Carl Erik Rinsch’s short film The Gift is one of five shorts created for Philips’s Parallel Lines project. Each utilises the same six lines of dialogue, and was shot in order to promote Philips’s new range of 21:9 ratio televisions. Having premiered last night, Rinsch’s entry in the series seems to have made quite an impact – apparently a number of big-name studios are already engaged in a bidding war to develop the feature film that it’s based on: Small.
Rinsch has primarily been a commercial director in the past, and /Film, great supporters of his, have compiled a collection of his commercials, which you can watch here. They’re an inventive lot; I’m particularly keen on the first one: “Saturn: Evolution of Technology,” which features robotic dinosaurs. Nice.
The Gift is set in Moscow, and revolves around a mysterious box, and a humanoid robot on the run from the authorities. It’s mostly live-action, although some of the characters have been created using CGI, and they look very nice. The short in general is very cool, and definitely something I’d like to see more of. You can watch it below.
Heat Vision, who originally reported on the bidding feud resulting from The Gift‘s first showing, suggest that:
Some speculate the project will end up at Fox, because Rinsch is part of the stable of RSA, Ridley Scott’s commercial house that produced the short, and Scott’s longtime association with Fox.
Rinsch was also at one time, tied to Fox’s Alien prequel-thing. However, /Film points out that Rinsch is working on Creature from the Black Lagoon and 47 Ronin, both for Universal. I wonder who’ll get it…
/Film is on a roll for cool news this week, and today scooped an exclusive: the studio bidding war is over feature film Small, which has already been written and designed. Short The Gift is a prequel to it.
/Film’s Peter gives us some interesting information:
I have also learned that Rinsch has met with various nobel prize winning scientists and theorists in designing a world and a narrative that could be scientifically plausible. He’s pretty hardcore about creating a world that could actually exist, ala 2001.
And apparently The Gift was created using modestly-budgeted CGI, along the lines of District 9. (this would therefore be the reason big studios wanna grab hold of it). This was aided by Rinsch’s partnership with the SFX company in Barcelona that he utilises for his commercials.
Anyway, head on over to /Film for some more snippets of information, and some interesting concept art from Small. It’s a project that I’ll definitely be keeping my eyes on.
P.S. You can watch the four other shorts from Parallel Lines at the Philips Cinema TVs YouTube page. El Secreto de Mateo is probably my favourite, if not just for the wonderfully warm lighting.
