No Budget Films
The 2014 Films
Slappy (2014)
Release Dates:
First Upload: April 26th, 2014
Current Upload (Shown): August 15th, 2016
Director: Nathan Nguyen
Story by: Nathan Nguyen
Photography by: Nathan Nguyen and Cooper Loundy
Edited by: Nathan Nguyen
Puppeteering by: Nathan Nguyen
Cast:
Nathan Nguyen as narrator, 70’s kid, and Slappy
Mark Loundy as 70’s dad
Idean Nakhjavani as Dean
Riitta Lehtinen-Nguyen as Dean’s mother
Cooper Loundy as Cooper
A sinister living dummy that last struck in the 1970’s is back. It chooses Idean, a kid living in the modern age of 2012, as its latest victim.
Production notes:
This movie took ridiculously long to see the light of day. The footage was filmed in late 2011, but was never actually posted online until 2014. The first attempt at editing it was done around November 2011, on Windows Movie Maker. This early edit was shown to my middle school class, but due to an unknown glitch, the software was unable to render the movie properly, so I decided to switch to a more powerful video editing software, PowerDirector (this film marks my transitional time between Movie Maker and PowerDirector). But I was new to the software, and I had much to learn. It seems I eventually forgot all about this movie and moved on to other projects, until 2014, when I rediscovered the footage and finally decided to fully edit it. Another fun fact—the movie was never actually fully filmed. The ending of this movie is so abrupt precisely for that reason—I quickly filmed a handful of entirely new footage of Slappy as I was editing this to throw together some sort of ending. As I said, I sort of just forgot about this movie. It was originally supposed to be a series called "Slappy: The Series", but since I had no intention of following through on that idea, this is now a standalone movie.
The Possessed Doll 2 (2014)
Release Dates:
Original Edit: August 17th, 2014
Re-Edit (Shown): August 15th, 2016
Director: Nathan Nguyen
Story by: Nathan Nguyen
Photography by: Nathan Nguyen and Natalia Nguyen
Edited by: Nathan Nguyen
Puppeteering by: Nathan Nguyen and Natalia Nguyen
Cast:
Nathan Nguyen as himself
The evil doll is back for another killing. One of its previous victims had miraculously survived, and that’s not something the doll is going to let slide...
Production notes:
It was just the first few days of our vacation in Finland, and my sister and I were bored. We felt like making a sequel to last year's movie (or rather I did and dragged my sister along), so we grabbed the camera and the doll, and went out to film it. Filming went rather smoothly, lots of attention going into atmosphere. Like its predecessor, this film was intended to be more or less a silent film with very little dialogue. In her usual manner, my sister threw in the towel partway through and quit helping me by the end, so the last few shots of the movie were done entirely by me. Overall, I feel like this movie was a success artistically, but it was unpopular like the first installment in the series. The first upload gained about 9,000 views, which was better than the first Possessed Doll, but still on the low side.
Spiders From Space (2014)
Release Dates:
Original Edit: August 17th, 2014
Re-Edit (Shown): August 15th, 2016
Director: Nathan Nguyen
Story by: Nathan Nguyen
Photography by: Nathan Nguyen and Lucas Nguyen
Edited by: Nathan Nguyen
Cast:
Lucas Nguyen as himself
Nathan Nguyen as Space Spider voices
A mysterious UFO lands in the forest, and Lucas is quick to investigate. At the landing site, he discovers a group of not-so-friendly alien robots who’ve got their sights locked onto him!
Production notes:
This film was the second of two movies I made in the summer of 2014 while vacationing in Finland. Joining the cast in this flick is my half-uncle Lucas (who is younger than me, long story). The idea from the start was to make some sort of creature feature, but the problem was that we didn’t quite know just what the creature would be. As we looked around Lucas’ room, we noticed a Hex Bug lying around, and I figured that would be perfect. Soon we had found something to use as a spaceship, and then it was a matter of green screening the critters into some footage of Lucas running around the forest. This movie was the first time I really decided to go all-out with the lasers. It wasn’t the first of my films to use laser effects (Dinosaur Attack 2), but here the effects were the most numerous and refined yet, especially in the second edit. The first edit had some issues—shameless use of battle droid voices, and stolen laser stock footage I’m technically supposed to buy. The new edit fixes those issues by using effects and voices 100% made by me.
T-Rex vs Carnotaurus 2 (2014)
Release Dates:
Original Edit: August 18th, 2014
Re-Edit 1 (Shown): August 15th, 2016
Re-Edit 2: February 18th, 2022
Director: Nathan Nguyen
Story by: Nathan Nguyen
Photography by: Nathan Nguyen
Edited by: Nathan Nguyen
Puppeteering by: Nathan Nguyen
Rematch! A second Carnotaurus arrives to challenge the dominance of the T-Rex. However, this time the Rex has help—will the Carnotaurus be able to take on two tyrants?
Production notes:
This is hands down my most successful video to date, attracting upwards of 50 million views. This was arguably the video that launched my channel from obscurity to relative fame. Originally, I had no plans to produce a sequel to T-Rex vs Carnotaurus (2013). After all, it was just a quick little practice video for bigger projects in the future. But lo and behold, T-Rex vs Carnotaurus actually became very popular, and realizing the potential of a sequel, I went ahead and whipped out the ‘ol puppets again, and filmed a part 2. This time I tried to have a bit more of a story element, and of course I did my best to make this episode more spectacular than the first. This was primarily achieved through the introduction of a second T-Rex. That, however, did have a downside: Carnotaurus was already outclassed by a single T-Rex, so how could it possibly hope to stand up against two? The answer: It can’t. Just like last time, the Carnotaurus lost, which apparently made a few Carnotaurus fans a little mad. Fanboys began to have flamewars in the comments section, and the debates even ventured into the infamous T-Rex vs Spinosaurus territory (which can get quite ugly). Sometimes I like to think of that as a certain milestone in the development of a YouTube channel, when you start finding arguments in the comments section. Anyway, it is my guess that this is the video that mainly caused networks and investors to turn their attention towards me. Soon, No Budget Films would be Budget Films.
Records: Most popular video
Dinosaur Attack Alternate Ending (2014)
Release Dates:
Original Edit: October 20th, 2014
Re-Edit (Shown): August 16th, 2016
Director: Nathan Nguyen
Story by: Nathan Nguyen
Photography by: Nathan Nguyen and Idean Nakhjavani
Edited by: Nathan Nguyen
Puppeteering by: Nathan Nguyen
Cast:
Idean Nakhjavani as Idean
Cooper Loundy as Cooper
Timothy Bagachev as Tim
n 2011, Tim was tragically killed by a Tyrannosaurus. But what if things had turned out differently? What if it was Cooper who suffered that fate?
Production notes:
This is actually less of an “alternate” ending and more like the “original” ending. Indeed, the first version of the Dinosaur Attack (2011) script called for Cooper to die while Tim lived on, but later on that was changed because I thought it disrupted the flow of the movie. I figured it made more sense to keep Cooper alive since he was the first character to be introduced in the film (although his death would still come in Dinosaur Attack 2). So this is how Dinosaur Attack would’ve looked, had things been kept as they were. Another difference with this version was that Tim had a bottle of ketchup rather than a box of macaroni and cheese. That little detail was changed because we thought it would make our use of ketchup as blood a little too obvious (even though it was already obvious). During the filming of this scene, it was hilariously fun to drag Cooper around and have him spit ketchup out of his mouth. The scene also makes use of a Barbie doll to represent Cooper’s body, a technique that stayed in use in the final version of the movie. Some shots of the dinosaur were actually filmed years later, and that’s because I only had the idea to release this thing in 2014, three years after the debut of Dinosaur Attack.