Ataque de Pánico! (Panic Attack!) 2009

HOLY SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

I wish him them all the very best of luck. And I thought I was working on something big... HA!!!

Article from Slash Film.com
The hotly tipped future talent of the minute is Federico Alvarez, a 30 year old Uruguyan behind the YouTube smash sci-fi short called Panic Attack - which you can see below the break. So far, Alvarez seems to be following a very similar racing line to the one Neill Blomkamp has roared around over the last few years.

Whereas Blomkamp’s breakthrough short was Alive in Joburg, a shaky-cam alien invasion picture set in South Africa, Alvarez has now made his crash landing with Panic Attack… a shaky-cam alien invasion picture set in Uruguay. The latter features rather more giant robots, however, which you may see as a very good thing.

Blomkamp’s protector/mentor in making the transition to feature length filmmaking was Peter Jackson, while Alvarez has in turn been taken under the wing of Sam Raimi. Apparently the two have already spoken at length and the expectation is that Raimi will help Alvarez make the transition to feature filmmaking without too much interference from suits and money men.

According to a report in El Pais, the film that Alvarez has signed on to make for Ghost House will also feature giant robots. He’s working with a budget of $30 to $40 million and has a $1 million fund just to fund script development. There’s apparently perks too - Alvarez, his girlfriend and also his co-writer Rodolfo Sayagués have all been relocated to new apartments in LA and given cars. Reading all of this, I had an uneasy feeling that either Alvarez has been speaking too freely or that the El Pais journalist has betrayed his confidence because we rarely hear this kind of detail.

According to Alvarez, he and Raimi share a vision of what the feature film should be and this is why he was happy to sign with Ghost House. It seems that he didn’t even keep his appointments to meet with “Dreamworks, Fox, Warner and The Weinstein Company”.