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NEWS 4th May, 2007
In other news, I'm still working ever so slowly on Haters. But as the completion date drifts further and further away, rest assured that in my mind, the quality of the end product is getting better and better. In the meantime, here's a rough idea of what the new Prince of Hatred will look like:
14th March, 2007 I know it's been going on forever, but recently I did yet another rewrite of the Haters script, which apparently is tons better than previous attempts. And just to show that progress is being made, I've also reshot the main villain character with Cedric playing the role, and now he looks a lot more hardcore and evil than he used to. An additional scene of Hanxiang free-falling with guns in his hands has also been shot. In other news, I'm also editing Version 4 of Nate's Totally Dope Skate Video. Why another version? Well, Ced has put me in touch with the people who handle the programming for those plasma TVs in McDonald's, and now they want to screen N-Skate, which is totally awesome! Unfortunately, they did stipulate that I have to use licensed or original music, which excludes all existing versions of the N-Skate. After scoping around for music from local Singaporean bands, I decided that The Dubious Brothers and their favorite original song "Little Miss Judy" would suit the video best, and after a couple of days of non-stop editing, I've made a quick roughcut of Version 4. Check it out and lemme know what you think. Nate has given his approval, so all's good so far! 17th September, 2006 I've been working on another rewrite of the Haters script. Retooling the characters, and mainly changing the villain to be more of a tragic prince sorta character to better reflect his Hamlet influence. In other news, I've been asked to co-direct a local indie feature film by someone who really liked what I did with Woog and Bad Karma. A full length feature film, with like, proper actors and paid crew and stuff is something that I've never really been involved with before, so I'm pretty excited about that. Maybe if this all goes well, we can go back and try to tackle Idle Dreams again. Anyway, the new film is tentatively entitled Pixie Krusher, and it's going to be like a sci-fi romance with eco-terrorists. So I'll be spending more time on that in the next couple of months to push that one out before going back to working on Haters. 31st July, 2006 Well, the latest news is that I've rewritten the Haters script. I felt that the first draft was a bit too videogame fanboy-ish, so I've toned that down a bit now, and made it a bit more accessible for the average person. Hopefully, this will be for the best. I've also dramatically increased the amount of insane action in it now, which will result in more work for me later on in post-production, but should also make it exponentially more kick-ass. Look out for a scene where Ellipsis fights a bunch of Haters on top of a moving bus while a helicopter makes strafing runs with machinegun fire. That ought to be pretty cool! The backstories for some of the characters have changed too, and I've added a new Ninja princess character into it. More news when it happens! 23rd May, 2006 Okay, progress on Haters has been REALLY slow due to the new job and everything. But I've just looked over at the script, and I think another draft would do Haters a world of good, so I'm going to work on that a bit before continuing on the production. It's okay, all the footage shot is still usable, so nothing's been wasted at all. We will have to reshoot Nick Pan's scenes as Deimos though. Just the cutscene footage though. 20th March, 2006 Well this isn't exactly about the Legion of Haters, but it's a pretty big deal for us here at Deadpan Entertainment. The unexpected popularity of Woog also came with an unexpected cost: the exorbitant bill for going waaay over our bandwidth limit. Now I'm hit with a giant $685 bill for going 115 gigs over the bandwidth limit. I can't really afford to splurge out on a bill like that, so now I've set up a PayPal account to take charity donations for the Rescue Deadpan Entertainment! fund. So if you've got a couple of extra bucks to spare, please feel free to donate some to help us cover that bill. If you've seen our videos, you know that we're not the kinda people that can afford to burn a few hundred bucks. Geez I don't even have a studio light or a proper tripod! 15th March, 2006 Beware the ides of March! Okay, so there's nothing really much to be wary of... just a new update. Principal shoots of Haters is almost coming to an end. We'll be getting most of it done pretty damn soon, so it's on to the dreaded post-production period. Anyway, just thought I'd share some more demo-gifs.
So yeah! I've also decided that The White Stripes kinda annoy me. Their music videos are still really good, but the music itself gets pretty annoying. 7th March, 2006
In other news, I've put up some of Sam's music for Haters. They're not quite finalized as I've not even come up with a rough-cut of Haters yet... but they should give a pretty good indication of what the music's going to be like. Check it out on the Music page! It's really good stuff. It's really great that Sam's totally excited about this project too. There's a really good dynamic going because I think we're like feeding off each other's energy, and we're totally in synch. He knows exactly what I mean when I ask for something obscure like "make it sound a bit Red Alert-ish" or "this tune should be a sub-boss fight tune". So yeah, the music is totally going to rock. Go check it out! ---
Oh, and for the first time ever in a Deadpan Entertainment video, we're going to invite anyone who wants to make a cameo to... well... make a cameo as one of the many Haters that appear in the video, or just as a bystander watching in the background. If you wanna appear in our upcoming video, just send an email to haters@deadpan-entertainment.com and we'll send you some instructions on how to appear in our video. All it takes is a digital camera (or a regular film camera and a scanner, or a photo printing place that can turn your negatives into pics on a CD-ROM... well you get the picture) and about 10 minutes! So yeah, send an email to us and we'll keep you posted on how to appear in our video! 26 February, 2006 Rain rain rain. If it's not raining, it's overcast and cloudy as fuck. If the sun comes out, it comes out for all of 2 seconds. This weather is really pissing me off! In the meantime I've gone into overdrive doing the post-production sprite isolation photoshop stuff. Gotten some online help, so it's all coming along great. Of course, my arm is STILL numb from the mouse-clicking. Check out this preview demo of Ellipsis doing a flame swipe:
Ellipsis pulling of a downward swipe, In other news, Woog is doing really well on the internet. Not as well as that stolen video-phone footage of that local girl blowing her boyfriend and "fucking like a porn star" but then again, we can't really compete with that sorta shit, can we? Well, maybe if we get Dave to dance around naked with a couple of scantily clad Night Elves... 17 February, 2006 One week down the road, and we still haven't shot anything new thanks to the constant "Possible Thunderstorms" weather reports that's been plaguing us all fucking week. I mean, damnit! All I need is one afternoon of sunshine... is that too much to ask? --- For some good news, Cedric & Samuel have come aboard the team to help us with the soundtrack for Haters. I haven't been able to properly work with them since making Tragic Vendetta for their band Meza Virs many winters ago, and I'm really excited to be able to work with them again. Already they've sent me some samples of their music, and it's really good stuff. There's a good amount of diversity in the music, and there's definitely a really strong videogame influence on the tracks, which was exactly what I was hoping for in order to compliment the videogame look of the video. I'll put some music samples up later when it's more finalized. --- After spending a whole week doing nothing but isolating sprites on Photoshop, I finally relented and decided to seek outside help with that when my right arm went numb. Hopefully this should speed up the production some... and then we can concentrate on churning out a nice trailer with our nice new music! :] 10 February, 2006 GWAR! Just when I thought I was going to finish shooting the Khajja and Deimos scenes, it started fucking raining. And the rain is supposed to last all the way into next week. That sucks royally! If you're wondering why rain is going to affect my shooting since I'm shooting indoors... well, if I had proper studio lights I'd be able to light the whole place up like a dream and not worry about the weather. But I don't, so I depend on natural light to support the dinky desk lamps and floor lamps that I scavenge from around the house. Well, I could just go without sunlight, but it won't look as good, and I want it to look as good as can be. Oh well, I guess I'll just have to do the tedious sprite isolation stuff until the sun comes back out again. In the meantime, you guys can check out some wallpapers of the characters we've done. They contain brief histories and summaries of the various characters. Click on the thumbs for a 1024 x 768 version.
Oh and here's some concept sketches of the characters we've yet to shoot. Oh, and I'm still looking for someone to play the tragic Princess Manitari.
8 February, 2006 Well, we're still rolling along on schedule. Today Hanxiang came over and we managed to shoot the rest of his scenes as Ellipsis. Tomorrow I'll shoot the Khajja scenes in the morning, and hopefully Nick Pan will be able to make it over in the afternoon to shoot his scenes as Deimos the Demon-Prince. In the meantime, I thought I'd share some screenshots of the ghetto set-ups we've been using to shoot this flick.
This is how we've been shooting this video. Two large sheets of green cloth held up by sticky tape and scavenged domestic household lamps as makeshift studio lights. Oh, and a bunch of fans to get that wind in the cape look. It's not very glamourous looking, and it sure doesn't look the slightest bit professional. But you know what? It works. So there. --- Been churning out some Mortal Kombat inspired wallpapers to give some background information on the characters. I might post them up tomorrow after we finish shooting Deimos and Khajja. 27th January, 2006 Work on The Legion of Haters is still going, despite a little time-out in production when I had to head to Hong Kong to hopefully find work. Before I left, I managed to see Javad and relocate the green-screen studio to his basement, where we shot his scenes as Nathaniel the Skater-King. We were really happy about the shots we took. Choreographing a fight scene around a skateboard wasn't the easiest thing in the world to do, but nevertheless I think we did a pretty good job with some tricky photography and it will look totally AWESOME when we complete the trickier editing. Slightly before that I also managed to get shots of Shaun as a member of the Legion, who gets decapitated by a skateboard. Currently the big deal for us is figuring out who gets use which videogame fighting style. The breakdown we have so far is:
That's pretty much what we have so far. Major characters left to shoot would be Khajja, and of course Deimos the Demon-Child. Khajja would probably get the Mantis style of fighting, while Deimos is going to be heavily influenced by Orochi from King of Fighters. Expected completion date is now pushed to March. Hopefully not April. Maybe June if I get really lazy. I might go through the video footage that we have tomorrow... so I'll get some stills up for you guys to check out then. 30th December, 2005
Anyway, I'll put up more as we get it done. If things go smoothly, we should be able to churn this one out by February. 6th December, 2005 Well it's been yet another long absence without an update, so here's the latest. Idle Dreams is coming along pretty slowly. I've put together a rough cut up to about 20% of the film... a lot of things left to do, like re-recording all of Adele's lines because what we've got is kinda muffled. But hopefully it'll be finished sometime before the dawn of the next millenium. --- In other news, I've started work on yet another new video. Hopefully to be completed in time for Tropfest, this new one is an expansion on the Drew Kombat idea. Basically a 15 minute video-game, complete with cut-scenes to drive the plot which is a very standard video-gamey plot. Think Diablo/Warcraft, spliced with Mortal Kombat/King of Fighters, with Japanese RPG elements thrown in. It's going to feature a lot of different warriors, all in a weird mythical yet urban setting. Like a psychotic skateboarder, a demon-queen, crazy bloggers and angry musicians. Keep checking in for more updates. In the meantime, check out this test video of me trying to figure out how to splice kungfu and skating for the fighting style of the dreaded Nathaniel, right-hand man of Deimos the Demon-Child. 16th September, 2005 Wow it's been quite a while without an update. Anyway, just to fill everyone in on the goings-on, while Pete and Dave were here we started shooting a short film for next year's Tropfest, entitled World of Offline Gaming, or Woog for short. Basically the premise for the video is what would happen should the hardcore gamers of the world lose their grip on reality and start behaving in real life as they would in computer games like World of Warcraft. I'll put up a sample video soon. Also, while shooting Idle Dreams I got the idea to play around with animated still photos even more and so a couple of days ago I decided to just set the camera up and videotape myself doing some ninja kicks, and the end result was my little homage to the Mortal Kombat videogames. Follow the link to check out more about Drew Kombat, or go to the Video Vault to watch the video. Here are some stills to whet your appetite for blood.
Check out the old news to read about our previous projects!
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