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THIS finally made me register. Hi everyone! Prepare for a long one. 
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Emotional part of the post:Yay, MaSu! Way to go! My very first thought after listening to "Phantom Shadow" was something like "This ought to have a full-length anime or CGI visualization". Honestly, the world deserves another "Interstellar 5555"-style masterpiece, and PS will be just a perfect base for it, since it's already so conceptual, whole and story-driven. It's definitely a must-be and I'm sure, that we here at MaSu community will show you full support by any means necessary (crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, advertising - you name it). Looking forward to "Phantom Shadow - The Movie"!
Rational part of the post:Making a full-length quality video from scratch and without proper experience and connections will most probably take a lot of time and resources, like, REALLY a lot. Plus many things will depend on the exact way to do the whole project. I see 3 most possible ways to do it, based on time, money and the degree of MaSu involvement in the process:
1.
Making the whole thing strictly by yourself, maybe with the help from the community, but with minimal external involvement possible. That's pretty much as all MaSu official videos are made now.
Pros:
- the project will be under full band's control and the outcome will be totally MaSu-ish in every possible aspect
- this option is rather cheap
Cons:
- will take a huge amount of time and personal resources from MaSu, slowing all the other their activities, delaying the next album, canceling a few possible gigs, etc.
- the result may not be as good as everyone'd expect to. Sad but true, that's where 99% of such enthusiasm-based projects end up. I'm not saying it will necessarily be bad, but it won't be very good either, due to the simple lack of professionalism among its makers
- the project will be at risk of being cancelled eventually, wasting everyone's effort and expectations. And the more time will pass, the higher the chances will be. That's another bane of self-made projects - they tend to have a good start, but an awful finish, if there is one at all
2.
MaSu themselves or MaSu's label can make a contract with an animation studio of their choice and let the professionals do the thing.Pros:
- the result will surely be of high quality, since the professionals are doing it
- it won't take very long this way, probably 1-1,5 years from start to finish
- the band is free to do other awesome stuff
Cons:
- expensive way of doing things
- MaSu won't have any involvement or control over the situation. They'll provide music and ideas, yes, but the rest will depend solely on the bunch of other people, who may not get the thing at all. The result may end to be not so MaSu-influenced and not exactly what we want it to be. Knowing how principial Rob is about involvement of MaSu in their projects and such things as the creative freedom, I doubt that's really an option at all
3. Daft Punk style of doing things.
MaSu needs to find a person or a group of persons, who is already part of anime industry (ranobe writers, mangakas, animators, etc.) and who may get interested in the idea of PS Movie and show it a full support. Daft Punk got lucky [
puns! puns everywhere! 
] finding Leiji Matsumoto and inspiring him with their music, resulting in "Interstellar 5555". You should probably try to do the same or at least something similar, since that's clearly where you're aiming at. The problem is, whom exactly to try to contact. I'm not a specialist in this field at all, but if you want my wild guess, I would try to reach someone like Reki Kawahara, the author of Sword Art Online and Accel World. This guy seems to be all about videogames and technology and you may have a lot in common. Who knows, maybe he's even listening to MaSu!
Pros:
- MaSu gets a partner and a co-author, who knows how the stuff is actually done. They discuss the ideas and details, then the partner uses his resources and connections to get things working. Meanwhile MaSu and even the community can control the process and do some sort of QA to make sure everything is the way we want it to be. This way leaves MaSu in control of the most parts of the project, freeing them from the parts they're not very good at
- the work is still done by professionals, so the quality is expected to be high
- it will, of course, take some time, money and personal efforts, but reasonable amounts of them
Cons:
- this way is pretty tricky to fulfil, lots of things can go wrong or unexpected
- everything really depends on the luck of finding a good partner, who can BOTH be interested in your ideas AND provide tools necesarry for their realization
As you may have guessed, personally I'd take the third way, but after all it's up to you to decide, what suits you best. Hell, it's even up to you to read this long and probably boring post!
Anyway, wish you luck with this one and keeping my fingers crossed for you!
TL;DR part of the post:The idea is awesome, the realization can prove to be very difficult and time-consuming and can be executed in several ways. Good luck with the project though, if it IS actually started someday.
P.S. CYA in November in Russia!
