No Budget Films
The 2010 Films
Curse of the Shrunken Skeleton (2010)
Release Dates:
Original Edit: October 30th, 2010
Re-Edit 1: October 19th, 2012
Re-Edit 2: June 22nd, 2015
Re-Edit 3 (shown): August 4th, 2016
Director: Nathan Nguyen
Story by: Nathan Nguyen
Photography by: Nathan Nguyen and Shotaro Watanabe
Edited by: Nathan Nguyen
Cast:
Shotaro Watanabe as Shotaro
Timothy Bagachev as Tim
Nathan Nguyen as the Skeleton (both movements and voice)
Two friends find what appears to be a toy skeleton out in the yard, but is it really a toy? Shotaro and Tim are in for the scare of their lives as the diminutive thing comes to life and goes on the attack!
Production Notes:
This was one of my earliest films, preceded only by the intro/trailer to Slappy’s Return (2010). And as such, it’s obviously one of the cheesier ones. It was thrown together in one day, when my friends Shotaro and Tim happened to be over at my house carving pumpkins for Halloween. The movie is very, very simple both in terms of plot and effects. It was quite literally just me waving a skeleton decoration in front of the camera (with an occasional fishing line attached to swing the arm around). Very rudimentary edits were made on Windows Live Movie Maker—some badly placed sound effects, an unnecessary title card, and some brief credits. Three re-edits have been made to date, with the most recent one being released in August of 2016.
Milestones: Earliest movie
My Best Friend is a Werewolf (2010)
Release Dates:
Original Edit: November 4th, 2010
Re-Edit 1: October 22nd, 2012
Re-Edit 2: January 31st, 2016
Re-Edit 3 (shown): August 4th, 2016
Director: Nathan Nguyen
Story by: Nathan Nguyen
Photography by: Nathan Nguyen
Edited by: Nathan Nguyen
Cast:
Timothy Bagachev as Tim
Idean Nakhjavani as Idean
Kai Jacklin as Kai/werewolf
Yuri Bagashev as Yuri
It all starts out as a normal sleepover between three friends, but thing quickly go wrong as one of them undergoes a sudden strange transformation, and becomes a bloodthirsty werewolf! Who will survive?
Production notes:
What a classic. This is another of those really early ones that was all around cheesy and terrible, although the newest edit has done much to improve the original’s mistakes. Like the last entry in the series, Curse of the Shrunken Skeleton, this movie was filmed in one day with no pre-determined script or story. All we knew was that there should be a werewolf in it, and that’s pretty much it. I was in my Goosebumps phase, and the werewolf simply seemed like the next logical step after Slappy the dummy.
Milestones: First use of blood
Random Dinosaur Movie (2010)
Release dates:
Original Edit: November 12th, 2010
Re-Edit (shown): August 4th, 2016
Director: Nathan Nguyen
Story by: Nathan Nguyen
Photography by: Nathan Nguyen
Edited by: Nathan Nguyen
Puppeteering by: Nathan Nguyen
Cast:
Natalia Nguyen as herself
A girl named Natalia accidentally resurrects a couple of dinosaurs (don’t ask) and must now find a way to outwit the voracious predators.
Production notes:
One day my sister and I were bored, so this happened. Don’t ask me how I came up with the far fetched idea of having the “fossilized dinosaur skin” bring the dinos to life—I really have no idea. Although incredibly bad, this movie does have the distinction of being the first dinosaur movie that I published. I was trying out new filmmaking tricks, such as the use of forced perspective to give my dinosaur puppets the illusion of size, and making the T-Rex disappear via a jump cut. The whole short was more or less an early experiment in preparation for the later film, Dinosaur Attack (2011).
Milestones: First dinosaur movie
Slappy's Return (2010)
Release Dates:
First Upload (Lost): Some time in 2010
Earliest Known Upload Date: May 22nd, 2013
Re-Edit 3 (Shown): August 4th, 2016
Director: Nathan Nguyen
Story by: Nathan Nguyen
Photography by: Nathan Nguyen and Timothy Bagachev
Edited by: Nathan Nguyen
Puppeteering by: Nathan Nguyen
Cast:
Timothy Bagachev as Tim
Shotaro Watanabe as Shotaro
Riitta Lehtinen-Nguyen as mom
Nathan Nguyen as Slappy
After moving into a new house, Tim finds a mysterious ventriloquist dummy under his bed. He unknowingly brings it to life, and soon enough the evil doll is on a mission to enslave Tim and his friend.
Production notes:
This movie was first made in 2010, and was in fact one of my earliest films. It used to be split into three episodes: “Night of the Living Dummy: Slappy’s Return” episodes 0.5, 1, and 2. Episode 0.5 wasn’t really a full episode, it was more like a preview or trailer. Episode 1 was the bulk of the story, while episode 2 was a comparatively short finale. All three of these original videos were forcibly taken down from YouTube due to a little copyright problem with Scholastic. I guess they thought I was trying to rip off the Goosebumps books, which were in fact the inspiration for these videos. It’s totally bogus because the internet is completely full of fan videos and parodies, not unlike Slappy’s Return. Maybe it was because I used “Night of the Living Dummy” in the title. Whatever the case, I was successfully able to re-upload the trilogy in 2013, this time all in one video and with the new and simplified title of Slappy’s Return. Perhaps it’s for the best, since the original edits were done on Windows Movie Maker, and therefore were probably awful (plus, you don’t want to hear my 12 year old self voicing Slappy). There exists a “first attempt” at Slappy’s Return, which was initially rejected because of how bad it was. But as with all “rejected scenes”, it too resurfaced and is now available to watch.
Milestones: First copyright strike!
Slappy's Return- The Original (2010)
Release dates:
First Upload (Lost): Some time in 2010
Earliest Known Upload Date: April 26th, 2014
Re-Edit 3 (Shown): August 4th, 2016
Director: Nathan Nguyen
Story by: Nathan Nguyen
Photography by: Nathan Nguyen
Edited by: Nathan Nguyen
Puppeteering by: Nathan Nguyen
Cast:
Timothy Bagachev as Tim
Shotaro Watanabe as Shotaro
Nathan Nguyen as Slappy
After moving into a new house, Tim finds a mysterious ventriloquist dummy under his bed. He unknowingly brings it to life, and soon enough the evil doll is on a mission to enslave Tim and his friend.
Production notes:
This is the first attempt at making Slappy's Return, at first considered a failure due to a plot that didn’t flow right, and overall cheesiness. Although it was replaced and temporarily forgotten, the footage was eventually re-edited on PowerDirector 11 and then re-re-edited on PowerDirector 14 to form what you see here. Part of the reason it was originally rejected was because of the lousy editing job that made it seem even worse than it really was. Love ya, Windows Movie Maker! The plot of the movie is essentially the same as that of the “official” Slappy’s Return, but with a few minor differences. For example, in this version Shotaro gets stabbed and Tim escapes, rather than the other way around.
Puppet Fight! (2010)
Release dates:
First upload (Lost): Some time in December 2010
Re-Edit (Shown): January 14th, 2017
Director: Nathan Nguyen
Story by: Nathan Nguyen
Photography by: Nathan Nguyen
Edited by: Nathan Nguyen
Puppeteering by: Nathan Nguyen
Cast:
Nathan Nguyen as Himself
What kind of trouble do Nathan's puppets get into when he's not around?
Production notes:
One of the most obscure No Budget films, this little video was filmed on December 17th, 2010. Although originally uploaded at some time around that, the exact date is unknown because the video was deleted. The version you see here is a 2017 re-edit which finally allowed the video to be seen once again after a 6 year hiatus. The new edit is fairly similar to the original, although more advanced effects were made possible with better software (as opposed to Windows Movie Maker, which was standard for me back in 2010). One plot point was changed, however. In the old edit I had this weird twist where the chicken beats its opponent with a Shoop Da Whoop laser beam (and trust me, it looked bad with Movie Maker's limitations). But in this edit, I kept things as the footage originally intended.
Pumpkin the Superdog (2010)
Release Dates:
Original Edit: December 27th, 2010
Re-Edit 1: November 19th, 2011
Re-Edit 2 (Shown): August 5th, 2016
Director: Nathan Nguyen
Story by: Nathan Nguyen
Photography by: Nathan Nguyen
Edited by: Nathan Nguyen
Cast:
Natalia Nguyen as herself
Pumpkin as herself
Some idiot girl finds a random canister of “dog treats” on the ground, and stupidly decides to feed them to her dog. Big mistake! The once small and harmless chihuahua grows to massive size.
Production notes:
This was made way before I knew how to use a green screen, so all special effects shots were made using simple perspective illusions. Our dog Pumpkin was placed near the camera, while Natalia stood back to convey a sense of scale. The effect more or less still holds up today, although that one closeup of Pumpkin’s fur was quite obviously a rug. In the first edit, Natalia spoke so quietly in one scene that I had to add subtitles (Thanks Windows Movie Maker for being so limited that you can’t even raise volume!).
The Dinosaur (2010)
Release Dates:
Original Edit (Lost): Some time in 2010
Earliest Known Upload Date: November 17th, 2011
Re-Edit 3 (Shown): August 5th, 2016
Director: Nathan Nguyen
Story by: Nathan Nguyen
Photography by: Nathan Nguyen
Edited by: Nathan Nguyen
Puppeteering by: Nathan Nguyen
Cast:
Natalia Nguyen as herself
A young girl wanders into the wilderness, where she encounters a Tyrannosaurus. The chase is on!
Production notes:
The Dinosaur was more or less practice for Dinosaur Attack, and in the film I refine my use of perspective illusion to make my dinosaur puppet appear huge (the effect wasn’t perfect, but hey, I was a beginner). My sister and I filmed this thing in a nearby park that would one day become the filming location for my longest films, Dinosaur Attack 3 and Top Predators. The Dinosaur was the first of my films to get an editing treatment from Cyberlink PowerDirector. From here on out, there’s no going back to Movie Maker.