What's Manborg about?Manborg is about a soldier that is killed in an epic war against hell, only to return as a cyborg in the distant future, where the world has been taken over by demons. Manborg must then team up with a rag-tag group of rebels to battle to evil Count Draculon.
Manborg infamously was shot on a thousand dollar budget. What was your greatest cost?
Probably costumes, and all the junk it took to make the costumes. I visited a lot of used sporting-goods stores to buy old hockey pads. Everything else was made out of junk and discarded materials.
What was the genesis of the film?Manborg came about when I was watching the 80s classic
The Eliminators with fellow Astron-6 member Jeremy Gillespie, and he remarked that I should make a movie called
Manborg.
For some reason that’s all it took to convince me to devote 3 years of my life to making that dream a reality.
You shot over a year in your spare time to make the film. How much of the film was planned and scripted and how much was improvised once filming began?
There was a (pretty weak) script for the movie, I really relied on the actors to punch it up and make everything entertaining. Adam, Matt, Conor and Jeremy really took their roles and turned them into the charming characters that they are. Jeremy wrote the entire romantic subplot between The Baron and Mina, which I think is the best part of the movie.
Manborg utilizes a significant amount of green screen work. What equipment did you use to make the film with and what challenges were there during production and later, post production?
My mom sewed the green screen for me, and I borrowed lights from my old high school. It was a long torturous process trying to make this movie. It took about a year to shoot, and then 2 years of post-production. The biggest challenge of production was dealing with the conditions of the spaces we were in.
We shot in my garage and the dusty basement of a store. Neither were very habitable and it made filming a lot more difficult than it needed to be. Post production was especially challenging because the quality of video we shot on was so low, it made keying out the green screen a nightmare.
In conclusion, it was a good learning experience that I hope to never repeat.
The film is a love letter to genre films of the Eighties. Are there any specific influences?The Eliminators, I Come In Peace, Robot Jox, Guyver 2: Dark Hero, Starcrash, Judge Dredd, Spawn, The Keep, Captain America 1990, Nemesis, Cyborg…and about a million others. My childhood was built on watching vhs movies. If there’s a heaven, for me it’ll be a grungy video store with endless racks full of sci-fi/horror/action movies with cool covers.
Will there be a Manborg 2? What are your future projects?
I’d love to do a
Manborg 2, just not anytime soon. I’ve got a few things in the works right now. My hope is to start making movies for a little bit more than 1000 bucks.
What are you currently geeking out over?
Just got my 4 movie action-pack in the mail from Amazon:
Cyclone, Alienator, Eye of the Tiger, and
Exterminator 2! Can’t wait to watch them!
And to celebrate the release of
Manborg, we're giving away three copies of the film on DVD!
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