So much happening today at Fun Size Horror! Today is the big day for Rene and I since the short I wrote and directed, Bloody Mary, is up and the short she stars in, Home, is up as well. Wednesday is Double Feature day, so all of the hosting sites are showing two shorts. We are friends with just about everyone involved int todays posts so I hope you’ll check them all out…
Home is the tale of a crumbling marriage and a fight that leads to the worst kind of homecoming.
Bloody Mary is a bit more personal. When my sister and I were kids I used to get a great deal of joy out of scaring her which, as I’m sure you can imagine, neither she or my parents were all that fond of. The worst thing I ever did was convince her that Bloody Mary lived in our bathroom mirror. This is that story.
Big second day is here and there are six more shorts released! All of them can be seen at Fun Size Horror.com.
However, I’d like to bring special attention to the short Persephone by Lisa J. Dooley. In it Rene and I are terrible rich people. Because it’s a short we’re not in it much, but hopefully a release of the outtakes will be put up somewhere because we had a LOT of fun on this shoot and there was some comedy gold that was, rightly, sent to the cutting room floor.
It feels good to be getting back into the writing swing of things. Today’s Fun Video Friday is more shameless promotion about Fun Size Horror (have you liked the Facebook page yet?). Here’s the trailer, which features many of the shorts and you can even glimpse Rene a few times if you’re paying attention *wink*. Next Monday the shorts will be released, five per sponsor per day, for only 24 hours each until Halloween!
Yesterday Wiggy Webs released our first sketch – “The Chili!” It is the first of many planned new items for the Wiggy Webs channel.
Starring its writer, Alexander Rossiter, and myself and directed by Zeke Pinheiro this is the exploration of two men trying to discover whether or not they love chili.
Watch, “Like,” and subscribe, like you do for YouTube stuff,and feel free to comment.
Rene and I did some shooting this week for a new project. It’s a travel show that has been sitting in the back of my head for a while now. We haven’t really done anything with it, frankly, because we haven’t been able to afford to. No mystery challenges, no equipment problems, just cost. For a while I thought that’d we’d sell the idea to the Travel Channel and maybe be able to host it.
Well the Travel Channel didn’t buy it and so we decided it was time to do it ourselves.
And that’s really what I wanted to get to in today’s post, waiting for permission.
One of the things that I preach is “finding a way.” “No excuses, just results.” My students hear it and more than one of my friends in the pit of their despair has heard me say it. Rene, my poor suffering wife, has heard it often enough that she knows when it’s coming. But as often as I say it, it’s something I don’t always do myself. When it comes to the entertainment industry it’s easy to look for “the way” to do things. Following steps. For example: If I want to make a TV show then I should 1) put together a pitch 2) build a package of materials 3) put together a sizzle reel and 4) present to the appropriate company to get the budget and crew to make the show. These are simplified steps, but you see what I’m talking about, right? Also, that way is REALLY hard! Super hard! Unless you are Mark Burnett or Chuck Lorre there’s no guarantee that you’re getting anything even to pilot. So what do you do?
Conventional wisdom would suggest getting a job at a production company or waiting until you are a celebrity and then hoping for a development deal. These options aren’t much better than the first. So this year I’m not asking permission any more.
We’ve had a lot of projects that have been sitting idle just waiting for someone to say yes. “All we need is one!” has been a popular mantra, but that “one” hasn’t come yet. It might not ever. Waiting is not a position of power and it doesn’t help get anything done.
If I were talking to me I’d tell myself that waiting for money is just an excuse and nobody wants excuses, they only want results. So that’s what we’re going to do now, generate results. With the help and support of my wife and our friends we have started a series of projects that will be released come hell or high water. Whether it be on the WiggyWebs YouTube channel or some network does magically come along and sweep something up remains to be seen, but we’re doing them and that’s that.
Financing schminancing – production levels will be at whatever we can beg, barrow or steal. Thankfully we have some very talented friends with some very nice toys. And in the end, if what we do is really good and lots of people watch it, the projects will start paying for themselves and then we just need to keep cranking stuff out (fingers crossed).
I know this isn’t a new idea, hell there’s a whole community over at YouTube of people who got this way before I did, but I’ve finally gotten on the train. And maybe by talking about it you can get on the train too.
Besides, Rene and I had a hell of a lot of fun shooting this weekend and that in and of itself was worth it.
As many of you will know I started a production company back 2005 called Wiggy VonSchtick Productions. Wiggy produced Stupid Teenagers Must Die!, a series of web material and got a whole bunch of genre projects started (many still in process) but as a name it does not generate, how you say, respectability.
Here’s what that logo looks like:
Is it catchy? Yes. Is it “sticky?” Yes. Is it something you want in front of your documentary about plastic surgeons and the patients who have been harmed by them? Not so much.
I tried a few different solutions to this including altering the name to WVS Productions and doing a rough sketch of what a new logo would look like:
But It just wasn’t right.
Then Rene came into the picture. She has a long list of ideas for projects that are designed to educate and uplift (a few are being developed right now) and we needed a company to do those things.
Taking our last names and smashing them together we created Andelon Productions! We’ve actually been working under this umbrella since 2011, but only recently have we gotten serious about our branding and websites and everything else. So today I wanted to show off our new logos designed by Karen Halker-Miller!
The silhouette is of our dog, Frankie, doing his inquisitive head turn.
New website and social media soon – I’m sure I’ll mention it here.
Rene and I have been making some changes over in our neck of the woods. Career changes, home changes, business changes – really the only things not changing are the animals.
Lazy bums.
Now there are other changes that are coming – new websites (I know I’ve been promising this for a while, now there will be a few more), new videos, all kinds of new things – but I’m also restructuring how some of the old social networking works.
Starting today, because a random Thursday is as good a day to do something as any other day, I’m going to start separating out what goes on which Facebook page. My personal Facebook page is going to get a lot more private, just family and actual friends. The Fan Page is going to start getting exclusive content – all the acting and production stuff.
Want to see pictures from the bobble head video I just shot? They’ll be there.
Want to latest updates about The Pom Pom Massacre or other production bits? Well, you should actually visit those pages, but the information will also be posted on the fan page.
I’ve tried this before, some of you may remember it, but I didn’t have any content to maintain it. Based on current events, content should no longer be an issue (Yay!).
Exciting, right?
