Neill Blomkamp schrijft op dit moment samen met zijn Oats Studio's geschiedenis, want hij maakt hele korte science-fiction horror films die behoorlijk cool zijn. De website CraveOnline had nu een interview met hem en daar vertelde hij alles over het Volume 1 project en nog veel meer. Een klein stukje uit het artikel kan je hier onder lezen.

Crave: I am so excited by the all possibilities involved in Oats Studios. It feels like the short film, although it isn't going anywhere, isn't getting enough attention. This project, this studio you've created, at least it has opportunity to change that. Is that part of the mission statement?

Neill Blomkamp: I think the mission statement is really for us to try to be as free and creative open to making whatever we want to make. So the byproduct of that is, we can make more pieces if they are shorter, and show the audience more worlds, or avenues that we can go down. Instead of one piece that's 80 minutes long, we make four that are 20 minutes long. It's sort of like the shorter film allocation is a byproduct of financial limitation. I wish that I had a two-hour film for each of these, but we don't have the [finances].

So yeah, it's a hard one to answer. If you look at things like God, the God short we did, or the weird, totally insane cooking show stuff, those are meant to be the length that they are. It's hard to expand those out further. And those are designed to be shorter in nature. But the bigger ones are meant to eventually evolve into longer formats.

So is the business model, from that perspective, since you're spending millions of dollars on these shorts, to turn them into features? Or is there another endgame? Could these be released as an anthology?

We never really thought that the shorts themselves would generate revenue in any way. It was always more a case of... First of all, when we first got into it, it was like, okay, would people buy this kind of material, where the beginning and the middle and the end, a three-act film structure isn't really present as much? Will they feel ripped off? Can you even sell something like this? And we felt like a smarter move would just be to release everything for free, so the audience knew what to expect, and then if we want to attempt to charge for Volume 2 we could because you could make the argument that the audience knew what they were getting involved in, because Volume 1 was out for free.

But the more we thought about that the more that also didn't make sense, and I think, personally, to me, the best model of the whole thing would be to continuously release volumes online, for free, for as long as we can. Hopefully just forever. And you pick your favorite pieces, the pieces that the audience is really responding to. So in a sense that's where the [is] audience kind of picking.

But if you release five pieces and two are standout hits, then we inside the company could pick our favorite of those two and make a traditional film out of that, and the proceeds of that film would then finance Volume 2 and Volume 3. And you could do the same thing again with Volume 2 and Volume 3. Put those out for free, see which ones work, and then make a traditional, sellable piece out of whatever your favorite piece is.

So for me, from my perspective, that gives me the ability to always be in this creative environment of constantly coming up with ideas and executing them, and seeing what works and what doesn't work, and then getting ready to scale up to a feature film for something that I feel really invested in, and something that I know the audience is behind. That has become what I think we're going to do.