You may recall when director David M. Reynolds shared a guest post with No Film School readers, in the midst of what would become a significantly successful Kickstarter campaign -- overfunded $40k beyond its $60k goal -- for his project The Underwater Realm. Now, a year later, the film is less than two weeks from premiering for free on YouTube. Needless to say, the all-volunteer-multi-talented-hyphenates of Realm Pictures is working tirelessly to get the project finished. On top of this, they've shared a seemingly endless amount of insight into their process along the way, via weekly video blogs -- including a recent look at their self-implemented render farm-style workflow, the sound design, and a bit earlier, a look at their amazing underwater shooting process. Watch these and a new trailer below.


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The image above (courtesy Ben Von Wong) displays a couple of the notable things about this production -- which will culminate in 5 shorts portraying mankind's encounters with the lost civilization of Atlantis throughout history -- mainly its intensive aquatic shooting, and the custom lighting, camera, and communication techniques necessary to pull it off. The previous post here, by director David Reynolds himself, includes details of building a cheap kino flo-like lighting array -- the team also devised a fully submersible DIY LED array as well -- so be sure to check that out.

Here are some of the more recent video blogs, which will give you a serious idea of why this independent, low-budget, high-quality feature-length undertaking is important to what we do. These first two deal with the crew's workflow during crunch time:

These other two, posted two months and a month ago respectively, illustrates what the production had to go through to achieve the Atlantian thread vital to the concept.

This material is just the tip of the iceberg, a sliver of the goods already available on Realm Pictures' Vimeo page -- and this is just behind-the-scenes stuff. Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for the premiere of The Underwater Realm itself, on the 25th of this month.

Link: The UnderWater Realm -- Vimeo

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