into a robotic cyborg-- and, as a result, wanted by shadowy organization. —

In an e-mail to Wired, director Zlotescu name-checked influences including Apocalypse Now, 70-millimeter documentary Baraka and, most obviously, Blade Runner. Ridley Scott famously shot his dystopian thriller on an expensive, art-directed soundstage to capture the look of a pollution-decimated Los Angeles, but using modern FX technology, Zlotescu and his team managed to envision the future in the slums of Thailand.

“We filmed 95 percent of the film in Bangkok,” Zlotescu told Wired. “Bangkok itself has an aggressive black market and that location dovetailed nicely with my ideas of black-market implants and sexbots.”  He shot True Skin on a Canon 5D Mark II digital video camera, and composited the FX afterwards.
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“True Skin is the culmination of all my work in film and VFX,” he said. “The plan all along has been to turn True Skin into a feature film. I have plenty of ideas and twists for the feature that build thematically from what you see in the short.”

Now signed on with Warner Bros., Zlotescu is set to direct a full-length version of True Skin, with David Heyman, of the Harry Potter franchise to produce.



SOURCE  Hollywood Reporter

IMAGE SOURCE  N1ON

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