Bat Chain Puller's video: THE BASILISK The FIRST full length Jurassic Park Fan Film

The Basilisk is a film shot in Virginia Beach in the summer of 1993 immediately after seeing Jurassic Park. My high school aged self actually began writing the script before the film was out after reading the Michael Crichton novel a few months before. My friends and I filmed "guerrilla style" behind grocery stores, strip malls, and in wooded areas between housing developments. We "Filmed" on a Hitachi VHS camcorder throughout the rest the summer and fall of 1993 and resuming again in the spring of 1994. We filmed the last bits after graduation in the summer of 1994 with "adulthood" and "the real world" looming before us. Our last summer of "freedom." The movie was still missing a few key moments and shots when the ocean of adult life began washing over us one by one. Full time jobs ate into production time. College gobbled up some others. Hairstyles changed, wrecking continuity. Key vehicles featured in the film were sold, traded, or otherwise broke down and were traded as scrap. Relationships changed, effecting who could work with who. The Basilisk seemed destined to remain a rough, incomplete work in progress. Cut to: 12 years later. After houses, wives, children, and career patches chosen. Several of us reconvened and set about to "Finish" what we had come to accept as a Jurassic Park fan film. (Probably one of the first, if not THE FIRST.) New dialogue was recorded and mixed into the cut in to work around the scenes that simply could not be filmed. The trusty Hitachi camera had long since passed on so New footage was recorded on higher end HD cameras and transferred back to VHS and copied a couple times to give it all that vintage look. This is the end result: The Basilisk. Recorded and edited on VHS between the summer of 1993 and the fall of 1994. Revisted 12 years later and completed in the summer of 2006. UPDATE: YouTube had blocked the video because of a sequence which contained footage from a nature documentary. But YouTube's editing tools have evolved to the point where I could go in and "trim out" the offending footage and bring The Basilisk back from the prison vault and into the sunshine once again. My hope is to inspire young film makers (and content creators) to be forever creative, resourceful, and perseverant in the face the financial difficulty, the changing times, cultural climates, political attitudes, and the self doubt that comes with dealing with all of that. Make your movie. Stake your claim. Believe in yourself. Have fun. Bat Chain Puller.