The original Fellowship.
The Biggest of Dem Rings: The Herd Effect was launched on 10th of March 2007. It was the first big project.
The idea for it began in 2005 when two of Andrei's friends, Amalia and Sorina, who were also highschool colleagues, asked him if he'd be interested in making such a parody. They all loved Lord of the Rings very much and it seemed like a great homage to J.R.R.Tolkien and Peter Jackson.
The two friends gave Andrei the first three pages of the script with some general ideas. He took those pages and started working. He finished the script in about two weeks. Back then, redrafting was still new to the brothers. They rarely double checked a script before shooting it.
When they settled with a small team of people to actually start filming, they were stood up by 90% of the cast. Then, a friend called Daniel introduced an entire new group of people that ended up being the actual fellowship we see in the movie.
You can now see the movie, split up into 8 parts, on youtube due to the fact that the brothers didn't think of adding English subtitles at the right moment. Youtube has the only subtitled version.
The film was launched in a coffee shop where they had to show it twice due to the fact that too many people came to see it. There was no entry fee so, naturally, the word spread far and wide. A local newspaper featured the cast.
You can watch the movie here.
Things you might not know:
- Till this day, most cast memeber did not read the entire script, not even the parts in which they were supposed to play.
- Adrian Grigore, who played Sam, had trouble at school due to the fact that he couldn't cut his hair short during the actual shooting of the movie. He almost gave up on the project after the first shooting session.
- It took two years to gather the props and the costumes. Low budget means LOW budget. A total of 70 dollars was gathered during those two years. That is quite a lot, considering the fact that most of the cast was not 18 yet so they couldn't work.
- The actual shooting was done in 8 days, over the course of two weeks. The editing took a month and a half, mostly because Andrei's PC froze more often that it should've.
- After the viewing (which lasted one hour), some people said that it was "too short" and that the crew should make "the next one LONGER!". They did.
- Mihai, who played Ghemli, had a nasty cold. He got ill so he was not capable of going outside to film, hence most of the outside shots have Alex playing Ghemli, even though he only signed up for Ishmildur's part.
- The cat logo that was used throughout some of the projects was specifically designed for this movie. It's an actual trace of a picture of Shanti, their cat.
- They couldn't find someone to play Legolas so they went for Diana, a girl, who was initially expecting to play Galadriel.
- All the characters' butched up names are meant to be funny in romanian, so the translation doesn't really match the original intentions.
- Most of the cast memebers remained good friends till this day and you can still see cameos of them in various projects.