Geekza

Hey guys, here is the Q and A from yesterday, it’s very informative and fun to listen to. Thanks to the twenty or more folks who came out to the chat, and the half dozen folks who sent in questions or concerns, and to Ryan for coming out and talking pro FX with me.

If you’re even remotely interested in visual FX, this one’s for you. Enjoy.

Update! We’re going to have old Geekza vet Ryan Wieber in the studio with us today, and I hear tell he might just be bringing a one-time only piece of footage with him, for the live listeners to check out. Ryan is an Emmy-winning visual effects artist, who works at Stargate Digital, working on shows like “Heroes.” Together we represent experience from five or six different studios, so check it out, and keep those questions coming! Got a bunch so far, this is shaping up to be a great episode.

If you’ve never listened live to a show before, here’s how it works. From Talkshoe’s website, edited to be Geekza-specific. Remember, our show begins at 4:00pm Pacific, and we’re usually on air a few minutes before that.

“You can listen in two ways.

You can click on the big purple Listen button next to Geekza’s live show, without downloading anything. You will not be able to particpate in the chat or call in, but you’ll be able to hear the show live, and you can always email questions on the fly to teague.chrystie@gmail.com.

Or, you can sign up and use the TalkShoe Live! Pro software to listen and chat with other listeners, and the hosts. Go to Geekza’s talkshoe page and click “Live Now” or “Join In”, which will launch TalkShoe Live! Pro on your computer. If you have not yet downloaded TalkShoe Live! Pro, you will be asked to do so.

And THEN, if you’re so inclined, you can call into the show. Call 1-724-444-7444, Geekza’s show ID is 8230. Enter your 10-digit phone number or PIN, which is something you designate when you’re signing up, ask myself or Ryan any questions you might have live, on air, radio style. Piece of cake.”

Hey folks, Fig here. I’ve gotten a lot of questions lately about the industry, my experiences, and mostly, what other folks need to know before they can begin, or how to break in, or what to never do, etc.. Today we’ll cover all of that, so if you’re a budding FX artist, definitely be here - and leave comments on this post, or send an email to teague.chrystie@gmail.com, encompassing any and all questions you have. No limit, let’s have us a good ‘ol talkin about it.’

And, as always, we’ll have an eye on that chat, so you can ask there.

Thanks folks, and see ya there!

Update! Here’s the episode! Low quality Talkshoe, high rez up tonight.
So.

We were on last week, but didn’t tell you. But that episode is now available and all.

This is awkward. *bites knuckle* Anyway.

Today on Geekza we’ll have Pink Five renaissance man Trey Stokes on to talk about his new series Ark, which was announced at Comic-Con. You might have seen him in the Atomfilms booth with his star, Renee O’Connor, who was the second lead in Xena back in the day. If not, here’s a giant picture of her that fucks up the page.

So, here’s a very sleep-deprived Trey, and Renee, talking about the project a bit at Comic-Con…and here you can see the super-secret bootleg of the trailer that someone taped at Comic-Con and threw online. Those bastards!

(Also, I’m the visual effects lead on Ark. What. What.)

So, same thing as always, we’ll be there at 4:00pm pacific, live, the whole bit. Be there or I’ll eat your parents.

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.

…

What?

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.