Inside the Moon – June 11, 2010
June 10th, 2010

Posted by Tim

Tune in to Inside the Moon every Friday, at 1 PM PST (8 PM GMT), followed at 1:30ish by Ask An Alex Live. Both shows can be watched at http://ustream.tv/channel/inside-the-moon. This week’s episode is over, and can be watched below.

Make sure you get your Operation: Speak ‘n’ Sell submissions in tomorrow, as well! Check here for details.

This week, the theme of Inside the Moon is nostalgia. We’re going to take a look back at some creative projects from our past.

If you have questions you’d like to have answered on the show, whether they’re nostalgia-related or not, leave them in a comment on this blog post, or put them in this forum thread.

ENN: Resident Evil Romance
June 9th, 2010

Posted by Jeremy

This week marks the beginning of Rejected ENN’s run on the Escapist Publisher’s Club. In its place, I’ve decided to give you some inside info on this week’s episode, similar to what Matt does for the weekly video posts. To discuss the move, check this forum thread.

This week’s feature story is an idea I’ve had for a while, but had been struggling to iterate. My foray into the Dragon Age pen-and-paper roleplaying game led me to read both Dragon Age novels, and that got me thinking about game literature in general. I’ve picked up quite a few novels as PAX freebies and such, and they’re always useful to have on long ferry or plane rides. Meaning no offense to the game writers who often create them, however, they are typically not that hot.

I already had the idea of using the horrible dialogue in Resident Evil as grounds for a romance novel, but it wasn’t until I pitched the story to Paul that everything really clicked. The “people who like books that aren’t very good” part of the venn diagram was his idea, and really brought it together.

Not including video, Paul and I generated over 70 graphics and sound files for this episode. Notable among these was the narration for Resident Evil: The Spencer Mansion Liaison, which was cut significantly to reduce the length of the episode. I’m including the full version here, for your listening…uh…pleasure (no SFX or music though, I’m afraid):

Resident Evil Romance (long version)

Huge thanks to Dale Friesen for lending his superlative pipes to such an icky task–makes me want to write more things for him to narrate :).

Craft-A-Long Update
June 9th, 2010

Posted by Jeremy

Hello Craft-Alongers!

We’ve had a tidal wave of emails from people with crafting plans, and I’m pleased to announce that there will be many many many lots of truly wonderful items up for auction this year. They may melt your brain with awesomeness.

As of now, however, we can no longer accept certain crafts, due to having quite a few items in these categories already. Said categories are:

– hats / toques / beanies (Unless it’s really truly cross-your-heart-and-hope-to-die an absolutely incredible idea that no one has ever done before… in which case email[email protected] with your proposal.)

– paintings / portraits / sketches / figurines of the LRR crew. Art portraying characters from various LRR videos is still ok, but we’ve had several proposals for LRR portraits already. While we understand that looking at us makes people laugh, we believe there’s a limit to how many people will want to hang our pictures on their bedroom wall. And to how many bedroom walls we want to be hung on, actually…

Also, a quick reminder that if you want to make something, that’s great, we want to auction what you want to make. However we probably only want one of whatever you are making. Scarcity of an item will drive up its value, thus bringing in higher donations for the children. And we want to leave plenty of room for other people to donate their crafts as well.

There is still plenty of space for your crafty creativity, so if you have great ideas, keep those emails coming!

~Tally

Echo
June 7th, 2010

Posted by Graham

This week’s video, featuring twice as much dialogue as a regular video*, is online for your viewing pleasure!

*That’s not actually accurate of course, but you get the idea.

This is a video Andy wrote a while back, and when Andy comes up with a video it’s usually a winner, so we had to shoot it. Also, he was only in town for a couple months, and it gave us a chance to have him in a video—something everyone likes to see.

Shooting was quick, if a little tricky. The hill we shot this on is very near my house, but it was still about 10-15 minutes to get up it, with camera and microphone. Once we got up there and figured out the location though, it went really fast. For most shots, we would deliver our line as normal, and then Matt (while running boom) would mouth the echo line silently so we knew how long to pause before continuing with our next line.

We originally recorded the whole video’s dialogue again as audio only, so I could make the echos from it. But it turns out that for instances where a line didn’t change, it sounded wrong to use a different clip, so I only used different audio when the line was specifically different.

The funniest part for us was recording those lines. Since I wanted to make sure they sounded the same as the regular audio, we recorded them at the location right after we had finished shooting. So, imagine if you will, Andy and I standing on a hill in a public park yelling the echo lines back and forth. I yell “Your wife’s a bitch” four times and Andy replies with “I am a homosexual” before going off about his Austrian stable-boy fantasy… it was an odd moment. I think we confused some joggers.

Here’s some pictures from the shoot:

Additionally, this week’s Unskippable riffs on a game that is Legendary in name only.

And of course, there are some new Crap Shots you should see. Check out The Drainage for some fancy effects, The Accusation for a real WTF moment, and The Measurement for even-more-WTF-than-the-other-one.

On the Run: Olympic Beard Growing and Long Jumping
June 4th, 2010

Posted by Tim

There are two new behind-the-scenes videos for you to watch. One is from a few months back:

This is from the shoot for Olympic Beard Growing. You can watch the end product here.

The next one is from last week:

Shenanigans! Jer can do the longest standing-long-jump of the people who were present, at roughly 7’4″. Can anyone do longer? Prove it by submitting a video response!

The Loading Time for the ping-pong tournament is also in the pipe, as are some other behind-the-scenes features, so watch this space for those in the future!