Culture: Exhibit E: Pumpkin Patch!

(This is me in the corn maze, surrounded by culture spewing from the Earth)

As the leaves began to turn their aging orange and fall from the trees like cherubs seeking naptime, I made my journey to the annual pumpkin patch. This is no ordinary pumpkin patch, however. This a pumpkin patch with blue grass bands, home made cider and artisan displays, and even a pirate ship. Venturing to this family friendly location takes me away from the hustle and bustle of city life in Shepherdstown. It is a place to meditate on folk music and heritage, a place to awkwardly run into people you haven’t spoken to in years, people you’ve secretly avoided while judging their silly meanderings on Facebook. It is a place to pause. (Below: my girlfriend, sneaking up on a lady pumpkin)

The importance of the pumpkin patch as a cultural relic stems from it’s ability to take us back to our “grass roots” as one could say. It reminds us that we indeed do live in the country and that life isn’t wholly about cranking out papers filled with half-understood ideas and just getting through to the next week. It’s a place that allows us to get lost in a maze other than our dumb, confusing minds; letting us soak in the breeze that blows us onward.

Culture: Exhibit D: Drag Queens!

(For evidence, see the footage Konrad has for his capstone, which I help majorly in shooting. Also, my face was on his poster board, which stated I helped him greatly. Also, I'm an honest young man just trying to graduate.)

Straight Up Drag is a documentary I’m co-producing with Konrad about the culture behind the art of drag queens. To help develop a trailer and sizzle reel for the documentary, Konrad, Matt Richards, and I went out to a drag show just down the road in Boonesboro (weird, right?) and filmed, with unprecedented access, the entirety of the show. This means from dolling up to stripping down, we filmed what the entrance of the stars to the finale of their performances.

Just by filming this event I learned quite a bit about the processes behind the transformation into queenhood. For one, breasts don’t just poof out of no where. There’s a shading process between the man-pecks that’s a vital part of making the breasts look realistic enough. Also, the shading must match well with your skin tone. You can’t just slap magenta on and think you’re boobzilla. Creating the drag visage is very much about knowing what color works best with your skin and where to shade in the most important areas of the body.

I hope that next year we’ll really start pursuing this idea more and have a working product to shop around to festivals.

Culture: Exhibit C: Muppets!

I never watched The Muppet Show when I was a kid. I even hated Sesame Street with a burning passion, which is something I’ve never been able to figure out why exactly. But boy do I love Muppet movies. My favorite Christmas movie is A Muppet Christmas Carol. I watch it every year. So when I saw that a new Muppet movie was poised for release and potential greatness, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

What I love about this film is that it is lays everything on the table. It doesn’t try to just rekindle that fire of old, trying to turn a cheek to the troubles the franchise has found over the last twenty years. It shows the audience that times have changed, yet people still want Muppets if Muppets can be done right. What I also loved was the fact that the writers of the film didn’t try to make the movie hip or create a “modern Muppets”. They distinctly played off of the aged franchise, projecting charm onto the theme of relics rather than garbage. This was the most respectable part of the film, but at the same time it just didn’t feel quite like a Muppet movie. Sections screamed the dry Muppet wit, but other segments screamed a little too loud and obnoxiously for me to care. In the end it gives me hope for another film, but they can’t go down the charming relic path again. This time they’ve got to be obviously fresh and not wholly rely on the hearts of fans of the past.

Week Nine: Research

With all of this talk of 'series bible', 'character bios', and 'audience analyses', you must be wondering "Well how did you figure out how you need to do all this?" Have no fear my two blog readers, this entry is all about research.

Blip.tv is a great starting point for researching web series viewer trends. It's a site that hosts tons of original series and distributes them across the web, tracking who watches what at what time and where for how long. One of the most important bits of data I found from them was what time of day people typically watch shows on the web, which is between 9pm and 11pm weekdays. That, in addition to the others bits of data they offer, helps tremendously when shows are in pre-production, trying to determine the target audience and marketing strategies.

I'm also conducting a market analysis, studying three successful web series: H+, The Guild, and Aidan 5. I'm studying these series to develop an idea of why these shows have found such success and gathered an audience from thin air. I'm studying their budgets, their marketing and social media strategies, how many writers are typically writing for the show, where they distribute their shows, etc. Basically I'm analyzing the ins and outs of these three shows, gutting them to discover the magic they use to create great shows.

Culture: Exhibit B

Many have seen Burlesque, few have lived to tell the tale. Recently, I was given the opportunity to experience the unadulterated wonder of 99% male and female nudity firsthand at the Shepherdstown Opera House. The format for the show developed over the course of nearly a dozen short comedy sketches ranging from dancing in lobster costumes, stripping out of treasure chests (thus wearing only pasties), and flashlight dance numbers in the dark.

The beauty of this show lies in the performances by artists as they dance and lip sing to song by other musicians. Never are they hooked up to mics, readily belting out notes. Rather, the performing artists are bound to their musical selections, choreographing intense dancing sequences involving swinging through the air while hanging on curtains, stripping down to man-thongs, and flipping around the stage. The acts are purely physical, purely aesthetic in design. Audio is collaborative, rather than defining. It is a show about stripping us down to our aesthetic basics, with only a glitter man-thong in between us and pure nature.

Week Eight: I Think?

The White Rabbit Poster is finished and it looks outstanding. Sarah Loy, an incredibly gifted artist, just dotted the finishing touches onto it last week. It's magical because she can understand the mess of ideas that spill from my head and organize that chaos onto a canvas in ways far beyond what I originally intended. I'm truly excited to finalize the typography for the poster and show this puppy to the masses.

Character bios, location info, time travel explanations, and basically everything that has to do with the immediate descriptions of the White Rabbit universe is just about finished. I'm excited to open discussion on the science behind the series. I've tried to make the time travel, immortality, and every other seemingly 'magical' ability within this story as scientifically plausible as possible. Hopefully once these ideas are brought to the table, people can see how these real life theories can be morphed into the fantastical.

Other than that this week is essentially just about wrapping everything up. It's the beginning of the end now and the week after this is centered around making all these packages look pretty for the world to see.

Movie Game

Ever watch a horror movie and wish you could just steer the stupid main character out of harms way, instead of looking into a dark closet and being chopped in half? Well I hope to make that dream a reality with my game design project.

The basis for the game is to shoot a short film with a fully developed story, cast of characters, effects, etc. but also branch the story off in different directions based on the decisions of the main character; decisions that the audience must make throughout the film. Let's develop an example scene real quick to get a better idea of the concept. We'll continue our horror film from above.

Jen gets a call while watching TV. The person on the other end says that they're coming to kill her. She gets weirded out, ends the call. Then the lights go out. She's in total darkness. The audience has two choices now: Call 911 or sit in fear. They choose 911. She dials. Operator's voice is heard. Then: silence. Whoops her phone's battery died. Two choices: get up and grab a flashlight or grab a weapon of some kind. She goes for a weapon. After walking a few feet she hears tapping on a nearby window. Two choices: investigate or get a weapon. She continues for the weapon. It's dark though. She trips over a wooden chair and falls to the ground. Her breathing intensifies. The taps become louder, turning into pounding. Two choices: break a leg off the chair as a weapon or continue to find another weapon. She breaks the leg off after a few attempts. Suddenly the lights turn on. Nothing out of the ordinary is seen but a broken chair. What happens next? The audience will decide.

That's the basis. Nothing extraordinarily difficult, just programming the DVD to skip around to chapters depending upon what's clicked during a choice. There's a company, Will Interactive, out in DC that I met over the summer that does this kind of video work for the military, NFL, etc. so they're my starting point in developing the concept more. There's also a group on YouTube that utilizes the same concept, just linking to a new video after a choice rather than playing on disc. That route definitely allows for a larger audience, but it's clumsy having to click on new pages all the time. DVD seems like a good route when in a classroom setting. Here's a link to the beginning of a video from the YouTube group: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDn0ow8EzcU&feature=related