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This site is in not an affiliation of MalleuS but is an independent critique site created by Josie Kogge, who is in no way associated with MalleuS or their productions.
Last updated 6th August 2001
A teaser trailer entitled "Who is Gatri" was assembled using footage from the finished cut of the film and released onto the internet at the MalleuS HomepagE on May 29th 2000. It drummed up a great amount of interest. The video was an AVI file 1mb big.
On July 30th the full movie was released in six chapters. Compressing the video had proved deeply problematic for Morris who was aware that people did not like HUGE downloads. POPCAST provided a solution, a free video streaming service. Malleus signed up with POPCAST and used their Popcaster software to compress each of the six segments of Looking for Gatri down to a suitable size for streaming. The video files were then placed on Popcast's site and linked to via the MalleuS HomepagE.
Looking for Gatri was viewed over 500 times in the following two months and met with positive feedback from site visitors. A phenominom noticed when viewing Popcast download statistics was that people were viewing segments 1, 2 and 6 for more than the other segments - leading Morris to comment that the movie was suffering from "Fast Forward" syndrome as people were not prepared to sit through the detail and opted straight for the action scenes.
Among positive feedback were comments and support from Philippe Chabot, a Canadian film producer at 0'19 films, Allen Richards of the B-Movie website and e-group, ArcVile of the Gorezone Webzine, Alex Krotosky who commented that "MalleuS proves talent does not need cash to create art", the popular British computer magazine Computeractive, who ran an article on the Malleus site and their mission, and American musician and artist Shane Semler - who is now Malleus' graphic designer and is responsible for the excellent Gatri logos and their soon-to-be relaunched website.
Morris-Henshaw discovered a problem; It became apparent that POPCAST were doing sterling work in The States and other terratories where phonelines are bang-up-to-date. But here in blighty the streaming video was erratic, jumpy and generally...crap. What I needed to do was stick the video files on our own webspace (such as it is) so visitors could download directly onto their harddrive.
To this end I remastered the feature with the MPEG4 codec, which really compresses the buggers! Quality was extremely comprimised with the videos looking like moving JPEG graphics - and the sound was awful. But that was as best as I could do. At least now British visitors could watch the feature.
CD ROMS featuring the video as a huge MPEG1 file were sent to anybody that requested them - and also a VHS version - absolutely free! Basically we did everything we could to ensure the feature reached as many people as possible.
Our next step is to remaster LOOKING FOR GATRI using the wonderful new Div-X codec, which should ensure we can finally realease the feature as the three-act play it is supposed to be, with each act being of infinitely superior quality and yet no bigger than 8 megs a piece.
In the intervening time Andrew had written another adventure for Gatri. Such was the positive response to the first that it was decided that Looking for Gatri was only the first episode of a multi-part adventure. Epsode Two in the now titled Chronicles of Gatri was written by Andrew Morris and Tim Ricketts and is currently being filmed. Two further episodes are scripted and ready to shoot - Echoes of Gatri by Sean Jeffery, and Gatri in the Nick of Time (provisional title) by Andrew Morris. During the course of these episode more and mmore will be revealled about the character of Alex Monday and the unhinged world in which he lives.
Each episode will be realeased onto the internet free to downlaod as was the first. On release of the second episode, Waking for Gatri, the first will be wiped from the Malleus Webspace never to be seen again. It will then be remasterd, re-edited and re-released on CD ROM at a small charge.
