BrandonJLa

After wasting most of 2013 on the legal process of extracting myself from RocketJump. (Legal stuff is time consuming and kills creativity) I decided that 2014 was a year of action, so now that I have my creative freedom back, I launched into the year with the plan to just go,go, go. So far, it's been great, seriously great, and you guys are going to really reap the benefits because there is a lot of amazing stuff on its way.

Throughout 2013 I had many different conversations about making a large scale Minecraft project with Mojang. They are very enthusiastic about projects surrounding Minecraft that come from the community, so much so that they have gone through the trouble of posting specific community guidelines that detail the extent of their support of Minecraft projects. It even details how they support the millions of dollars of ad revenue generated off of Minecraft Lets Plays and the tens of millions made off of Minecraft knock off games. Truly groundbreaking generosity, and its worked out well for them, I hope more games follow suit. The culmination of our talks concluded to this: they had no intention of selling the Minecraft film rights to anyone at the time, they supported all community projects that followed their guidelines but would not officially support any of them because they don't want to play favorites. Super respectable.

I launched the Kickstarter campaign and immediately got an email from Mojang, they supported the project and were very excited by what it promised but had a few tweaks that they requested for the campaign, so I temporarily pulled the campaign to alter it and then relaunch.

At this point two things both led me to decide to pursue my next project without Minecraft in it. First, something that I didn't realize until launching the Kickstarter campaign is that the audience of Minecraft is really young now. My experience in Minecraft as an early adopter was one filled with people that were in their 20's. I knew that the audience was younger now but I didn't realize just how young it had gotten. As you may remember from the campaign, my intention coming off of VGHS was for my next project to be much more mature to satisfy my more action oriented filmmaking sensibilities. Upon realizing the age of the current Minecraft fanbase I would be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Either I make the film that I wanted to make which would be too adult for the young fans or I make the film that I should make given the audience and disappoint those of you who are looking forward to me making a much more mature action project then what I did on VGHS.

The second reason is that I gravitated to the Minecraft franchise because of its position as a community based game that was outside of the traditional system. I wanted to make an indie movie for an indie game that approached the game differently then Hollywood's game adaptations. As soon as I learned that a Minecraft movie was being made by Warner Bros, it largely lost its appeal to me. I have high hopes for their movie, Lego Movie was great so it is in fantastic hands, I'll be there at midnight to see it. But this development makes me want to steer clear of it the same way Facebook's acquisition of Oculus made Notch want to seperate himself.

I'm super excited to announce what I've been developing over the past few months since this project. It's going to be right up your alley. It's going to be rated R, it's going to be unlike anything you've seen, it's going to be action packed, it's going to be 4k, guns will be reloaded whenever appropriate, it's going to be filmed in the same DIY style that you've come to love and expect from my work. Can't wait to tell you all about it!

Leave a comment with any questions!

Brandon

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