This film was produced by Katsuhiro Jones as a fictional but serious warning to the townspeople of Vestige. Mysterious underground experiments were being performed by "The Company" and the results could wreck havoc on the town (and the planet) if they're not stopped. Too bad no one in town took Katsuhiro seriously!

This is a full-length monster movie for Players to uncover in "Bounty of Blood", the 3rd DLC for Borderlands 3. There are a total of six (6) film reels hidden around the game. As a Player, once you found a reel you could return to the movie theater and see where it fit.

Watching the film, any reels you haven't yet found are marked with a "missing reel" placeholder. This incentivized the Player to track down the other reels and see the completed film. Once completed, the Player would win the mission and the gratitude of the theater owner.

I had so much fun making this but it was a huge challenge being the only artist devoted to this. An initial outline, written months before, specified where each Reel would be found in the world and a basic story arc. This was the only pre-planning I had to work off of. The actual moment-to-moment details/locations/situations were created by me, in sequential order, as I started location scouting and building each shot. By reel 4, I still had no idea how the film was going to climax and conclude.

No additional art/animation/VFX support was available so I had to use whatever assets were readily usable. I raided character animations from the main game and kit-bashed them to approximate the character motivations I needed.  In many cases, scenes were made up on the spot based on whatever animations I could blend together.

There was no budget allocated for voice work, so I added fake subtitles to scenes where dialogue would have appeared. Happily, we did have budget set aside for sound effects and music, which helped to nail the old-film vibe.

On top of all of these constraints, I began work on this at the end of March 2020 - right as the COVID lockdown kicked into gear. This entire film was created in near-isolation.

* The film's main character is also the owner of the movie theater in Vestige. The film was made decades prior, so astute Players may notice a visual age difference when comparing the characters side by side.

* The opening company logo is a spoof of Toho; the studio responsible for the Godzilla films. Ten years prior, I created a similar Toho logo for a mobile game called "Monsters Ate My Condo".

* As a callback to the old film projectors, a cigarette burn in the top right corner of the image or a missing-scene "X" indicates when a reel changeover is about to occur.

* If you look closely, there are a number of visual Easter eggs scattered throughout the film to emphasize the Director's low-budget "vision" for the film. You might see things like buildings that are obviously miniatures, visible set lighting, models hanging from strings, and other fun elements: