Afterwards

I'm happy to report that my surgery went off without a hitch last week. Everyone at the hospital was super nice and cut open the side of my head like real pros. The only rough part was having to wake up at 4 in the morning for it.

I'm still in the process of healing up. I had to go back to the hearing clinic earlier this week to get a sponge (!) removed from my ear that was there to widen up my ear canal, which was a pretty odd sensation. I still have some packing in my ear that will be removed April 3rd too. After that, the only thing that's left is packing behind my eardrum that will dissolve away on its own in about a month or two. Once all that is out of the way, I should be able to hear from both sides again. For now everything is still mostly muted, but I can kind of hear myself on my left side when I talk, so that's probably a good sign. Couldn't do that before.

Part of the hair on my left side had to be shaved, so I look a little goofy. I also still need to keep a cotton ball in there at all times. So once my hair has grown back and I no longer have a wad of cotton stuffed in my ear, shooting Marble Hornets can finally commence again. Thanks so much for being patient everyone! I'm spending the downtime writing more detailed outlines of the next few entries, as well as trying to get through my sale-induced, embarrassingly large Steam backlog. Little Inferno was lovely.

Speaking of games, and enough about me, Slender: The Arrival launches this Tuesday! If you haven't preordered yet and were planning on it, get on that! The 60 dollar name-in-the-credits tier may have sold out, but the soundtrack and special editions are still up for grabs. Mark Hadley, the director of the game (as well as the straight up creator of the original game) pulled double duty to compose the soundtrack himself and it sounds really nice. He posted a preview of it over on his youtube channel that you should definitely check out. All of the art that comes with the special edition is also fantastic. Along with looking all pretty, it will also be signed by the entire StA development team, including the three of us! So if that's something you'd be down with, the special edition is the way to go.

More fun news coming soon, so be in touch you sweet little sugarplums.

Cut cut cut cut cut cut....

I keep forgetting to mention this on here to all of you, but this Monday I'll be going under the knife. I'm having some slightly invasive surgery done on my left ear to help return some of the hearing that I've slowly lost over the years, due to various boring medical reasons. Those of you that came to our Kami Con panel and were on my left side probably noticed that I had some problems hearing clearly whenever a question came from that side of the room. Hopefully that won't be a problem for much longer. I went to an ENT in Birmingham a little over a month ago, and after a few cool looking CT scans of my head, they let me know it can be fixed! Well, "mostly fixed", but whatever. It also apparently involves drilling away a small part of my skull, which is totally metal.

Anyway, that will be early early Monday morning, and I've been told that it'll probably put me out of commission for about a week minimum. As soon as I'm able to get back out there, Marble Hornets will resume shooting. But for now, expect a bit of a hiatus while I am reintroduced to stereo sound.

Now suddenly this

I'm sure a lot of you have already heard the news by now, but in case you haven't, a movie based on Marble Hornets is currently in the early stages of development! Which is totally nuts.

Here is the article from Variety with the announcement.

It's something that's been in the works for the last couple of years now, so it's refreshing to finally be able to talk about it in the open. I can't really get into too many details about it just yet, but here's what I'm at liberty to share:

-Assuming everything stays on schedule, it will be shot this spring. Rough release dates have been tossed around, but nothing is anywhere near to being set in stone yet.

-It's being produced by Mosaic, who are mainly known for producing comedies, but is taking its first foray into a new genre with this. We've spoken on the phone with them plenty of times and they're all super dedicated to making the movie the best it can possibly be.

-The director will be James Moran, who has done tons of stuff. He was the second unit director for the three most recent Paranormal Activity movies, which shows that he's plenty experienced in a film making style similar to Marble Hornets.

-The script has already been written by Ian Shorr, and both Joseph and I have read it. It's great!

-We will be involved with the movie in a certain capacity, but I can't get more specific than that.

-This absolutely does not mean people can't make a series like this anymore, nor does it mean we're going to send out lawyers or something to the ones that are already out there. That's the last thing I'd ever want to have happen.

-And finally, Marble Hornets will not be ending early because of this, I promise. Nothing at all has changed on that front.

That's all I'm able to say right now. We're all super excited that the stars have aligned to make this happen. We knew, and were told plenty of times, to keep our expectations low with getting this movie made. There were no empty promises. After the past few years, I now fully understand why it usually takes things so long to get greenlit in Hollywood. Luckily, the hardest part is done now. That's not to say there won't still be challenges, but at least the ones left are significantly less daunting.

I'm stoked, and I hope you are too! Stay tuned.

Crossbow ninjas

Kami Con was great! Our table ended up being right next to LittleKuriboh, so we totally got to pass those notes. Also we stole their credit card reader a few times because Joseph's didn't like him. They were the best booth neighbors a guy could ask for. Thanks to everyone who came by to say hey! We enjoyed chatting with all of you!

That guy over there didn't say much though.......

We also did a quick video interview with LittleKuriboh's wife Marianne for Gamerfront about writing for Slender: The Arrival, which you can watch right over here.

I was aiming to have Entry #67 posted before Kami Con, and it ended up being a real photo finish. I stayed up until about 6:30 Friday morning finishing up the edit and letting it render, then uploaded it while getting ready to go, and finally unprivated it right before heading out the door for Birmingham. Couldn't have been any closer if I tried! It definitely made me feel a lot more relaxed at the convention, so I'm really glad it was able to be done when it was.

Shooting 67 was a bit of a mixed bag. Weather wasn't on our side again, but luckily most of it was indoors. It just wasn't much fun walking to the location in the rain. One of the days we were out there, it literally started pouring the second we got out of the car, right after I said "At least it isn't raining yet..." I mean for real seriously come ON. 

Once we were inside though, things went swimmingly. We were on a tight schedule, but we somehow managed to finish about 30 minutes early all three days we were out there. That's pretty unheard of with us, believe me. We even shot while some high school kids were in the same building shooting at each other with airsoft guns. Don't really know why you'd want to do that, but whatever. One of them called Tim "sir".

Anyway, work on the next entry is trudging along. No release date yet, as usual, but it won't be too terribly far from now!

Kami Con

I keep forgetting to mention this, but we'll be at Kami-Con again this year! Instead of being in our home city of Tuscaloosa, it's been moved this time to the BJCC in Birmingham. It's all going down this weekend (!!!),  so get your tickets soon if'n you wanna come. Me, Tim, Joseph, and maybe one other mysterious person that you've probably already guessed will be there all weekend in the vendor room. We'll be selling season 1 and season 2 DVDs, as well as a limited number of shirts (that we actually HAVE this time). As always, autographs on anything are free. I'm not sure where the exact location of our table will be, but keep an eye on my twitter and I'll be sure to update you on that as soon as I know.

We will also be doing a Q&A panel on Saturday in the forum room from 3-4pm. That's the only panel we've got for this one, so be sure to come help fill the room!

Also go see our bestie LittleKuriboh, who I hope is close to our table so we can pass notes to each other. He'll be doing a panel on Friday from 6-7pm in the ballroom.

Betaaaaaaa

Slender: The Arrival, the successor to Slender: The Eight Pages that we did the writing for, is now available for preorder! A kind-of pay what you want model has been adopted, using 6 tiers, with the base price for it being just 5 of your dollars. See all the other options here.

Preordering also gets you beta access to one of the "levels" in the game! It's the one that sticks the closest to The Eight Pages in terms of objectives, so it should feel pretty familiar to those of you that have played S:TEP already. A good bit of the story stuff has been stripped out to avoid spoilers, but it's still a fun area to explore while constantly looking over your shoulder. Keep an eye out for the canoeing rules because I TOTALLY WROTE THAT.

The release date has also been.....uh, released. March 26th will be when you and the full version can venture out into the night together and tell each other spooky ghost stories. That's right around the corner, depending on your perspective.

Anyway, big ole' thanks to all of you that decide to preorder for supporting Blue Isle and Parsec, and by extension, us!

More Marble Hornets on the way.

Ghost Wrench

At long last, I'm glad to say that Entry #66 is finally done. I think that it had close to, if not the most rewrites of any entry to date. We felt that the scene at the beginning was important enough to take the time to write it as carefully as possible. We'd write it, then do the scene together, each time usually finding something that didn't flow as well as it did on paper and change it. We even went to try and shoot it on three separate occasions, but kept having to cut it short for various reasons. It was a long process, but hopefully one that people feel was worth the wait!

By comparison, the "stalking" scene was a breeze to shoot, and lots of fun. It was done a good couple of weeks before the beginning scene was, which cleared up plenty of time to focus entirely on it. Shooting that was one of the few times we've gone out there and not run into other people. That's probably for the best, as it probably wouldn't look too great to suddenly see two dudes stalking someone through an abandoned building while brandishing a unnecessarily large wrench. The fact that it was like 8am on a weekday probably had something to do with that.

As far as the next entry goes, we're in the process of finalizing details for it. We have one or two things already shot, but the more involved stuff is yet to come. I'll probably spend the rest of this week getting all the writing locked in. Going to try and shoot a little more while I do that to keep things moving if scheduling will allow it. Either way, I definitely don't anticipate a wait as long as the last one for it, which is a welcome change.

Also, we're hankering to do another livestream sometime soon. If you have any suggestions, let me know! I was thinking of Surgery Simulator 2013, given our extensive experience with such things.