There’s no shortage of movies about the apocalypse, but we don’t think enough of them are also fun road movies. Comedy duo Gabriel Diani and Etta Devine agree, so they’re making Diani & Devine Meet the Apocalypse and we’ll be tracking the whole production from start to finish.
We have an inside track with Diani & Devine Meet the Apocalypse because they happen to be friends of the site. We’ll follow their progress from start to finish, and today is the start. The Kickstarter campaign just went live, and we talked to Diani & Devine about the film and their past Kickstarter success.
Diani & Devine describe Apocalypse as a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby style road movie meets Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but funnier. It will follow the pair of comedians and their pets Watson and Mrs. Peel as they deal with the end of the world — an event for which they are grossly underprepared.
They’re the team behind The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Robotic Edition where they replaced Jim with a robot as a reaction to groups trying to censor the book. It was a huge success on Kickstarter with the campaign pulling in more than five times its goal.
Diani & Devine went back to the Kickstarter well to get a theatrical release of their horror comedy The Selling. They again beat their goal. This time around they’re asking for a significant sum of money to fund the production, $100,000. It’s ambitious, but we think they can pull it off.
Check out the initial Kickstarter campaign video:
Did you notice how their outfits deteriorated throughout the video? When we spoke to Diani & Devine last week as they were getting ready to launch the campaign, and they explained that was intentional, and it’s a device they’ll be using in the film as well. It also explains the completely insane beard Diani was sporting when we skyped with them:
Sweet beard, Gabe!
As they mentioned above, every day of the campaign they’ll be releasing a new video. They weren’t sure if they’ll be the first Kickstarter campaign to take this approach, and we couldn’t find any other examples, but it’s a lot of additional work to put in. Diani joked in our interview that if the campaign is successful then they’ll be blamed for future Kickstarters having to put the extra effort in.
That may or may not be the case, but considering that some of these videos will be Barry Bostwick giving us advice — or “Apocatips” — on how to survive the end of the world, we’re pretty pumped.
As with any good Kickstarter campaign, Diani & Devine are offering a plethora of sweet rewards for backers. They range from a digital soundtrack at the $1 level all the way to a full on Executive Producer credit at $10,000, and the levels in between are plentiful and interesting. Take a look
We tried to get a sense of how confident Diani & Devine are going into the start of the campaign, but they wouldn’t give us an answer. Raising $100,000 is a daunting task, but they have two big Kickstarter successes under their belt, and they’ve been promoting Apocalypse heavily on social media for weeks now. We think they’re off to a good start.
The campaign’s only been live for a few hours and they’ve already crossed the $5,000 mark with more than 40 backers.
(via Diani & Devine Meet the Apocalypse)
- Janet Varney, the voice of Korra, will appear in the movie
- So are Quark from DS9 and Don Draper’s dentist
- See Diani & Devine in the time travel short Present Tense
