Geekza

Hey kids, Fig here. Here’s the kickin’ rad Episode 54, wherein we talked about City of the Gods, and The Phantom Edit. Enjoy.

Also, last night Brian asked me to capture some footage for him, and apparently, if you have the camcorder connected and recording, but on record mode instead of playback mode, you get a wicked echo.

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What?

Hey guys, Fig here. Remember, this weekend we’re talking The Phantom Edit and City of the Gods, so know your shit if you want to keep up. (It’s probably not neccesary, though.)

So, here’s a short film made by two of my roommates and one guy who has a bunch of stuff in our apartment, Nick, about a year ago, that’s way, way funnier than it could be. Totally worth watching, check it out.

God fucking damn it.

What a loss.

Hey guys, Fig here.

Well, it’s fair to say that yesterday’s Raiders of the Lost Ark commentary was one of our best ever, with FX oldbie Trey Stokes and dubiously fedora’d 3D dogfighter Aaron Witlin rounding out the cast of characters, and it’s a god damned shame we had to record it with a Mac, because if not, you might be able to hear it clearly.

Yes, yes, there were audio problems. We were preparing an hour in advance, just in case a random issue sprung up, and one certainly did - for some reason, the laptop (Mac laptop, MAC LAPTOP) we had to record and broadcast with so we could watch a movie downstairs, handled the input from our mixer board wholly differently than the PC we always use does. This, mixed with the head-slap-duh factor “dude, that room is waaaaay more echo-y than the padded Geekza room,” presented our audio mixer Cloe Z with more than a handful of frustrations, and throughout the show she was still subtly tweaking the mix trying to make it as listenable as possible.

So, tonight I’ll crack open the official Audacity wav and do my best to clean it up, and make the high quality MP3 that goes up on the icon row with the other movie commentaries as awesome as I can, and we’ll consider that a lesson learned. In the mean time, the Talkshoe file will be up, and I need to listen to it myself to assess the recording.

But, the chat room was pakced with oldbies and newbies alike, and great fun was had by all. In the words of Tyler Durden, we should do this again some time. *clink*

Clarification Update: Yes, Raiders commentary this week, “The movies that might have been” next week. (Although I’ll bet that Rapidshare link expires before then, so snag early.)

It occurs to me that in the last week, two things have surfaced in my life that make for an interesting discussion topic, and I’d like for us to get a proper reading circle going on this one, so do me a favor. Torrent the file on this page (with BitComet, if you don’t already have a Torrent program you like), and also download this PDF, which someone somewhere on the internet should be thanked for, that contains some script, you may or may not have read, because it may or may not have ever been made into a movie.

These are Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Edit, and Indiana Jones and the City of Gods, by Frank Darabont. (Neither of which were uploaded, or hosted, by me.) As we’re all, and you’re all, avid fans of both series, I think an interesting discussion lies before us. The “movies that might have been.” The fact that I now consider a fan-edited edition of The Phantom Menace, The Phantom Menace, or a never-shot draft of a script that was buried by time, The Indy Four movie, is interesting to me, and all the more interesting because they’ve both come up in the last week.

So go ahead and snag both - and don’t be dicks with that guy’s torrent, after you’ve finished downloading it, let your software run for a while and give other folks a bit of your bandwidth, as you won’t be using the internet connection when you’re watching the movie - and take a look at them, and we’ll have us a proper discussion about this next weekend.

Hey guys, Fig here. Be sure to catch Colbert tonight, as the grapevine informs us that listener/chat participant DJ Bakerman has won the McCain Greenscreen Challenge, and that his video will air tonight, as the first place selection from the contest. (Although he informs me that they might not air it - as he won a previous Colbert greenscreen challenge, and it never aired.)

In any case, this is totally awesome, I love our FX artist listeners-on-the-rise. Way to go DJ, and the rest of you, step it up a bit, will ya?

See you on Sunday.

Hey folks, Fig here. Well, as some of you may know, today the internet exploded bits of paper and the weird gold bendy things that you use to hold scripts together all over the place, as links to the famously hard to find Frank Darabont “Indiana Jones and the City of Gods” script pinged around the internet like oh so many bouncy balls. Almost every site hosting the script crashed, and was subsequently sued, but it’s out there, and Brian and myself have got it.

We’ll be talking about it on the Raiders episode, I’m assuming, mostly because we’ve already talked about Indy for like four episodes in a row, and I don’t want to make it six, but we might forego it and talk about it the weekend after this, to keep the commentary shorter than it would be with that whole bit.

In any case, if you weren’t lucky enough to snag a copy, you can at least check out a formal review, here.

To sum up, that article with it’s last, spoiler-free paragraph: “At the end of the day, Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods is 100% a better script than the one that was shot for the film. This would have been the right way to close out the series, and it would have been a return to form that no one could have expected, instead of a movie that everyone places just above the abysmal Temple of Doom in the Indy canon.”

See you this weekend, kids. Bring a friend. (Seriously. Tell others.) (Seriously.)

Hey guys, here’s episode 52, it’s truly amazing. And next week, be here with your Raiders of the Lost Ark DVD, we’re gonna do us an old-fashioned movie commentary. More on this as it develops, until then, keep your clothing on unless you’re a girl.

Episode 52. Download this shit.

Update!

Well, what do you know? That thing Rico and Brandon cooked up that I piano’ed for is a finalist.

To vote, if you want to vote, but only if you want to, and be a good fan, but only if you want to be a good fan, go here, type “one nine films” in the search box, and watch that video. There’s a little thumbs up icon next to it, click it, then click “view next video” to register that vote.

More on this as it develops!

Hey guys, Fig again. Here’s a little video I worked on with my buddy Rico in New York City, for Zack Snyder’s little “make us a commercial and we’ll put you in The Watchmen movie” contest. The idea was to take a given product - namely, this perfume - and make a spec ad for it. Best one ends up in the movie, as far as I understand it.

Rico called me up last night and he says to me he says, “I need some sad piano shit.” I did a few sad improvs, he picked his favorite, and this is the result. This thing is fucking awesome.

Props to Rico and his boy Brandon for the edit.