Neill Blomkamp's next big project (or weekend amusement) goes viral

Even if the Wired iPad edition hadn't credited him as the creator, it would have been obvious that Neill Blomkamp was behind what has come to be known as the AGM Heartland clip. It has his fingerprints all over it: that more-real-than-real thing, with actors acting more normally than normal people in normal situations do; sci-fi elements casually strewn about the place; the suggestion that any 12-year-old with a video camera could have shot it, except for the astonishing amount of meaning packed into just 62 seconds.

In that time, using nothing more than incidental dialogue, the clip suggests pig farming meets Soylent Green, Blair Witch meets Alien Autopsy, a conspiracy uncovered by accident, and a great deal of creepiness. It's probably the creepiness that has seen it rack up more than a million cumulative views on YouTube in the last week or so.

Some digging by /Film suggests this may be the start of an entirely online project, some kind of episodic series of short clips, perhaps. But Blomkamp is also working on a sci-fi (big screen) film project called Elysium, which is known to have a budget north of R200 million, but is otherwise still quite mysterious.

Or perhaps Blomkamp just had some time to kill. We'd like to think the fame that came with District 9 hasn't stopped him from experimenting just for the hell of it. DM

Read more: /Film on the mysterious Wired iPad video.