An old friend of mine from way back, Tim Erwin, started his own podcast recently called Capes & Scowls which is usually a comic centric podcast (along with other geeky topics). I had the pleasure of being asked to do an interview for the show which actually turned out to be way more than the normal interview I’ve done before. Tim dives into more than just the recent shorts, as we go into my college and art background, conversations about old Jacquo shorts from my high school days, the Zoinks, the name Shamoozal, some of our Nerdlog articles, and loads of other stuff. So if you enjoy listening to me ramble on and on and sometimes not make a good point, then you’ll love the latest episode of Capes & Scowls. It’s an hour and ten minutes of nothing but Shamoozal… and of course a touch of Lost, Nintendo, and Ghostbusters.

Listen to and download the podcast on the Capes & Scowls Sound Cloud page.

My DVD/Blu-Ray Pick

TRON: Legacy – I saw the original TRON for the first time within the last year and I was not impressed. I know it was some seriously amazing stuff for its time, but it definitely did not hold up well over the almost 30 years since the initial release. But fortunately for myself, I love Jeff Bridges so I still wanted to see the sequel. It was a pretty wild movie. Again, some seriously amazing stuff done visually. A perfect movie to own on Blu Ray for the high definition. The story was like Star Wars meets The Matrix. Jeff Bridges’ character disappeared shortly after the events from the original movie and over 20 years later his son (Garrett Hedlund) finds his secret cyber world. He also finds out its being run by a cyber version of his Dad. So he has to help take him down. It has some jaw dropping visuals that are worth a watch.

My Theater Pick

Your Highness – my favorite comedy of 2008 was Pineapple Express. It was a good mixture between laughs and action. A stoner action comedy would be a great description. So when director David Gordon Green signed on for Your Highness, I was instantly pumped. James Franco plays a brave warrior who must save the girl of his dreams (Zooey Deschanel) from the clutches of an evil sorcerer. Danny McBride is his dipshit brother who tags along. Natalie Portman is also a skilled warrior and joins them on their quest. Its set in medieval times and has a hard R rating. So expect lots of cursing and nudity. Sounds fun right? The red band trailers crack me up so I’m really looking forward to it. Plus its written by McBride and his longtime writing partner Ben Best who provide a lot of the hilarious writing for Eastbound & Down.

(more…)

I’m out on vacation this week in sunny Florida, so this Music Monday is coming a little early. Here’s the music from my favorite ride in Disney World. I have the full soundtrack somewhere in my house that has a lot of neat out-takes with Thurl Ravenscroft and Paul Frees. Fun fact about this song is that to get the creepy disorientated sound, the musicians played portions of the music backwards. Then they took the backwards recordings and reversed them and sync’d it to the other tracks. Pretty wild in the days before computer multi-tracking! See you next week!

I’m probably going to get a little more personal about my work here than I should, so I just want to get that out of the way first.

Last week I mentioned that I had started work on the next episode of Read Only Memory and that production was full steam ahead. After that night I only did another night or two of work on the short, mainly doing storyboards. I have one shot that’s actually semi complex and I did spend a night trying to come up with how I’m going to tackle that moment. Outside of that, work on the short has kind of come to a halt.

It would be easy for me to blame distractions like getting the 3DS, or any other number of things as to why production has been slow. The truth is, I’m at one of my moments where I really feel like I’ve just hit the wall. There is usually a hurdle in getting a new project started and generally once I hit that stride is when I really get into things. When I was working on Howard & Nester & Metroid I was literally thinking about that short almost every waking moment. The second I got the girls to bed I’d come down into the studio and pound out a decent amount of work. It was good getting back into the swing of things after so much time away from working on the shorts. I honestly felt like that rush was going to carry over into the current short, but alas, my high didn’t last.

(more…)

My DVD/Blu-Ray Pick

Black Swan – this is actually a hot topic in Hollywood right now because there’s a dispute over how much of the ballet Natalie Portman actually did and how much was really a stunt double. But regardless, she won the Oscar for her acting, not her dancing. This movie is creeptacular. Filmed like The Wrestler but more of a mind trip like The Fountain. Both of those movies were done by Darren Aronofsky so its no surprise that he merged some styles here. Guys, don’t worry. This is not a chick flick ballet movie. Its dark and weird. Oh and if you aren’t sold yet then just remember you get a couple of scenes of hot Mila Kunis on Natalie action. Boneriffic.

My Theater Pick

Source Code – Duncan Jones may always be associated with his father, musician David Bowie, but he’s actually a really talented filmmaker. His first feature film MOON was one of my favorites of 2009. Now he comes back with another little mindtripper about a soldier (Jake Gyllenhaal) who has a mission to find the bomber of a train. The catch is the bombing already happened and through a new military experiment he can be constantly transferred into the body of a man on that train in the final 8 minutes of his life. He has to find the bomber before another one happens. Sounds oddly interesting.

(more…)

Childish Gambino is the side project of Donald Glover (of TV’s Community). This track comes from his latest EP which was released for free through his Tumblr. I particularly like the beat on this song a lot, though I will warn you the lyrics are NSFW, so throw those headphones on. Heres a link to the whole EP.

I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, but the next episode of Read Only Memory, tentatively titled “Contra with Friends”, has begun production. I suppose the surprising part is that it took so long for production to begin, I mean, Howard & Nester & Metroid has been out for weeks now! Well, I took a week off, and then last week got a bit nuts personally and also with preparing for the Full Hearts Marathon. Would you believe it took me longer to set up Thursday night than the time I actually spent playing games the following night? Computers. They suck.

So anyway, Contra with Friends. I’m kind of excited to make this one, because it’s an idea I’ve been kicking around for ages now. In fact it goes all the way back to “How to Hook Up the NES.” I’ve said in the past that GFG#5 was actually cut in half when I realized just how much work it would be. After Jacquo finally hooked up the NES, a SECOND Jacquo (another throwback to the old Goofy shorts where multiple Goofy’s would be walking around) would enter the scene and they’d begin to play Contra together, hence the reason it was the featured game in the short. The narrator was going to sort of do a play by play type thing as the Jacquos played Contra and eventually rung each others necks and both passed out. ‘Contra with Friends’ obviously won’t be that way, nor will it feature bunny version of Lance and Bill, but it will explore some of the ideas I had there. It’s nice sort of being able to complete something, even though it’s so far removed from where it originally ended up.

That’s sort of the fun of the creative process, pulling bad ideas, saving the good ones, refining them for use later, and so on. Heck, Howard & Nester & Metroid was actually two ideas combined into one. Howard & Nester was going to be its own thing, and the whole bit with Samus being “Metroid” was another short I had planned, but the two ideas worked better together.

(more…)