The why behind their passion
Morgan Spurlock has an impressive track record as a documentary filmmaker, making provocative films by putting himself at the center of the story, as in SUPER SIZE ME (2004), when he ate McDonald’s food exclusively for a month to show its health risks; POM WONDERFUL PRESENTS: THE GREATEST FILM EVER SOLD (2011), as he investigated product placement in films by selling the appearance of products in this film, and WHERE IN THE WORLD IS OSAMA BIN LADEN (2008). He’s a passionate, first-person filmmaker whose newest film isn’t about him. At all.
COMIC-CON EPISODE IV: A FAN’S HOPE is focused entirely on fans of San Diego’s annual Comic-Con, that huge and vibrant convention celebrating comic books, graphic novels, video games, and Japanese anime. Even if you’re not part of that world, Spurlock’s film is “a lot of fun,” says Kenneth Turan of the LOS ANGELES TIMES, “nicely balancing absurdity with genuine human interest,” says VARIETY’s Peter Debruge. The documentary follows five main characters, watching their deepest wishes evolve through the five days of the convention.
We have five reasons you should get this film now:
- It's fun, even if you don’t care for superheroes (as long as you’re intrigued by human beings).
- It's exciting – find out if a marriage proposal at the convention is accepted or if a monster maker hits the big time.
- For most cities, it’s not coming to a theater near you. To vote to have it come to your hometown, click here.
- You will understand the significance of comic and game culture to a vast segment of today’s culture creators, including Stan Lee, Joss Whedon, Guillermo Del Toro, Kevin Smith, Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, and Seth Green.
- It is an amazing piece of filmmaking!
Spurlock described to WIRED how they filmed this during the five days of the convention:
“We were following basically 10 characters into Comic-Con, and so we had 15 film crews, one camera for each one of those crews, and an additional five crews that were shooting panels or signings or B-roll at any given moment. Within each of those crews, there was a second camera that can either be taken to a different location or used within that shoot. So during the shoot, there were usually anywhere between 15 and 28 cameras that were shooting over the course of the five days of Comic-Con. There was a crew of 150 people that we had working on the film, everything from the sound and camera crews to production assistants, to location assistants, to talent scouts, people who are going around the floor trying to basically find people, publicists that were helping to arrange the interviews that were shooting on the sites. You know, gaffers, grips, electrics, it was huge.
And data wranglers. The thing is we were shooting about 100 hours of footage a day, so we’re having to wrangle all that footage at the same time so we can watch it every night. So every night, when we were done shooting, I would go down with the data wranglers, we would watch footage from select cameras — basically the ones that were following our characters. We weren’t even watching B-roll, we were literally just watching everything that was surrounding all the characters, making sure that whatever key story points there were, the key things that happened that day, we followed up on the next day, we knew what was happening when. I mean, it was a massive, massive undertaking.”
In answer to why he created a film like this about fans of Comic-Con, Spurlock answered: “what we wanted to make sure was that you understood why, the why behind their passion.” Now you have your chance -- get the film right here, right now, for just $6.99.