GNOMES *RE-RELEASE*
 

I can't believe I forgot to post this.

Despite the turmoil that would later occur in part because of this film, this was really a joy to make, and is still a personnal favorite of mine. In retrospect, I can see its flaws very clearly, but being my first feature length movie it'll always be something I'll hold dearly in my little 3dmming heart.

Original release thread: http://www.3dmm.com/showthread.php?t=8731
Old discussion thread: http://www.3dmm.com/showthread.php?p=966765#post966765
(will be merged back in at a later date, separated to reduce clutter)

Re-released as part of the 3DMM Preservation Project. Enjoy.

DVDs.

There, it's out of the way. Please direct further commenting at the movie itself. :)

This was really the most fun I ever had making a 3dmm movie. It started becoming a chore after this. I learned a lot which still aids me to this day on my new projects.

Really, the most notable thing about this movie is the scenery and direction. It's been said again and again that the concept of murderous gnomes is impossible to take seriously, but Mike Storch just rolls with it, treats it with much more gravitas than it deserves, and winds up with something that's actually quite good, as long as you don't start picking into the hows and whys. No, the gnomes existence is never explained. No, it makes no sense that they want to, and have the means to kill a bunch of people. No, the ghost never really ties in to anything. No, there is no satisfying conclusion. This is still a fine movie with some fine moments.

The movie is incredibly good with scenery and character animation. The wide shots of the forest and buildings are incredible, and still stand up well. Of particular note is the ghost of Sarah's father. Even with V3dmm, it's incredibly difficult to pull off gore in a 3DMM movie without it looking cartoony or ridiculous. Storch actually succeeds at creating a walking, decomposing, maggot infested corpse that actually comes off as rather unsettling.

The biggest goddamn tragedy is that Gnomes is pretty much inextricable from all the drama that ended up attatched to it. It's INCREDIBLY difficult to actually discuss this movie without bringing up THAT saga, or questioning whether Ramza actually composed anything for it, and so forth. Taken as it is though, Gnomes is a fun, if flawed horror movie.



Oh, and kudos to Z-man as well, for what must have been an incredibly thankless job of putting Sarah's arm in a cast every damn frame she's in.

From the first time I heard about this, it sounded to me like a directorial challenge: "Make a creepy, serious movie about the dumbest concept you can think of." The best case scenario is that the craft disguises the silliness, and I think at all levels that's basically what happened. Mike's directing and instincts are so good, it elevates some pretty bad writing and dialogue and makes you expect better. The direction soars so high above the material that you see the movie it could've been.

The characters are pretty trite as written, but you can see the broad strokes of a more nuanced version of them. It's like....if this wasn't directed as well as it is, the non-ending wouldn't have mattered. The story of Sarah's home life or how the kids bonded or the old man being like a surrogate protector isn't written or acted very well, but it's clearly building toward something, and then the movie just stops. The human drama isn't tied into the horror or enhanced by it or anything. It's just story, story, story, "and then some gnomes kill everyone."

About the horror stuff itself: the scene where she talks to her dead father was so damn creepy and great, but I had no idea what it had to do with the rest of the movie. When it came to the gnomes, I got the distinct impression that Mike ran as far from them as possible. There might have been a way to make them scary, but it didn't seem like he was able to find it, and so we see the tops of their hats scurrying left and right like short people walking in front of the screen. The darkness itself is what's scary in this movie, the unseen comes across as the threat, the gnomes are more of a distraction. I don't think less of them would've helped either -- I think the only solution would've been to just go for it, make them fucking creepy and show them a lot. Don't think much was gained by pretending it was the real world and cryptically shying away from anything that might sound silly.

The drive up to the cabin made me laugh, cause I could kind of see the progression: Ramza hands Mike a 60-second piece of music, says "time the drive up to the cabin to this." Mike is like "er, okay," and does 5 or 6 shots, then stretches them unnaturally to fit the score. We sit for so long on these landscapes with nothing happening, then the car finally comes into frame. It's a total soundtrack showcase.

The movie hasn't aged well, but it's still really interesting to study and see how all these elements work together. Great direction does some interesting things to a sub-par story, but it also hamstrings the ending even further. When horror is done well, it's creepy and most of the characters dying is a natural consequence of the plot. When most of the movie is a character drama, it feels really strange in the last 5 minutes to go "AND THEN GNOMES KILLED EVERYONE", even if the mood has been suitably dark up to that point. If it had come around and had some kind of epilogue where the kids try to make sense of life and death and all this crazy shit that happened to them, it would've worked better as a whole, I think.

There's a lot here to like, though, I was really getting into it by the halfway mark. It's obvious you had great control over audience manipulation even at this stage. It's so well done I forgot to account for it being your first non-short in assessing it. You did a beautiful job with the craft of making this movie, and it's not a bad experience watching it, you can just see all the seams now. The nice thing about that is the seams are interesting to talk about, too.

The whole idea came out of a conversation that was very similar to how Dew Fight came about. My best friend and I were talking one day and randomly started talking about evil Gnomes and then I was like "omg I have to make a movie." I've always liked the idea of an evil forest, and now a days I would have focused more on that rather than just straight up evil little dudes with pointed hats.

I really really wanted to expand on all the holes in the story in Gnomes 2. I wanted the father to be brought back in and explained. I wanted to answer questions. Most importantly I wanted to shift the story to the whole evil forest idea and kinda demote the Gnomes in terms of their importance. Ramza wanted to go into a completely different direction and instead of answering any of the lingering questions from the first movie his Gnomes 2 script just got weird and brought up a whole bunch more ridiculous questions. Around this time I got really into making Missing, and the DVD crap started, and I just basically lost interest in the sequel all together. To this day, though, I still have a more fleshed out and focused version of the story in my head.

I think I realized straight up Gnomes would be hard to make really scary so I made the conscious decision to show them as little as possible until the end (and even then its just a face). That decision though kinda lead to my less is more approach I sometimes use.

No other way to put it. This is completely true. Haha.
I really hated working that way, I felt like it constrained me a lot. That's why I did nearly all my work on the 3dmm version of Missing and THEN gave it to Ramza to pick out music. It worked much better that way. lol

The disconnect between the drama and horror is something that has bothered me increasingly each time I've watched it. I really like horror / suspense mixed in with some heavy drama. I learned here, though, that they need to have a common thread.

Thanks sir. I really love looking back at all this stuff. Its quite fun. lol

Ahhh, yeah, I can see that. A short black comedy with some creepy moments that disarms your expectations. Turning into a longer-form dramatic story was a lot more ambitious. The evil forest idea sounds like a much better concept, gives you a faceless malevolence that drives whatever creatures you decide to spawn out of it. Might be worth revisiting someday. Just don't call it "Gnomes". ;)I've been doing this with Vlarion for years. It's basically been percolating and evolving ever since I started remaking it in 2005. Might do something else with it one day.Yeah, if you're going to introduce interesting human drama, you should pay it off, otherwise your story is "your personal problems are irrelevant to monsters, who you should watch out for." If the story is just a red herring for monster deaths, have a blast, those can be really fun. But it's weird to write a story about a lot of involved character drama, then end it with "then a monster killed them all, the end."

Of course, I don't watch a lot of horror movies anyway because I'm a wuss. But I love suspense, which this (and your other work) does really well. :)

Of course this is fantastic. I'd even go so far as to say that this is the most cinematic 3dmm movie. Now, that's not necessarily a good thing. I consider 3dmm to be a medium in itself, and so to try so hard in mimicking live-action horror films, I think it's trying to be something it's not to some extent. However, that's not to say it's a bad movie. It's a great movie in fact.

To be nitpicky, there's a few things that really don't work. Most glaringly, the gnomes' laughs are downright comical. I was literally loling at them this time around, but that was in a fun way, even if it might've been unintentional. I think the relationship between the mother and daughter was a bit of a forced way to try to get people to take it more seriously; it came across as very unconvincing, at least to me. And in the scene where the old guy tells the kids about the gnomes, the fact that he keeps saying stuff like, "... oh, deary me, it's because I'm soooo OLD!" well, it's a bit silly. And one line of the old dude really threw me for a loop: "Boy, you are too young to carry such ignorance!" If you're going to be ignorant it seems like the time when it's most acceptable is when you're young. Obviously Ramza's the only one to blame for this bit, since he was the writer.

Otherwise, great movie. There's not many serious 3dmm films, and I think this one is at the top of the pile in that regard.

Also you dudes should re-release 3dmm House Party next for its relevancy :P.

I'm not big on this one, personally. And it has more to do with the script and the display of horror in 3dmm than anything else.

The dialogue and acting is... Alright. At best. Where this movie shines is in pacing and direction.

That's about as much as I can say about this one. I recognize its importance, but, I never thought it was particularly great.

It's kind of sad, because it starts to get a litle comedic when the gnomes show themselves. You need to play Amnesia, and watch Alien. They don't show the fear. This does have the potential of being really really scary though. brilliant film, and without expansions??? How did you manage?

I've learned many lessons since then and are in the process of applying them. ;)
And I secretly resisted using expansions early on. I lagged behind everyone else in their adoption.

I'm trying my hand at horror and I'm taking some inspiration from this. Hope you do horror again in the future!

It was 10 years last June that I made this. Even though I'm much older now, and even though 3dmm is far behind me; making this was one of the fondest memories I've ever had. I learned a lot and it laid the groundwork for how I would approach projects in the future. So much so that when I went to make my first feature, Phantom of the Woods, I used Gnomes as a basis for much of the setting and characters.

If you're interested in watching Phantom; the trailer is below as well as a link to my website where you can find info on where to watch it. (DVD, Xfinity, Cox, Verizon, Dish, and soon more) I've continued working in movies, video, and horror specifically. If you liked Gnomes please consider following my other work as I keep very busy and am always working on something new.

At the very least, though, give Gnomes one last watch through. I think its good for what it is and what it was.

And with that, it was fun while it lasted, but I'm out. Best wishes guys.

My Website (info on where to watch Phantom):
http://opensignprods.com/


Phantom of the Woods Trailer:



YouTube Channels:
https://www.youtube.com/HorrorHive
https://www.youtube.com/OpenSignProductions

Good job, I'll check it out