INTRODUCTION
Predator: Dark Jungle is Sboob Entertainment’s biggest project to date. In the summer of '99, we had quickly become bored out of our minds. Many years before, friends and I had created a 30 minute movie and called it "Predator 3". It was terribly written, terribly acted, and full of many terrible things that make you go "ha ha"; but, it was rather well done for our ages at the time. So, Rothanak (pronounced Rot-an-ah) and I thought it would be very fun to try and re-create our Predator 3 movie, and push ourselves to the limit to see what we were capable of. Seven months later and $1,000 poorer, we were done.

Yes, Predator is copyright of Twentieth Century Fox and no, we can't make any money off of it because of that. So why did we do Predator? Why didn't we come up with our own idea? Well, we needed something to compare our own efforts to; the best way to do that is to recreate instead of creating. We recreated the Predator costume, the special effects used in the Predator films, and all of the other things you find in both Predator films (skulls, skinned bodies, etc.). Just for the record, our characters (with the exception of the Predator) and story/script were original. When I look back at it, I can safely say we did a fine job; but, I think Sboob Entertainment's greatest strength is that we look at our past work and say "we could do that a lot better now". Following is a small re-cap of our work on Predator: Dark Jungle.

WHY PREDATOR?
Many people wonder, why did we choose Predator? Why not a better sci-fi movie to mock? To answer that, I have to explain why not anything else. The main thing to keep in mind is how limited we were in scenery, manpower, and equipment. Our film was done at home in our spare time between school and work hours. Our scenery included the trees in my backyard, and a neighbors farmhouse. The only city shots we could have gotten would be a near-by small town of 1600 people and no building over 3 stories high, and we couldn't exactly section off parts of town for ourselves. Our manpower consisted of myself, Rothanak, and any friends who volunteered to help. We knew right away that we'd never make any money off of our Predator movie, so we had to keep our budget tight. So to sum it all up, what did we have to work with? Two people doing all of the behind the scenes work, some trees, $1,000, and a camera from the mid-80's. As you can guess, we couldn't exactly recreate Jurassic Park or Starship Troopers.

Predator was perfect. We wanted to do a sci-fi movie, and it covers that. It carries all the elements we were looking for in one simple package. The real Predator movies are set in present day, which immediately makes it much easier than any future-based sci-fi movie. The first film contained nothing but trees - exactly what we had to work with. Most importantly, it contained only one elaborate costume; the Predator itself. The only other thing we had to worry about was guns.

SCRIPT
Our script for this film was actually a remake of our first attempt several years ago. Basically, I gave the script to Rothanak and asked him to take my crap and shape it into something good. I have to say he did a fine job. We created our own plot, characters, and twists, but included all of the characteristics of a Predator film; skinned bodies, big guns, skulls, so on and so forth. If you haven't seen the actual Predator films, do yourself a favor, run to you nearest video store and rent them. They're a great pair of sci-fi movies.

CAST & CREW
A cast and crew is very difficult to come by when you can't afford to pay any of them, and even more difficult to ask them to do strenuous work for many,many days in exchange for nothing. Everyone in our film was a volunteer, and we got rather frustrated with each-other at times. You see, it's very difficult to find a day when four employed people with very different schedules are free for an entire day and the weather is cooperating; we had to find days like that many, many times throughout the summer. Once you actually get the people there, it's even more difficult to actually get anything done; 3's a crowd, and 4's a disaster. Perhaps if we had all been getting 25 million dollar checks we would have been more cooperative.

The cast consisted mainly of myself, Rothanak Chhoun, Joe Lee, and Mark Marvin. On top of that, we had over half a dozen other people play small rolls or help out with the physical work involved, such as setting up equipment and moving things from location to location. We could have never done the film without these people, and it's fantastic that they actually volunteered. I'm a hundred-times-over thankful for them. Yes, even you, Shawn.

PROPS & COSTUMES
We needed props and we needed them fast. So where do you find a man-sized Predator costume for a very small amount of money? Well, you make it yourself. Yep. Our Predator was created through the cunning use of household items, such as cardboard and duct tape; and because we got stuck using a low-quality analog camera from the 80's, he's actually quite good looking, if I do say so myself. I don't know what we spent more money on, spray paint, bug spray, or Mountain Dew. We've got enough of each absorbed into our bodies to last us a decade.

Oddly enough, it's very difficult to get your hands on actual M-16 assault rifles and gauntlet guns. We found two toy M-16's laying around, and doubled the stalk and barrel size with a metal broom handle, cardboard, and electrical tape. Sadly, before the first day of filming, our M'16's got left out in the rain so one side of the barrels looked like mush. To remedy this, Joe and my character always keep the ugly side of our M-16's facing away from the camera during the movie.

The minigun was a lot of fun to make and show off. Six barrels of sheer pain constructed of PVC pipe, plumbing parts, wood, four oil filters, a governor off a tractor, some lawn mower parts, and cool-whip containers. With the major help of our friend Adam Laidlaw and some black spray paint, it all came together.

The ammunition backpack was an old school backpack of mine with a wooden box stuffed in it to give it the rectangular shape. We heard complains from Mark more than once about how heavy it became after carrying it for hours, but I'm sure he'll agree that it was worth the effort.

Our costumes were taken, for the most part, directly from Mark's basement. His older brother was in the army, so he had a lot of old clothes packed away. We took the harnesses from our gun-touting fathers, and ran up to the sporting goods store to get camoflauge face paint. Our costumes are far from realistic, but they were the best we could do with what we had.

SCENERY
As I said earlier, we were pretty much limited to my backyard for a place where we could film for long lengths of time without disturbing anyone. Of course, the trees were no picnic. All of our power had to arrive via extension cord, so we were limited in distance to how many feet of cable we had. Batteries only last so long, and not often enough did we have a spare battery on hand. Rothanak and myself had to clear paths and open areas in the woods by hand; a very time-consuming task that had be done before we could start filming anything. We get the "I didn't know Colombia looked like northern Minnesota" smart-ass remark every time we show our film; I say to them, "You can put up the money to fly us down to Colombia for a summer, and then we'll make sure our trees are the right kind". We did our best to avoid pine trees, though. And then, there were the bugs.

If you've ever been to northern Minnesota you know how bad the bugs can be. We had to stop filming many times to swat a mosquito off, and we basically went insane trying to sit still and calm while having the blood sucked out of you from every limb in your body. We went through over a half-dozen cans of "Off" and other bug sprays trying to keep the little savage beasts off.

The Bees. While in the middle of filming the "shack" scene, we came to realize the hard way that a small army of bees had colonized under the doorway of the shack where we filmed. We didn't care for them much, and I think the feeling was mutual. None of us got stung, but in order to continue filming, we had to beat them to death with our own shoes.

The "Colombian farm" was property of Adam Laidlaw, who so generously let us film in his yard and barn on several different occasions. We saved these indoor scenes for last because our filming took longer than anticipated and ended up going well into fall. We needed to get all of our outdoor filming done before the leaves started changing colors and the snow started falling. There were some nights that our indoor filming was done in about 30 degree temperatures. We kept a small propane heater running off-camera at all times. I probably kept the warmest with the big, bulky Predator costume. Thankfully, we all thawed nicely during the ride home in the car with the heater set to the temperature of the sun's surface.

SPECIAL EFFECTS
Perhaps the single most important thing that sets our Predator movie apart from any other "home-made" videos is our computer-generated special effects. Our goal was to be able to recreate the special effects used in the Predator films, including the Predator's laser, infrared vision, and cloaked mode. With some major help from Rothanak, he and I pulled this part off quite well, I think.

For equipment, we were armed with a Blue & White Power Macintosh G3, an Aurora Fuse video capture card, Quicktime 4 Pro, and a demo version of Adobe Photoshop 5. After getting the video into Quicktime, we could break it down frame by frame and use Adobe Photoshop to add in any effects we wanted. Of course, this means that any second of the film with a special effect in it had to be broken down into 30 separate pictures and dealt with each individually. A five second part with a special effect in it meant we had to do 150 separate pictures. As you might guess, it was a lot of work, and a lot if time.

Even though we didn't get any money in return for this film, we did gain enough experience that our next film would be ten times better than this one. You don't get experience any other way.

Be sure to check out the pictures and movie clips posted on the site for your own enjoyment, and get your hands on the DVD!

-Cory Bauer

Sboob Entertainment President & Vice-President

NOTE: in the event that the President of Sboob Entertainment is unable to fulfill his duties, the acting Vice-President will assume his position.