‘District 9’ Director Neill Blomkamp Teases Series Of “Streaming” Sci-Fi Shorts

The man who made one of the most inventive sci-fi movies of the past decade has some “experimental” work to share, and he plans to offer it up through the internet. Neill Blomkamp, director of District 9, is one of the people involved in Oats Studios, a venture that will soon release its first batch of short films.

Details related to Oats Studios are scant, but a teaser posted to the company’s YouTube channel offers a first look at the sort of content it plans to serve up. As with Blomkamp’s other work, Oats shorts will make use of sharp special effects will feature enough action-packed sequences to keep your heart rate up.

The Oats teaser says that the studio’s shorts will be “streaming” somewhere in the near future. Blomkamp has indicated that a lot of his coming work will be offered for free through the Oats YouTube channel, but he is also interested in utilizing digital retail platform Steam. If he goes with that binary distribution model, it would make his short film project experimental in more ways that one.

If Blomkamp’s plan, as his tweets suggest, is to use Oats Studios as an incubator for his feature-length work, he would be returning to the strategy he has employed for much of his career. Both District 9 and 2015’s Chappie were based off short films that have garnered considerable attention in their own rights since Blomkamp became a household name. Alive In Joburg, which served as the foundation for District 9, has gathered more than 800,000 views on YouTube.

Given Blomkamp’s pedigree, there’s reason to think his Oats shorts could reach similar heights. If you want to catch updates about the coming films, the best place to will be Blomkamp’s Twitter feed, where he has spent most of the past week answering questions about his new venture.