|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
NEWS 2004 Saturday, August 14, 2004: Aside from the usual "quote of the week" update, I've added a new feature to the site. I made it possible to have individual, seperate 'websites' while keeping it all on the same server. I choose to use this power for blogging - whether that be for good or for evil I can't rightly say. In any case, I now have my blog online, called Play on Words. It is also accessible from the Cool Stuff menu, my actor page, or by typing ted.thettt.com directly into the browser. I've explained my reasons for having a blog in the first blog entry, so head on over there and check it out, if you feel so inclined. Sunday, August 8, 2004: I put two more of our videos online: Mincemeat! and The TTT Presents: One Minute. That will probably be all for now. I don't know if that necessarily warrants its own news entry. Oh well, it got one anyway. Also, the obligatory continuing site transition update! I switched the news archives over to the new format. For some reason, they just never got done and I sort of forgot about it until just recently. I took down the FAQ, as well, since the questions, although asked, were not terribly frequent. It also reflected a somewhat older style than we have now (not just in page design, but in our overall outlook on life) and subsequently seems dated compared with our fun and fancy-free atmosphere and clean page design of the present. Or something like that. Anyway, like everything else transitional on this site, it may or may not get reincarnated. Saturday, August 7, 2004: Well, I finally did it. I began putting our videos online. For now, only the copies that exist in edited digital format will be on the site. That takes us back too Mincemeat!, although right now I only have up Trademark, Midnight Fugue, and A Public Service Announcement. Other stuff of ours that is digitized but not in a format (or size) which is condusive to download will probably not be going up anytime in the near future. This includes A New Oddity and From Beyond, among others. However, I may make an exception for The TTT Presents: One Minute since it was on the DVD. Speaking of which, even though we do have our stuff online, the DVD is by far the best quality; we recommend getting a copy to see our productions in all their DV glory. (Not to mention the originals do not have the annoying web-address-title across the bottom the whole time.) Saturday, July 31, 2004: "So what're you up to?" you ask. Not much. We actually have a lot of stuff we'd like to be working on, but not much time in which to work on it. That's the thing about time. So... so... slippery. We have periodic meetings where we get together and talk about how great it would be if we weren't all so lazy. For example: Man, we're just sitting around. You realize we could have been filming for four hours already? You know how much we could get done in four hours? Probably like... Like three lines of dialogue? Yeah... Man. That would be great. You get the idea. One thing we have done is a home-brewed green screen test. Using Ultimatte Green posterboard (not really, but we like to think so), we rigged up a very temporary greenscreen and shot some random crap against it. If you were wondering how temporary it was: it fell down before we finished. Still, we got some scratch footage to play around with. Despite being an inadequately lit and poorly mounted background, the software did a pretty good job of chromakeying it out. The verdict? Not as good as I'd hoped, but better than I expected. We are considering using the technique extensively on our next production, once we decide what that is. In the meantime, I have taken it upon myself to continue the site redesign after a couple-month hiatus. And what have I learned from this? The site is freakin' huge. Freakin. It's just like the last time I started working on the site. The problem, basically, is having to remake every single page – and there are a lot of pages. But it will progress. Slowly. For now, I updated the archives because they got inadvertently taken down. (I accidently deleted the entire "images" directory on the server, in which the archives pages were contained.) Anyway, everything else is still up, I think, except pictures. Many of those are missing, and the site is so convoluted at this point, I'm not even going to bother trying to figure out where they go to make them work again. My ultimate goal is to delete the entire site and re-upload it clean. It has gotten quite unweildy. Some of my shorter-term goals for the site include putting up video clips of our more recent (non-VHS) productions and a links page. I like to think that's going to get done before the end of the summer... Monday, June 7, 2004: There's a funny thing about productivity. The more you have to do, the more you get done. Also along the same lines: The more things you do, the more ideas you get for more things to do. We currently have a boatload of ideas which we may or may not work on in the future. There is one thing in particular that we're focusing on, but we won't tell you what it is because we've learned from experience that that instantly dooms projects to failure. It would be nice, come to think of it, if we could instantly doom projects to success, but, inconveniently, we seem to lack that talent. However, we have had one success... The Best of the TTT DVD is out! This is the first "official" thing that we've done specifically in mind to give to other people. We never really made videos for distribution because on the one hand, they were time consuming to make and on the other hand, they weren't really that good. However, we were somehow able to scrape together enough decent material to warrant making an entire DVD, resulting in the aforementioned product of shameless self-promotion. For those of you still reading this, the DVD includes:
Whew! That's about 40 minutes worth of stuff. To tell you the truth, we're amazed, too. If you are intersted in a copy, let us know, somehow, and we'll get one to you... somehow. Friday, May 29, 2004: Make that four shorts in three months. At the very very very last minute, we created a very short (30 seconds; TV commerical length) short for the Ad Busters TV culture jamming contest. It's called Trademark, and it's a little piece criticizing the lengths corporations go through to protect their identities. Unfortunately, we didn't have as much time to plan and shoot as we would have liked. We found out about the contest on May 25; the deadline for entries was May 31st. It was only with the last minute coming-up-with-an-idea that we even entered. But since we had a few hours of free time, we whipped something up and sent it in. Still, we're happy with the way it turned out even though it's not necessarily our best work. Next year we'd like to enter again, assuming we come up with another idea and don't wait until the last minute. Unlike the Zoetropolis One Minute Film Fest, however, we didn't wait until the last minute to do something; it was just that we didn't actually find out about it until the last minute. In any case, we had nothing to lose (no entry fee) and possibly something to gain (if, somehow, we win), so we went ahead and entered. Even if we don't win, it's no big deal. The fun is all in the process. Tuesday, May 11, 2004: Whoo! Three shorts in three months. Talk about productivity. Midnight Fugue is our 25th production, done for Lancaster's second One Minute Film Festival, sponsored by Zoetropolis. The deadline for entries was today, so hopefully having it postmarked today will count. (If anyone from Zoe is reading this, please count us in... please? Thanks.) Normally we would have this in with plenty of time to spare, like days or even weeks. Last time we had it done a whole two weeks ahead of time. This time, though, we were quite wishy-washy, one hour deciding to forget the whole thing, the next hour asking ourselves how we can be so lazy as to not bother producing one minute worth of movie. Not only that, but, if I may use this as an excuse: we just finished A Public Service Announcment! So we definately think that would qualify us as 'not lazy'. In any case, we did decide to do it, but unfortunately had a heck of a time coming up with a usuable idea. By the time we got all the details ironed out we had exactly a week left to finish. One week to do one minute? Is it possible? Apparently. Was it worth it? Definately. Be sure to check out the show; we'll post dates on here as soon as they're available. It's the least we can do, seeing as how Zoetropolis's page hasn't been updated since the last One Minute Film Fest. This webpage, however, continues to come along nicely. Updates have slowed down quite a bit since I'm now working two jobs, but at least it does not look as daunting as it once did. I believe finishing it is possible. Also notice it is modular: I can add pictures and things as I go along, so I don't feel like I need to do everything at once. New pics of us as well as still from our movies should be appearing with semi-regularity over the next few months. Keep a lookout. Wednesday, April 28, 2004: Well, the new site is up, as you can see. There's a ton of work to be done, though... so keep in mind this is under horrible strenuous construction. It could revert back to the old site at any moment - without warning! Anyway, as I've mentioned in the past, the site was in serious need of a facelift. As I began contemplating the new design I realized something annoying: The old site is big. Really big. So I put off the redesign until later (when the site gets spontaneously smaller, perhaps?), only to discover that the longer the site was up, the bigger it got! How is this possible? No one knows. Well, I finally cracked down, sucked it up, and pulled in the reins, simultaneously throwing all caution to the wind and mixing a metaphor. The new site began to take shape. Now it's at the point where it's up, but only a very small portion of it. I tried to make sure that most of the links worked, connecting back to the original pages, but there are most likely some broken ones. It's a dangerous site out there, folks. Tread carefully. I also have plans to competely revamp the productions page. I want to do it more the way that the Internet Movie Database does it. Each movie will have its own page with links to trivia, goofs, notes, etc and each actor will have his or her own page with bios and other info. It'll be much sleeker. The only problem? The Internet Movie Database is a database, and, well, this isn't. I suppose I could make it that way, but I haven't the foggiest idea how to go about setting up a database and a template or whatever, and I certainly don't want to spend the time doing it, so I'll probably just do it by hand. Ironically enough, that's probably a lot more work. I'll most likely start with the newest stuff and work backwords. Once again, we'll see. |
|