The Purchase Brother’s amazing live action Half Life 2 short.
Over the past couple of years or so there has been an explosion of excellently produced game based fan-films, among the most well received of these have been the Purchase Brothers Escape from City 17 shorts based within the world depicted in Valve’s Half Life 2 game.
Having previously made several commercials such as this one for Coca-Cola, the brothers decided to put their skills to something else with the intention for it to showcase their film making abilities.
Escape from City 17 Part One, was released back in February 2009 and reportedly made for only five hundred Canadian dollars, soon racked up impressive viewing figures via YouTube and garnered the brothers a lot of attention from many fans of the series.
Initially, the brothers planned to follow up this film with the second part around six to eight weeks after its release, that gap eventually grew to a two and a half (life?) year wait, with the follow up eventually being released in August 2011. Although the general consensus being that it was worth the wait.
I’m sure that we’ll see The Purchase Brothers move into the realm of making actual features, if they haven’t already, similar perhaps to the likes of Neill Blomkamp who moved onto bigger and better things due, in part, to creating a game related short (Because of his Live in Joburg short, Blomkamp was given directing duties on the Halo: Landfall short, where he first crossed paths with Peter Jackson – who then went on to help him produce his District 9 feature after what was to be his first actual feature, the Jackson produced Halo movie, fell through). Who knows, but if the viewing figures on YouTube are anything to go by, there could be a lot of people out there quite interested to see what they come up with next.
