But in the end, isn’t it always the same question and always the same answer?
June 29, 2004
As this nation of mine sits glued to the TV, feeling the strain of their well-exercised democratic muscles, I sit (with the help of Shane) largely due to my own procrastination, writing another production journal for you all to enjoy. Under the circumstances, I ought to be writing about a political film that somehow moved me, or helped shape my artistic perspective. And though there are many great politically driven films, few have left a huge impression on me. That’s not to say that there aren’t some great political films out there. All the President’s Men – a classic. Wag the Dog – cute. Dr. Strangelove – killer. But I’ve never considered myself an overly political guy.
I have noticed, however, that one of the major issues in any election is that of budget. How to most wisely spend the money and resources you have. This same issue plays a major part of our lives here at Dead End Days. Making a four-hour film for no money is a hell of a task. How to maximize resources, materials, equipment and the little money we have to keep the show rolling is an extremely sensitive aspect of making an independent film. If I tried to write down every great idea I’ve had to throw out the window due to lack of funds or resources to pull it off in a way that doesn’t insult our audience’s intelligence, or compromise our limited but proud production values, I’d have a list longer than the string of lies that is the liberal election platform. That said, the old clich
Some weeks you just can’t think of a witty title.
June 25, 2004
Today’s thrilling new episode testing the limits of couch design concludes the muchly anticipated “Brad Overexposure Week”, thanks for watching.
1. Opinion polls conducted by Screamy Mc Screams-a-lot, the Hollering Hobo have shown than 95% of the public at large find Decision 2004 either hilarious or disturbing. The remaining 5% find Decision 2004 disturbingly hilarious. Polls conducted are accurate to within +/- 100% 19 times out of 20.
2. Since you’ve been
Strange Adventures in Infinite Space is a great little game for Windows and Macs that allow you to adventure through the universe in twenty minutes or less… with free demos available for all… huzzah!
The 2004 Cartoonists Choice Awards basically affirmed that everyone loves the same stuff I’ve been plugging all year (although I’ll point out that the ever-good John Alliston has really stepped up his (already considerably lofty) game. I had not made acquaintance with the delightful Count Your Sheep, but that’s cool.
(Memo to those who claim I simply rave about everything: Despite my general agreement with this years CCA nominees, it physically pains me to see Sore Thumbs in there. Don’t get me wrong, I have every reason to believe that Chris Crosby is a great guy, and a tremendous patron to the field of web cartooniststry, but Sore Thumbs has always projected such an air of complete shameless genre pandering it makes my head hurt every time I try to read more than an strip or two… then again, I’m sure it draws more readers in a day than we get all month, so it’s got to be doing something right).
Item! Reports from the front line indicate that the Gillette Mach Vibrating Turbo Three Plus Xerxes Tire-Iron Dada may actually be more effective than the shameless marketing would indicate. I’ve received enough glowing reviews that I’m sorely temped to shell out the bucks… but at what cost to my soul? Eh, they seemed to like it over at Consumer Whore, and those guys are ballsy enough to use a .biz domain!
And finally if you have no idea how you’re going to spend the next week waiting for the arrival of the last promo prior to the historic vote on July 5, I located this eight year old Wired article by Neil Stephenson chronicling his multi-year, multi-country journey following the laying of the longest fiber-optic cable in the world. It’s a mammoth read at 58 pages, but absolutely fascinating. Check it out.
Finally a bunch of Team: Dead is going to catch Farenheit 9/11 tonight to see what all the fuss is about firsthand. Considering the forums barely survived the heated “Super-size me” debates, I can only imagine the carnage come Saturday. Speaking of the forums we have a nifty new review section where folks are reviewing… just about anything. So if you want to know if stuff if any good, you now know where to look! Huzzah!
That’s it cats and kiddies. See you next week for half the carbs and 80% less me! Sweet!
Their numeral is many!
June 23, 2004
Decision 2004 spot two is up. The opposition weighs in with many erudite arguments about why your June 5th vote should go to them. I have no idea if you watched spot one, but you really don’t want to miss this one… trust me on this.
Staring out the window at the kids on recess.
June 22, 2004
I apologize for what is becoming “Brad overexposure week” over here at Days. I promise it’s not indicative of any plans of future stardom that me doing a production journal, the first installment of decision 2004 and the surprise return of everyone’s favorite bit-part in the next episode all fall within days of each other. I’ll do my best to stay out of everyone’s face for the next little bit, as I figure my Warhollian 15 minutes are now well and truly up.
It was a weird week in Dead-ville these past seven days; A couple of family events as well as our esteemed Matthew taking a business trip out of town coincided to throw our schedule completely to heck, nothing overtly catastrophic, but in a subtle unnerving way. For better or worse everyone has fallen into a fairly regular pattern for the past couple of months. Ignoring shooting weekends we’ve got a pretty regular schedule of staff meetings, editing sessions, and timing and sound mixing nights… all of a sudden everything was off kilter by a day or two, there were too many people around, or not enough space, or equipment wasn’t where it was supposed to be; Only in scrambling to keep everything on schedule did I get a distanced outside look into a fairly self evident truth that I had blinded myself to: We put a lot of time into Dead End Days. I’m not even talking about the “in the shower musing about the show” time either, just the physical nuts and bolts of doing it. At DED-HQ alone we now have well over 40 hours a week of people over doing things… things that are not necessarily “fun” or “rewarding” or “not a complete pain” but that need to be done to get that episode up every Friday.
Maybe it’s just hitting harder now that the weather has turned nicer, or my day-job is about to pick up exponentially, or City of Heroes is getting such rave reviews, or I got my latest bandwidth bill in the mail (incidentally the data we’ve moved since opening would make a stack of floppy discs roughly big enough to circle the globe - good job!) but last week was a challenge and it would have been so easy to take a day off… maybe two… maybe a week… a very slippery slope indeed.
That brings me to you all. “Dead End Days” is by no means a runaway success. We’ve yet to be flooded with groupies, no one is constructing fan page shrines to Sam (although they should be), I’ll be pleasantly surprised if we ever break even on t-shirt sales and shady bootleggers aren’t selling dodgy VCD’s on eBay. That’s fine and dandy with us, mind you, from inception DED was a project with such a narrow audience that we needed a net as wide at the Internet to hopefully find the few and the faithful to appreciate it. That’s why it means so much to me that you all are still watching (and reading). Every time I notice someone saying kind things in a forum out on the net, or quoting a line, it gives me another reason to not reconfigure the EditingMachine3000 so that it can support DirectX 9. Every time someone cares enough to let us know that they didn’t like the way we did something, it’s also a shove on the back to keep us going the next time we’re shooting. Every e-mail, every anecdote about a friend who watches at work, every guy who runs-up-to-Matt-in-a-mall is just another reason to see this crazy ride through to the end.
I can’t tell you how proud I am of the “Dead End Days” team. While there are websites out there that struggle to find a few hours a month for their audiences, there are many, many folks on our team who give far more than that (and in some cases do nothing else outside of day jobs) to see this thing through. It’s also given me a humble respect for the legions of solo writers and artists out there who create the works that I enjoy reading every day/week and don’t have a peer support group to keep their noses to the grindstone.
I can’t tell you where it’s all going to end. Our shooting schedule has never been as tight as it’s going to be over the next two months, nor have we been trying to do so much – but I can tell you one thing: If no one was watching, we would have stopped a long time ago.
So every time an innocent citizen gets mugged in City of Hero’s and I’m not there to stop them, you have only yourselves to blame.
Thanks.
Three is also the first Fermat prime number!
June 18, 2004
Yeah, I know - you all got used to “new episodes every Friday” meaning “very late Thursday”, and now we’ve gone and ruined your routine. If it helps any it was for a good cause… provided you consider “Brad gets to go watch musicals” a good cause. What was only to be a minor delay was unfortunately amplified by a “Yeah, about that entire day off work…” scenario that would have done Lumbergh proud.
To coincide with our celebration of Day Three I also wanted to give a hearty “shout-out” to forums admin, and all around DED-workaholic Firefox for graduating from University this week. I’d wish Rob the best for his future, but since it will invariably involve him wishing he was back in University, that just seems cruel.
Assuming you all are up-to-date on decision 2004 (and when will the next installment drop? Only mailing list subscribers know for certain!) you are likely not surprised that some of us over at Rocket Ace Moving Pictures Heavy Industries, are avid politico’s and are watching 2004’s heated North American election circuit with interest. One story from the upcoming Canadian national elections that really reverberated with me was that of the NDP Candidate for Edmonton Strathcona Malcolm Azania. I’ve been lead to believe that Malcolm, as a very well spoken young black male has been positoned by the party to be a very visable “face” for the NDP in Alberta. Along comes National Post columnist Colby Cosh who was at the University of Alberta at the same time, and thought that Mr. Azania was a bit of a pompous twit. Sure enough a four minute Google search by Mr. Cosh turned up a ten year old USENET diatribe posted by Malcolm’s radical student alter-ego to soc.culture.african.american entitled JEWS:ENEMIES?FRIENDS?. Colby jots out a sixty word post on his blog pointing to the old post, and the proverbial hilarity ensues. Colby does a pretty good job later on of chronicaling the resulting media fraccas.
Frankly I don’t actually care about the specifics of this particular case all that much, as your view on where to put Azania and Cosh on the “insane radical socialist to calculating muck-raking conservative bastard” spectrum will largely depend on your political leanings to begin with. I will point out that if a simple Google-search now constitutes “Muck-raking” I am personally worse than Frank Magazine.
I will point out that through the cartooning “genius” of Stephen Notley, and Adam Thrasher, and now Azania and Cosh, I probably have a better picture of the political climate of early 90’s University of Alberta than I did of my own Alma Matter. Actually my social activisim at York consisted primarily of forming and sharing a burning “stong dislike” for the Canadian Federation of Students that continues to this day… fodder for a future post perhaps.
Back to what’s interesting about this Azania story to me: The strange permacy and accessability the Internet gives written works, especially during one’s formative “bonehead student” years. Many scholars have written about the so called “Digital Dark Ages” (basically a prediction that since we’re storing more and more information electronically, we’re leaving almost no “hard” records for future generations to understand us by should something cataclysmic happen (or time and indifference take their inevitable toll on the laundry-lists and casual corrospondance of the day). I have yet to read any equal bodies of work about how past writings may come back to haunt us in the more immediate future.
Anyone who runs for political office in this day and age now risks having everything they ever wrote, on web forums, USENET, perhaps even e-mails scoured for ammunition for the opposition even (especially) the volume of digital writings contributed during secondary and post-secondary education, when free time to actively contribute to a variety of Internet discussion forums is more plentiful. Perhaps fair game for the politician, but what about every other aspect of one’s life.
I don’t necessarily want to have potential employers reading what I thought of the Calgary Flames in 1995, (and yes that link was *very* carefully culled from a list of far more embarassing posts… many about comic books).
Can you imagine your girlfriend/boyfriends dad pouring through her MSN logs while you two are out? Do you want your mother-in-law going through the “recently visited” cache of your web-browser?
These are just a few of the areas that Information secrecy is going to come into play. The No Archive metatags are are interesting start, but I’d hazard a guess that the next decade is going to see a lot of ex-Furries and ex-Goths worried about the permacy of data on the ‘net, and perhaps their chances with the NDP.
I chatted about this with Firefox over dinner a couple of nights back, and he didn’t seem to find it different than having one’s grandkids find a box of old journals or letters. The difference, in my mind, is there we choose what we save. It’s unlikely that Grandpa kept the 100s of loveletters he wrote courting other women, or the journal in which he whines incessently about having to clean his room. LiveJournal has no similar self-filtering. When I look at those with less self control than myself
(say certain memebers of past Survivor casts without the good sense not to post “Where can I get Crystal Meth” questions under their real names), I can only laugh when Grandma has to explain “the way things were back in her day.”
Whatever will you do?
June 17, 2004
Due to a scheduling conflict, episode 29 won’t be up first thing tomorrow morning as is usually the case. It will be available later in the day… I’m sure you’ll all cope somehow.
Premature Evaluation
June 15, 2004
It’s been just over eleven months since I flew to Toronto to meet with Brad “The Coffee Guy” Fox and Matt “Young Guns” Hoos to undertake preliminary planning on what would become this internet serial.
(Did I ever mention that Brad is my cousin-in-law-in-law? My father’s brother’s daughter’s mom’s sister married Brad’s father’s brother. We are two men bound by blood and two legal ceremonies.)
Right, so, eleven months ago… Ah, the golden days of yore. We were so young, so na
Decision 2004!
June 14, 2004
As you are all doubt no aware, there is a historic vote coming up shortly that will affect a good majority of our Dead End Days audience. In the interest of being a socially concious website we have devoted some free-time political advertising space to a number of parties who will be advertising over the next three weeks leading up to the July 5th vote.
I encourage you all to check out these informative spots (starting this week) not only because this inagural entry prominently features me, but because an informed and active democracy is the cornerstone of a healthy democratic process. I sincerely hope you all will vote on July 5th, right here at www.deadenddays.com, and in the meantime will brush up on the important issues of the day.
There’s no telling when the next promo ad might drop… so you’ll have to check back daily… if only there was some kind of electronic communication medium by which we could regularly share this kind of information. Say something that periodically sent information to a kind of electronic “mailbox.” Why with such a fantastical device we could tell you right away when new Decision 2004 spots were uploaded. What a shame.
Join us tomorrow for everyone’s favourite West-coast slacker/scribe and his crazy take on… stuff.
The Universal Language
June 11, 2004
"Day Two", we hardly knew ‘ye. Ah well. See ‘ya.
People often talk about film as a “universal language” capable of bridging the gaps of time, place, and culture. This is mostly bunk. If I can barely decypher the plot of a japanese movie targeted at little girls after two seperate screenings (long story), there is no way that some of my favourite films of all time would be the same without the glorious babelfish like assistance of the eloquent sub-title.
Because language is so entertwined with most creative mediums there are very few things in life which are truly trancendant: Fine Arts and Crafts. Design. Architecture. Fine Arts and Crafts by Robots. These few exceptions though often tend to be highly specilized areas of interest only to afficinadoes of the format, say perhaps, experts on machines that eat expensive food and defecate.
That’s why it’s so amazing when someone manages to cut across all lines of language and culture to create a languageless creation of mass appeal. The key is to find universal elements of the human experience common to every man woman and child on the planet. Elements such as humanities collective love for whack-a-mole and destroying alien invaders. By which I mean today’s topic is little more than a padded-out rave review for the site EYEZMAZE which I love with increasing vigour every time I visit. At the moment it includes three games: Grow (v3), Vanilla (vB), and Tontie (the latter being the aformentioned inspired whack-a-mole clone that threatens to consume my life). For each of them, trying to figure out how the “game” works is part of the fun, and some seemingly simple concepts are executed with remarkible insight and attention to detail (if you think “Grow” is stupid and pointless you haven’t played it nearly enough). Simple games that capture the imagination, easily suck away the hours, and require no language at all to understand. What more do you want from a website?
Pages of glowing adjectives from me can really do this site nor more justice than visiting for a few moments, so take the time you would normally spend listening to me rant and go bash some aliens on the noggin for exciting cash prizes right now.
Incidentally, those on our mailing list got some interesting teaser information today about a very special event coming to www.deadenddays.com next week. Tough noogies, those of you not on our list. Tough noogies indeed.
Miles to go before I sleep…
June 8, 2004
Well, here we are, moving towards episode 28, which will herald the end of day two. We have more than two hours of film up on the website, enough text written between the scripts and the site to fill a novel, and, if everything goes according to plan, we have now crossed the midway point of this madness we call Dead End Days.
It feels strange in about five different ways to say that.
I moved to Toronto to work on this project on September 15th. I auditioned, alongside Erin and Chad, on the 16th. Which means that, to me, the only thing that exists in this city is our film. It is the only reason I have to be here. When I go to work (as mentioned in Matt’s production journal last week) it is with the awareness that I am making money in order to keep making Dead End Days. When I arrive home at 4am, and know I have to wake up at 6:30 the next morning, I only have the willpower to set the alarm knowing that it will help the film in the end. It may be sad and clich
