'Mad Nation' Post-Apocalyptic TV show Megathread

Hmm this could be the next "Evil Dead" supers 8's got to love'em.

Man I'm really looking forward to seeing this movie so save A copy for me, 10 bucks is still the going rate right? theres just one thing could you like stop triming the movie, the more the better, man I know you got to worry about size and lenght but still a movie should at least be longer that 40 min, an hour tops, anyway its should be a great movie, cant wait, so keep it up.
 
Yes, the DVD is still 10$, that's -almost definately- not going to change. The only variable is shipping, depending on where you are. Most likely it'll be like, 2$ or so via envelope post, International shipping I've got no idea. If shipping ends up being more than 3$ on the avarage, I'll probably drop the price down on the DVD to 8$ and take a wee bit of a loss just so that I can keep them under 15$ total.

You'd be suprised how much 3 minutes less time on a movie can improve it. My biggest personal mistake with my pictures is that I make them too long and they drag in the middle, and I'm trying very hard not to let that happen with Mad Nation. While I can assure you that it will definately be more than 45 minutes, I'm trying hard to keep it under an hour. I just don't have the budget or the resources to make a feature length picture and have it be worth watching. However there will probably be a director's cut that will be a tad longer, so that I can feel a little more free to include more cinematics and possibly even deleted or extended scenes. Basically, I'll cut everything together that I like, make the directers cut from that, then strip out everything that is cinematically unnessesary, and that will be the would-be theatrical release.

I do have a pair of scenes I was considering for the movie and then decided against, both of which I doubt I will have time to shoot. It's a shame too, because as a scene by itself, they both would be very good. However another possible bonus feature on the DVD will be story boards of these deleted scenes.

I do have one additional hurtle to overcome with the DVD's international release, aside from organizing the subtitle work. That is that I need to figure out how to make versions of the film in PAL, the non-US video standard. For those who don't know, the United States and Japan use a video format called NTSC, while nearly everyone else uses PAL. A DVD in NTSC will probably not work in a DVD player outside of an NTSC standardised nation. Thus any International DVDs going anywhere other than Japan would need to be burned in PAL. If any of you are familiar with Final Cut Pro and iDVD, and know how to make DVDs in PAL, it'd be helpful of you to help me out with that.
 
Awesome man!

Yeah, PAL version would be great, but I wouldn't have a clue how you may format it for a PAL DVD player.

All the best!
 
Ah, goddamnit.
It does not matter whether you use 'NTSC' or 'PAL' on DVDs. Because on those formats it only refers to the number of scanlines and not the colour setup, making it completely irrelevant. Any DVD player can read both and sends out the correct signal to the TV it is connected to.
Gah!

What does matter is the region. That's it. That's the only thing that matters, and it doesn't even do anything. It's just a single flag.
 
You're right about the regions, I confuse the two sometimes. But I do know for a fact that PAL recordings don't always play on American tvs. I have several dvds around that I've made with PAL video files that don't work in my own dvd player, so I just kinda assumed that NTSC wouldn't work on Euro players either. Either way, I'll figure out a way to make it work in the final DVD release.
 
InTheOnlineAsbestosSuit said:
You're right about the regions, I confuse the two sometimes. But I do know for a fact that PAL recordings don't always play on American tvs. I have several dvds around that I've made with PAL video files that don't work in my own dvd player,
Click to expand...
...
What?
That's just silly. And is probably the problem of the DVD player.

InTheOnlineAsbestosSuit said:
so I just kinda assumed that NTSC wouldn't work on Euro players either. Either way, I'll figure out a way to make it work in the final DVD release.
Click to expand...
Just make it NTSC. Any European should be able to play that.
 
Don't worry too much about the region codes either, there are specific programs to... bypass those restrictions when you play said dvd on a computer.
 
So in my complete ineptitude I totally forgot to post these links a few months back. They are for productions I've done in the past that are availible on my website, so that anyone getting antsy while waiting for the movie can view some of my previous work and either get excited or discouraged depending on whether you like it or not.

http://www.perniciousparadise.com/Marooned.mov

This is "Marooned", a pirate comedy that we made in the wake of the release of Pirates of The Caribbean: thanks to the explosion of interest in the genre caused by PoTC, I was able to whip up enough interest amoung my friends to make a pirate movie. Be warned, this is one of my first movies, so pay little attention to the picture quality and camera shakeyness at times, though you'll notice that both improve as the movie goes along. This is because the first scene of Marooned was origionally made to be it's own movie, and then due to it's success in the local student film festival circuit (it won Best Comedy a couple times), we decided to go back and continue the story. At the time (sophmore year of highschool) it was my best, though now I personally think it starts and ends strong but the two scenes in the middle drag a bit too much. However that's what I get for writing a 45 minute dialog-driven pirate comedy and making it on a tight budget of 76$.

http://www.perniciousparadise.com/SwankSentral.mpg

This is "Swank Sentral", a mock-documentary that I made for a class project in school. The assignment was to find a self help book, use it to improve an area of our lives, and then make a short presentation on video about the experiance. The 10 minute long movie shows a serious improvement over Marooned as far as technical and exicution concerns. Because I didn't have to worry about needing as many actors and crew people, we were able to make this much more smoothly and easily than Marooned. I really like the way this one came out, aside from a few rough bits in editing and some jokes that turned out not to be very funny or just too random. But it holds interest and seems to make people laugh, so it was a winner I think.

Check them out and discuss if you like. As for Mad Nation, I'm doing a lot of script revision and location scouting right now because my school schedual is making shooting difficult, however I'm hoping to do some serious editing and re-editing over my next break and also to hopefully shoot a little more cinematic stuff.

EDIT: another link, I just put this one up:

www.perniciousparadise.com/leavesontrees.mp4

This is one of my newest productions, did this at the beginning of last school year. It was for an editing excersize, editing to music. It was supposed to be a fast paced assignment, but I went to the opposite extreem using a slow paced, jazz-like piece by Kid Koala. I think it came out really good: I used some slow motion blurs and camera moviements to emphasise the basey-sound in the song, and it really worked out well to give the effect I wanted. It's more of an audio visual art peice than an actual movie. It's 4 minutes, and it's saved as an mp4 so sadly some browsers will have trouble with it as they do with the Mad Nation Trailer.
 
Hey, guess what guys? We got fucked again.

I just checked on my project file for the first time in a few weeks, because I wanted to re-edit one scene, and yeah, all the footage is gone. I'm not sure how it could possibly have happened, but the entire capture scratch folder for the movie is gone, no footage anywhere.

This means I have to edit the entire movie all over again, and I probably have to re-shoot a good chunk of it too since I might have been forced to tape over one or more scenes since I can never find high8 tapes anymore.

So yeah, don't expect the movie for another year.

I'm so pissed right now.

EDIT: 11/12/06

Most everything is still intact on the tapes. The scene with Taft the bartender is gone, but I never really liked it anyway so reshooting that isn't a big deal. I also have to reshoot the first scene with marcus, which is a major pain because I not only liked how that scene came out a lot but I've also got to reshoot a scene with my least availible actor and reconstruct the set. But it has to be done, so I guess I'll just have to suffer through it.

The movie will be finished shooting over the summer, I hope and pray. I plan on doing a lot of the editing that was lost over the course of the next few months, as well as shooting whatever I can in Fitchburg to save time and keep the project rolling. It'll get done, though hod knowds when.
 
New update:

My girlfriend owns: she's been kicking my ass to finish all the make up work on the editing we can do so that by the time our next shoot comes up we'll have at least a good chunk of the work done. Also, she's been helping with set building and general motivation. If she whips me any harder to get the movie done, she'll probably end up qualifying as the new producer.

We shot another scene, a short dream sequence, and also we're hoping to shoot the caravan attack scene this weekend. So far we've got 2 1/2 out of 5 scenes re-edited to make up for the system crash. we've got more or less 7 more scenes to shoot. So basically, we're looking at late '07 for wrap up, if things go well.
 
Hey, man, good to hear from you, keep at it and don't think that just because we're not commenting too much here that we're not anxious too see your flick.
 
Dude, I'll be ordering a copy apon completion. What your doing is totally righteous and I hope that your film comes together like you probobly imagined it in your head. Great work and try to keep that computer holding together until you finish it. Another crash would be devasting. But anyways, great work mate. Great work.
 
I'm glad to hear you guys havn't given up on me yet hah. Moral on this project has been skiming just above pathetic for a while, it's good to hear that people are still looking forward to it.

Updates:

Bad news: We tried to shoot the caravan scene, and were met only with crushing defeat: set up difficulties and extroardinary cold slowed us down, and we didn't get to finish the scene. Due to the all-natural lighting of the scene and the location, chances are we'll have to start over from scratch when we finally find the time to shoot it.

Good news: dispite the failure of the shoot to produce a finished scene, it did prove to me that the actor I chose and the changes I've made recently to his character were very good choices. Also, I've got my computer more or less set up properly now, so we should be good to go. Also, I've schedualed a lot of free time for myself so that I can persue finishing as much as I can during the next four months I'm at school. There's a couple scenes I can do here that will be fun and simple and bring us that much closer to completion.

I'm thinking about releasing something new, just so everyone who's interested in seeing more footage or screen shots can get their fill. Also, i've got all this hosting space on my website and nothing to put on it. I've come down to three possibilities. A: finishing an individual scene and releasing it for download, B: cutting another trailer, or C: releasing some of the production stills we've been taking, in combination with new screen shots. Those who are interested please let your voices be heard, and vote in for what you'd like to see.
 
Latest Update:

We're still re-capturing all the footage to my computer that was lost in the great harddrive failure of '06. As soon as I've got enough on the computer, I'll start cutting the next trailer. The first one was more of a teaser, gives you a taste of what's interesting in the picture but not any actual plot information. This next trailer will be a little longer, and will actually contain a basic plot summary.

Also, in other news, I've been getting a lot of recognition on the street for my appearance as the star in the movie "Shaq Fu" by my fellow FSC students and friends Kevin James and Mathew Sinclair. I don't remember if I posted a link on this thread earlier or not, but just in case your interested and I forgot, here it is. At the hight of it's populairity, the movie was around #77ish on Google Video's top 100. Check it.

The origional:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-340820404036903162&q=Shaq+Fu

The Director's Cut:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3719342913589332640&q=Shaq+Fu
 
New updates:

Been doing a lot of location scouting in fitchburg for shitty city sets. As soon as the weather stops being an asshole, we'll start shooting the city related scenes, they being Gray's arrival and a montage sequence of him looking for clues about Jessie's dissapearance and the cult. Once that's done, we'll be down to re-shooting 2 scenes that were lost or unfinished, and then we'll be on the home stretch, and the most difficult part of the movie: the climactic battle and the journey home.

Still been re-writing a lot of the last few scenes. I've been having a lot of trouble communicating what I want without adding so much diologue that the scene gets draggy. I've always thought of myself as an alright writer, but I do tend to rely too heavily on diologue sometimes, and that's going against the whole "Show; don't tell" rule. I've been spending much of one of my lechture classes battling the script, but fortuneately it's nearly finalised now. I've also been going back and re-writing the parts where actors improved, so we can use the script for all the subtitle work we've been taking about for the DVD.

Also of interest, I've been combinding this movie with my other big hobby, gunsmithing. I've begun building a fully functional revolver based on Gray's gun. Why? Mostly for fun. Also because it will be helpful for sound effects purposes: sound is very important to me, mostly because my high school movies had terrible sound quality so I learned the hard way just how important it is to have good sound to make a seemingly-profesional production. Guns are no exception: being a shooter, and also having had sound editing experiance, I cringe every time Ihear a gunshot in a student/amature production because they sound so artificial. But fortuneatly, I or someone I know owns one of every gun we use in this movie, so I can tell you that at least the guns will -sound- realistic.

...and besides, a friend of mine just bought an AR 15. Seriously, why do I need an excuse to use it in my movie?
 
Latest Update:

We spent several hours sunday shooting more footage. Suprising to think that I've been at this for over a year and I'm still shooting, but that's what I get for letting my school, job, and bad luck take time away from my movie making. Lately I've been a bit depressed about the fact that my busy as hell lifestyle has taken me away from practicing my art, and this shooting day was a real boost for me. We got most of the City sequence done, all we need now is a few more skattered shots of me talking to people, asking around about the cult.

New pictures! Production Stills taken by the lovely Brittany. The green headed gentlemen is Yogi, who handled most of the video camera work that day.

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The sequence starts with Gray walking through the cemetary and overlooking the city.

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A nice shot as Gray walks through the graveyard.

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Shots in Fitchburg. Most of the city is abandon factory buildings.

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More to come when my bandwidth will allow it.
 
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