Is Neill Blomkamp about to rev­o­lu­tionise the film industry?

Hol­ly­wood is a busi­ness in which there are no guar­an­tees. Film­mak­ers and pro­duc­ers pour huge amounts of time, ener­gy and mon­ey into projects in an indus­try where suc­cess is mea­sured in box office dol­lars. But what if you could make an entire cat­a­logue of short films and cher­ry-pick the best for fea­ture devel­op­ment? This is the idea behind Oats Stu­dios, an exper­i­men­tal new pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny seek­ing to take unpre­dictabil­i­ty out of the equation.

Cre­at­ed by South African-Cana­di­an writer/​director Neill Blomkamp (Dis­trict 9, Ely­si­um, Chap­pie) in ear­ly 2017, Oats Stu­dios is a cre­ative play­ground with a focus on nur­tur­ing both emerg­ing and estab­lished tal­ent. Oats Stu­dios: Vol­ume 1 is set to con­tain four 20-minute films, all with­in the sci­ence fiction/​horror/​fantasy genre, inter­spersed with short­er, even stranger films.

So far the first two main shorts have been released, Rak­ka and Fire­base, along­side a two-minute spoof of an Amer­i­can infomer­cial. All are free to watch on oatsstu​dios​.com, as well as Steam and YouTube. Blomkamp has also made all com­po­nents of the films – from raw footage to com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed 3D mod­els – avail­able to down­load to encour­age users to cre­ate new films or even video games.

The poten­tial ben­e­fits of this scheme are twofold: first it enables Blomkamp to obtain feed­back from a much broad­er audi­ence sam­ple via online forums and YouTube com­ments; sec­ond, the col­lab­o­ra­tive nature of the studio’s cre­ative process will allow him to, in his own words, ​“inter­act with the audi­ence direct­ly, in a way that Hol­ly­wood doesn’t real­ly do.”

Going fur­ther than this, Blomkamp says he wants to build up an archive of work akin to a sculp­tor or painter, who might typ­i­cal­ly have ​“three or four hun­dred incom­plete oil paint­ings or half-done sculp­tures lying around in their house.” Clear­ly will­ing to exper­i­ment, Blomkamp’s stu­dio has opened up the doors to such possibilities.

This doesn’t feel like a van­i­ty project but a gen­uine attempt to do some­thing rad­i­cal with­in a risk-averse indus­try. In terms of his own film­mak­ing career, Blomkamp is hope­ful that Oats Stu­dios will enable him to deliv­er his next fea­ture to a ready-made fan­base. Yet while the prospect of a main­stream direc­tor effec­tive­ly bypass­ing Hol­ly­wood is cer­tain­ly intrigu­ing, at this ear­ly stage it remains to be seen just how prac­ti­cal it is.

It’s worth not­ing that Blomkamp has pre­vi­ous when it comes to tran­si­tion­ing from shorts to fea­tures, hav­ing devel­oped his 2005 viral hit, Alive in Joburg, into the crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed Dis­trict 9. Although this is com­mon prac­tice for film­mak­ers nowa­days, what Blomkamp is attempt­ing here is much more ambi­tious than your aver­age upscal­ing project.

One glar­ing prob­lem, which Blomkamp has open­ly admit­ted, is that Oats Stu­dios’ ​“busi­ness mod­el is to set fire to mon­ey right now.” Fund­ing the com­pa­ny out of his own pock­et is clear­ly unsus­tain­able in the long term, so a steady rev­enue stream will need to be estab­lished soon. One option (and pos­si­bly the most viable) is that after Vol­ume 1, all future films will be released behind a pay­wall. With enough audi­ence sup­port to even­tu­al­ly fund the first fea­ture that could in turn fund fol­low-up Vol­umes, Oats Stu­dios could fea­si­bly become self-sus­tain­ing with­in the next few years. This is a fair­ly big gam­ble, how­ev­er, and is being treat­ed as such.

Of course, stream­ing ser­vices such as Net­flix and Ama­zon have already proven that tra­di­tion­al the­atri­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly the safest mod­el. Oats Stu­dios’ tri­al and error struc­ture, on the oth­er hand, is a lot more unsta­ble – but if Blomkamp’s next fea­ture is a suc­cess, it will be inter­est­ing to see whether or not oth­er film­mak­ers and stu­dios fol­low suit. In any case, we’re excit­ed to see what kind of impact Blomkamp’s lat­est ven­ture will ulti­mate­ly have on the industry.