You mean they put movies on DVD now?

Once again the influence of Andrew is felt far and wide, as those television programs which I require are finally being released on DVD.

Scrubs - Every month for the last three or four years I've checked for the release date of this set.

Greatest American Hero - More hotly demanded than you might imagine. There's been a bootleg DVD market for GAH (terrible acronym) episodes for years. I even downloaded the first season and burned my own DVDs. And made my own labels. I'm so handy.

But the official set also includes the unaired Greatest American Heroine pilot. So I bought it already.

Remington Steele - This show may well be awful, but I love it. I can't even tell for sure if it's bad. Its premise is pretty complicated, but individual episodes aren't hard to follow. Hmm.

See, it's about this female P.I. that nobody respects, because it's the 80s I guess. So she drums up business by pretending to be an assistant to a totally made-up detective named Steele, who conveniently is always busy elsewhere. Then Pierce Brosnan, a thief whose name we never learn, shows up and starts calling himself Steele. He pretends to be the boss, and takes all the credit for her detective work, while she attempts to deflect his Brosnan-like charms and find out his real name.

See, that's kind of complex for a TV show synopsis. It's no "he found a superhero suit but he doesn't know how to use it," or "they're a bunch of funny doctors."

Moonlighting - Why am I embarrassed to admit I've been waiting for this release? It's a smart show, and I can never find it in syndication. Well, there you are.

But my thirst for semi-obscure television is not quenched. Nay, not by a long shot.

Dark Shadows (1991) - A remake of a cult-popular soap opera about a vampire. It is awesome. Way better than the original, I say. And its pathetic 12-episode run will never, ever be released on DVD. (Luckily, I made my own out of the VHS copies! Bwahahaha. Hmm.)

Misfits of Science - I think there were only six episodes. It's about four kooky kids with super powers, solving mysteries or something. But one of them didn't have super powers. And now they're all dead.

Hey, ever notice how the one girl on the superhero team gets saddled with psychic powers that make her faint or give her nosebleeds if she uses them too much? Like Invisible Girl, Marvel Girl, Saturn Girl, what have you. Well, in this show, Courtney Cox has telekinetic powers, but using those powers causes headaches. Meanwhile there's a dude who can shoot lightning bolts at people without any negative effect. Yeah, that's fair.

The Flash - Don't ask. Flash is one of those superheroes, like Aquaman, where there's always some loser who feels the need to point out how stupid his superpower is. "Oooh, all he can do is run really fast! That's lame!" Puh-lease. Flash must be one of the most powerful superheroes in the Justice League because of how fast he moves. And Aquaman is third in strength after Superman and Wonder Woman, so no, he doesn't just "talk to fish." Jerk.

As expected...

The "campusmoviefest" show was last night. We were told they would be showing the 10 best films. They did. As expected, we saw ten horrible, horrible student films, complete with stupid-looking effects, inaudible dialogue, bad lighting and framing, and not a plot among them. Oh -- and none of them was ours.

Oh, but wait! The show's not over. There are four more, award-winning films left. (I assumed as much; there's no way they'd show all that crap and not show our film.)

Then they showed four more films. None of which were ours.

So there you have it: Fruitless is worse than fourteen terrible, terrible movies. Deeply depressing.

Positive spin: We knew the judging criteria, and deliberately ignored it. In our defense, we had been told the wrong theme (a theme to which most of the movies shown tried desperately to pander); not in our defense, we never even planned to incorporate the theme we thought it was going to be. Another criteria is how well effects are used, and since effects are stupid-looking, we didn't.

Negative spin: Fourteen? Fourteen? I just applied to a bunch of film schools. What the hell was I thinking? I have no future.

My prediction? Well, pain, obviously.

We are so going to lose tomorrow.

(For those of you who don't remember, I'm talking about how our movie is going to lose campusmoviefest.)

There are two major reasons why we are doomed. In reverse order:

2. We didn't use any stupid effects.

One of the judging criteria is actually how well you use iMovie's special effects features, which are, by the way, awful. Last year's winner from Emory was a "parody" of The Ring (in quotes because it wasn't at all "funny") that extensively used iMovie's revolutionary ability to speed up motion. Second place was a movie so boring that I only saw the first 45 seconds, but in that amount of time they managed to work in sepia tone.

And our movie? Well, we played around with lighting a little, but nothing anyone would notice. (There is that school of thought that editing shouldn't draw attention to itself.) In other words, as people who have made movies before, we edited it well instead of using all of iMovie's bells and whistles, and for that we will surely suffer.

1. Corporate sponsorship.

Each year, this contest has a new "theme." Submitted films are asked to conform to the theme, no matter how loosely. Our team, hilariously, was told the wrong theme. Even when we found out the right one, though, we had no idea how to work it in. The theme is "Good comes around." We had already decided on the cat thing, in which there is no good, either coming or going. We decided to ignore the theme.

Come to find out that Delta, the festival's major sponsor, has a new slogan, "Good goes around," which, well, I have no idea what it means. But that's beyond the point -- this can't possibly be a coincidence. In other words, we should have done a movie about the convenience and affordability of air travel -- or at least something that a company can use to show off what great things it's funding. Robert, you were right about one thing: my Hitler & Stalin! idea would not have worked out. But the cat idea is definitely no better.

In short, tomorrow's winner will:
* be effects-heavy, with sped-up motion, over-use of the "gong" sound effect, and star wipe.
* be entirely toothless.
* suck.
* not be our movie.

Now you, too, can watch Fruitless

RM has fixed his broken-ass website. You can now watch our movie.

See how the passage of time is marked by me needing a shave? Movie magic.

Production Diary: Fruitless

As James has hinted, I haven't been a good blogger lately because I've been focusing on movie-making. I recently made the rotten mistake of applying to film schools, which involves a lot of waiting around and nail-biting, so actually making a movie was good both for distracting me, and for bolstering my chances when I have to reapply next year because nobody wants me.

Right. Whoa, okay, side note: I've started listening to an internet radio station that does movie soundtracks, so I can play the "do I recognize it" game. Right now they're totally playing the theme from Vision of Escaflowne. Weird.

Back to the matter at hand.

So my unfortunately named friend, Syed Adnan Hussein, approached me about campusmoviefest, a contest that started at Emory and has since been desperately trying to work other places. The idea behind the contest was to prove to college freshmen that it's easy to make a video using iMovie and other assorted Mac products, but I suspect everyone learns the exact opposite.

Adnan had all sorts of completely incorrect information about the contest, all of which pointed to us having a good shot at winning. (For example, he still thinks it will somehow help us that he's a graduate student. True, this contest is mostly populated by freshman dorm halls forced by their resident advisors to participate, but I don't think the fact that we're doing it too is going to work in our favor.)

So we decided to put together a movie, based on an idea I've been kicking around for a while. I won't go into a lot of detail, but it's moderately complex, requires around five actors, some props, a lot of locations, and it should run around 7 minutes -- and have a really excellent montage. We estimated that, if we worked hard, we'd be finished in mid-March.

We found actors, we gathered props, we scouted locations -- and then we hit our first snag. The movie must be no longer than five minutes.

Not a problem. It'll be a tight five minutes. We'll have to cut away fast, but that's a good thing. We can still --

Snag Two: There's a restriction regarding music. Recall that about half of our movie is taken up by a montage, which I had planned to score with the disco hit Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel. No good. You can make your own music, or you can use one of the 800 songs by local artists that the contest provides, each of which is worse than the last.

We can work with this. This is not the end. Hell, all I need is a bad song. We can totally --

Snag Three: It's due in five days.

Exactly how these people expect anyone to put something remotely good together in five days -- let alone five minutes of something good -- is entirely beyond me. And yet, sure enough, this was in the rules. In fact, only 10% -- that's 50 seconds at most -- of the finished product can consist of footage shot before the 5-day period.

Of course, this can only work in our favor. Frequent commenter RM, a major component of our team, has all kinds of editing equipment and is a much faster video editor than any of the other teams could possibly have, and he and I both are plenty familiar with the tricks and the pitfalls of filming what have you. Advantage: us. But my complicated idea had to go.

New challenge: come up with something that can be filmed in two days, and edited in the remaining three. It shouldn't have more than 2 actors, as few props as possible, maybe one location, and it better be no longer than two minutes. (Note: everyone else turns in a 5-minute movie, but everyone else's movie sucks.)

My first idea was an adaptation of a comic strip I did in high school, in which Hitler and Stalin live together in an apartment. (Stalin is the neat one, Hitler is the messy one.) I was voted down -- "too offensive." My ass.

Unfortunately, I had shown Adnan a tape of the movies I made in 2002. Like everyone else in the world, he liked the one with the cat. And he wanted us to remake it. Blaaaargh.

Bonus picture from the original cat movie:

The original was actually part of a larger project, Three Dreams..., in which I filmed three funny dreams I had (because it's easier than actually writing something). The cat dream was, in fact, particularly hilarious, and surprisingly easy to film. On the other hand, in its original form it took only about 20 seconds. So it would need to be padded, which could only decrease the funny. And problem #2: I've already done it! Come on, people!

But they wouldn't do Hitler & Stalin: The Odd Couple!, and I sure didn't want to wait around for another idea. We only had five days. So remember, if we lose the contest, it's totally their fault for picking the wrong project.

I wrote something. We went over it a few times and added some extra jokes. (Or at least, I thought they were jokes. One of them is about a miscarriage, which I grant isn't generally funny, but in this context I found it hilarious. Hmm.) Because really, what we had here was one good joke -- maybe two, if you count the concept -- stretched out to 2 minutes. Problematic.

Filming went more-or-less as planned, except that my cat was a total diva. He refused to stay when we needed him to stay, or to move when we needed him to move. The cat in the previous movie had been a lot easier to manipulate. (I just reviewed my notes from that production: apparently, to get the cat to look in the right direction, I was waving another cat around off-camera.)

Editing, thankfully, was lightning-fast. We had one last conflict, this time over the title. I wanted to call it We Broke Up. Everyone, of course, hated that idea. (For the record, Julia, who again provides the voice of the cat, agreed with me.) We ended up settling on Fruitless, which in almost no way describes the movie, but at least it's memorable. Remember, if we lose the contest, it's their fault for insisting on the wrong title.

So we did the cat thing. One day RM will realize that the link he posted is dead, and you'll be able to see it yourself. I agree with RM's assessment -- given the X-treme constraints, we put together a pretty good product. It's certainly better than last year's winners, all of which, for some reason, had a lot of sped-up motion. Maybe the judges are Benny Hill fans.

The contest happens on Thursday. Check back here with baited breath to find out if we actually win anything. Then I can start fretting about grad school again. Or, I can make another movie...