For those of you unfamiliar with the Shenmue: Gang Edition movies, allow me to explain. I'm Mike Paprocki, co-founder of the amateur film group known as Gang Entertainment. Many years ago, back in high school, we produced a 2-hour live-action spoof of the first Shenmue game. We weren't really serious about filming back then and we basically made it for our own amusement. However, we sent the movie to Shenmue Dojo just to see what would happen, and to our surprise, there were a few people who actually thought it was funny!
So encouraged were we by public reaction that we started to become more serious about making films, and thus made Shenmue II: The Gang Edition two years ago. Needless to say, this movie turned out a million times better than the first one and was that much more successful. Since then, we've been continuing to make our own movies...but the time has finally come to return to the series that made us "famous" in the first place.
It's been four years since Shenmue II was released on Xbox, and let's face it...if Shenmue III ever does come out, it won't be for a long, LONG time. Well, we've simply gotten tired of waiting. So, a while back, my co-director (and star of the movies) Terry Mulrenin and I began developing our own script for Shenmue III. It took a lot of work, but we finally came up with a cohesive storyline that, I think, wraps up the saga nicely. Yes, it IS a comedy movie just like the previous movies, but also like the previous movies, it follows the storyline of the games (it's just that this time, we didn't have a game to work from).
Production has finally gotten underway, and you can see 8 screenshots from our first day of filming over at our website, www.gangentertainment.org (though you can see 2 of them below). There's also a behind-the-scenes video about pre-production. And if you haven't seen the other two movies, the first movie is available for download on the site as well, while the second movie is still available here at Shenmue Dojo. If you haven't seen them, take a look. You just might enjoy them.
I hope you guys are as excited as we are about this project, and hearing your thoughts helps us greatly. So let's hear it!
-OckMan