Geeking at Media Expos

I dunno how to say it any better, but GMX completely destroyed us in the best possible way. We weren't expecting that kind of turn out for us, and I want to thank all of you personally for coming, but that would be kind of weird to do here. I'll be emailing all of you high fives as soon as I'm done here.

The whole weekend was such a great experience, and a perfect renewal for our drive to complete season 2 and start prepping for season 3 as quickly as we can.

Here's a quick list of thanks, because I can't think of a way to elegantly work them in any other way:

• Thanks to anyone that came to any of our panels. Sorry the one about making a web series was so late and without a powerpoint or something to look at while we rambled on.
• Bonus thanks if you came to the sci-fi trivia that Tim co-hosted (Joseph and I were Team Bradley, of course).
• Thanks to all of you that came by our booth, too. We weren't expecting to have one available to us for the entire time (see previous blog post for proof), so we didn't really have much in terms of decorations other than a pile of DVDs and a makeshift sign. Hope we didn't offended too many of the other pro-booth folk.
• Huge thanks to Mary Fancher for buying the mask we had at the charity auction on Saturday. It sold for the highest price of them all, even beating out a lifesize cutout of David Tennant. No doubt the Oasis Center thinks you're a pretty awesome dude for that.
• Along those same lines, thanks to Jason Cole for buying us at the Orion Slave Auction (also for the Oasis Center) for an amount that made us the highest sale price of all the guys auctioned (Tiffany and some playboy model beat us, understandably). Our breakfast with you was great!
• Speaking of booths, thanks to our booth-mates Chris Haley and Curt Franklin over at Let's Be Friends Again for being such cool guys to share a table top with. They drew slenderman by request in a few of their books, if memory serves. Joseph's girlfriend folded their shirts all pretty while they were gone.
• Thanks to Jason Miller. He has the most intimidating headshot on the planet, but is one of the nicest guys to talk to. His acoustic show at the end of the con was also fantastic. (not to mention being involved in the nice surprise at the closing ceremony)
• Also thanks to both Ellen McLane and John Patrick Lowrie for seriously being the friendliest people I've ever met at a con. They were both so thankful for all their fans and were willing to sign anything you asked. I now have a signed copy of Portal 2, which I'm totally considering outright framing. Tim also chatted up John enough to where he remembered Tim's name throughout the weekend. Jealous.
• And lastly but not leastly, thanks to GMX and mastermind Jeremy Miller for inviting us! They were so helpful and made sure all of the people fit in the rooms they gave us for the panels. We'd love to come back next year, hint hint.

That about sums it up. Now we're all back in Alabama and back to having school work to do again. Lame. One more thanks to all of you for supporting us and getting us to cons like GMX. You'll be the first to know about the next one(s) we're going to.

Golf Mike X-ray

So here's what we know we're doing at GMX this weekend:

How to Make a Web Series - 12 midnight on Friday (well, technically Saturday, but Friday night.)
Location: Grande West
-We'll try to be as informative as possible with this, without lying. It may devolve into a Q&A about the actual making of MH once we run out of stuff to say. Which I guess would be acceptable as well. Not sure why they scheduled it so late. Hopefully no one will fall asleep.

Marble Hornets Season 1 Live Commentary - 10pm Saturday
Location: Johnson
-This will be our attempt to make up for the lack of actual production stuff included in the Season 1 DVD. There's supposed to be a full on Q&A afterwards, as well.

Season 1 DVD sales - ???pm
Location: We have yet to be told
-At some point, Joseph, Tim, and I will be selling DVDs at a booth for about 2 hours. I think they rotate people at the booths out or something. I'll let all of you know the exact time as soon as I do. We'll be happy to sign the DVDs, or anything else made of a non-DVD material for no charge. My signature is so messy that I may have to pay you, honestly. Rimshot!

Full schedule here

And that's all the official stuff we're doing, that I know for sure. There's been talk of the three of us being auctioned off for charity, as well. I think the winner gets to sit down with us and eat lunch, or spend an hour or two just goofing off. It's not confirmed yet, but it'll probably happen. Bring some money!

When we're not doing any panels, we'll be wandering around the exhibition halls and sitting in on the other neato looking panels. Tim is particularly excited about John Patrick Lowrie, who voiced the Sniper in TF2. We've decided to not make any Jarate comments if we run into him.

Shortstop

Finally getting a chance to give Mr.Bloggington some attention here. Things have been much busier than usual as of late.

Entry #50 was a bit of a nightmare to shoot. Scheduling conflicts all over the place. I think the total number of days it took to get it all shot ended up being about four. I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that it's the entry that  spanned the most days in terms of shooting beginning to end. It was mostly due to the fact that the entire thing had to be shot around sundown, so we'd run out of light very quickly, especially while in the woods, which blocked out a ton of the little bit of sunlight we already had. There was one or two spots in the finished entry where the lighting wasn't consistent because of that, but overall I think I got it as good as I could possibly get it.

To those of you asking: No, Entry #50 was not the final entry of the second season. Although it is very very close to it. We're officially in the home stretch now, I feel.

Entry #51 has been fully shot. It went much better than the previous shoot, requiring only two days to get done. I'm in the process of editing it now, and should be done with it no later than Tuesday. It would be going a bit faster if I didn't have so much other stuff to get done at the moment. I'm currently working the light board for the UA theatre department's production of Animal Crackers. While it's a ton of fun, it's also very time consuming and is usually scheduled during the best "editing hours" for me. I've been squeezing in some time here and there though. Thanks for being patient, as usual!

Now that we're finally getting close to wrapping up Season 2, it's time to start talking about the Season 2 DVD. Although it hasn't been officially confirmed as of yet, I don't see why we wouldn't do it after how well the first one sold. So here's my question to you: What would you most like to see in the next DVD?


I know there were a few things people wanted more of, and a few things that were left out without my knowledge, in the Season 1 DVD so I want to do the next one as right as possible this time around. So suggest away, loyal folk. I'm all ears.

"Wipe that smile off your face"

Okay, I think I might finally be caught up on all the sleep I missed during Dragoncon a couple of weeks ago. We had a lot of fun, and met some really nice fans while we were there too! High fives to you all.

Also, this happened:

In terms of upcoming shoots, Joseph and I haven't gotten a concrete date just yet, but it'll most definitely be this week. We have a pretty major issue to resolve with our current script outline, so we'll have ourselves a cute little meeting tonight to figure it all out. There will be chips and dip.

Bear with us, we're getting to the good stuff.

Edit: In case you missed it on facebook, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette released an article about MH yesterday. Here's the link: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11236/1169306-67-0.stm 
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Sorry about the radio silence this week. It was my last first week of classes ever, so I was a little preoccupied. Scheduling was awful with Joseph and I. It's like whenever I would be home and available to shoot, he'd be at work, and vice versa. I think we're good to shoot early next week. Whatever happens, a new entry will be posted before we pack up and head to Atlanta for Dragon Con next weekend.

I ended up combining two of the three things we shot previously into the one entry last week, so our posting schedule is a bit thrown off now that we don't have anything ready to go this week. Originally, the confrontation in the parking lot and the phone call to Jessica were going to be separate, but then I realized that was kind of pointless and would probably end up pissing people off, having two "only talking" entries in a row.

It's a very delicate balancing act that we're having to work here. You can't do no-context suspense entries only, because then they'd become expected and (even worse) boring, but you also can't do strictly exposition too much because people ultimately want to get to the suspense, which I think is our bread and butter, not to sound to full of myself.

Joseph and I talked a little last night about the direction we want to take Season 3 in. We have the ending of Season 2, and we've had the ending of Season 3 ready for a long time, but everything in between those endings is vague at best. I think we've at least gotten started on solving some of the problems we've encountered with the initial writing process, but we're still a ways off from having it finished. Wish I could talk about it more, but of course that would probably spoil what's to come with the remainder of Season 2.

Guess you'll just have to wait and see, dude.

That Announcement Thing

Wow, I'm kind of surprised no one clicked on the comma after the link in my last blog post. I figured someone would have noticed it immediately. Guess I'm getting too crafty, yeah?

No but seriously. I guess I should announce that thing now. Like I said earlier, a good number of you have already guessed it, so a good number of you can go ahead and pat yourselves on the back.

Marble Hornets is going to have a third season.

It's going to be the LAST season, for real this time. I know we said about a year ago that this season would be the end, but halfway through shooting it, we began to realize that we'd greatly underestimated how much time we'd need to devote to explaining the lost seven months. There wasn't really much time left afterwards to return to the present and show the ending, not to mention that the whole story felt incredibly cramped that way. So we decided to take the ending and devote an entire season to it. That way we don't feel like we're cheapening it by rushing into it after spending so much time somewhere else.

Sound good? We cool with that? Need more explaining? Okay, I can handle that.

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Preemptive Season 3 FAQ:

Q: Will there be another seven month gap between seasons 2 and 3?
A: Nope. While I can't give a solid "release date" for it just yet, rest assured that it won't be that long. The gap between the seasons will only be as long as Joseph and I feel is necessary for us to cool down to avoid getting burnt out.

Q: Does this mean Season 2 is about to end?
A: Sorta kinda. I can't tell you how many entries are left in Season 2. It's not a double digit, though.

Q: Will there be a Season 2 DVD?
A: Nothing is set in stone yet, but I don't see why not. The first one sold (and is still selling) wonderfully.

Q: You're just doing this to make more money, aren't you?
A: Absolutely not. We're doing this to make the story we've had going for over two years finally be completed. I'm kind of bad about not finishing things I've started (case in point), so I'd like to go against the flow for once.
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Q: The ending is going to be one giant ambiguous wad where nothing gets resolved and no questions are fully answered, isn't it.
A: Come on, I'm no David Lynch.

Q: Why are you announcing Season 3 before Season 2 is over? That spoils some of the mystery!
A: It's kind of unconventional for us, I'll admit, seeing as how we didn't announce Season 2 until about a month or so after Season 1. But I don't really see what part of the story is spoiled because of this.


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Any other questions that you think I might be able to answer, go ahead and post them in the comments and I'll get back atcha.

I'm glad we'll be doing this one more time before wrapping everything up in a neat little box. Thanks in advance for continuing to watch! High fives all around!

Status Report

It was a busy day yesterday, but we managed to shoot everything that we needed to get done. I think Joseph almost had a heat stroke in the middle of one of the takes, but other than that and having anxiety attacks about the rain early during the shoot, things went well. Glad it's over though.

We also got an awesome phone call regarding a possible future of Marble Hornets while we were getting all of the equipment together to change locations, but as you can probably guess, I can't talk about it right now. Nice surprise though.

So that's two entries shot and one more left to go. We'll either do that tonight or tomorrow night. I'm still tired from yesterday, so tomorrow night seems more likely.

As for the announcement, I'll probably share it come Sunday. I've seen a few people guess it already. Kudos to your mind reading powers.