NoN.D.E. Fanfilms' Fourth Fanfilm!

[Scott A Melzer]

Excitement for working on a new film is high, so we're jumping right into it.

I'm still in "get the new film out there!" mode, but if we want to have our new film ready for next year's Otakon we've got to start now!

Presently we're moving forward with the idea we had last time: Do a musical. We're getting together this Sunday for a brainstorming session to try to get started. We have a basic plot but nothing fleshed out. We don't even know what anime we'll be using!

Obviously there will be massive challenges in doing a project like this, but I'm optimistic because I have several musicians "on staff" on this one.

We'll want help with writing, editing, and all that stuff in addition to voices. Remember that anyone who helps out with the "hard" stuff gets first crack at voices!

So, just wanted to post that we're getting started on a new film. Hopefully this will be:

Shorter
Tighter
Funnier

...than the last. Reviews have been very mixed over Fanboy Soze. Most people really like it, but I'm still struggling with the "this is more complicated than it needs to be and that hurts the film" problem all of our films have. Since others are working on the plot, maybe that'll help!

[Soul Tsukino]

Anything I can do to help?

[Gaelstrom]

I'm open to help as well, and yes, as you know, I'm into the hard stuff...

...

*makes note of line*

...anyway, I meant the difficult stuff like the plot editing and such. Plus, I'd very much like to be a part of the planning stages so that I may get some experience for my own parody. At this rate I don't see it happening in a single year with my limited experience, so if the potential to be in the later brainstorming sessions or potentially through Skype would work, please let me know.

[Scott A Melzer]

Soul and Gaelstrom:

We experimented with Skype today, having everyone hanging out in the studio where the Skype machine is. Bobby Beaver in Texas (from CDS Productions) was on the line chatting about things. It worked out pretty well. We should be able to have a Skype conference call with several people next time.

We're tentatively looking at two weeks (ie: August 21st) as our next meeting. Hopefully I can get another computer strung up in the living room so we can have more people and more room.

Unfortunately, it's extremely hard for me to say what "someone can do". We really need people to come up with idea and run with things. It takes just about as much work for me to do something myself as it is to write things up, post them, then work with someone to get something for them to do. VERY time consuming and it just didn't work. We took pages of notes in the four hours that we brainstormed today, but keeping people informed by formatting them and posting them would take hours and I've not found it to be useful. Unfortunately, this just isn't something I've had success with long distance.

What does work is being involved in the brainstorming sessions, coming up with your own ideas, funny lines, gags, etc. I don't want to sum up all of the notes, but here's what were basically looking at:

Musical. In Space. At an anime convention in space (Spacecon?). One man works for the convention. Staff. Guest Relations. There's an anti-anime group. A parents' group who wants to shut down anime fandom. The "Parents Liberating Otaku Types", or PLOT. They hire an assassin to take out the con chair or an important guest (probably the latter). She infiltrates the con. Our "heroes" meet because she needs to use him to get to her target. A Romeo & Juliet relationship happens between the two. She eventually switches sides and PLOT attacks when their A plan fails. Big climax.

We have five pages of random ideas, lines, etc., but that's the bare bones. We're thinking about using some Gundam as the prime source. Possibly SEED, but I haven't seen it. It should be filled with convention stuff, fun characters, crazy situations. Possibly a news broadcast a-la SSDDN. Maybe an "at-the-con" news show?

Hope this is helpful. Unfortunately, posting every little thing we talked about doesn't work well, but perhaps we can all get together in person and on Skype? We did find that it was very hard when Bobby didn't have his microphone set up. I had to read his texts, which was tough, so if you want to participate via Skype, please make sure you've got a decent microphone set up.

[Soul Tsukino]

when you mention PLOT, it makes me think of the phrase "Sledgehammer of Plot" but that seems to esoteric, but that could be just me.

As for a news Show. If you want to make it realistic to our world, than it should be more like some kind of coverage from a website or something (like ANN or Animecons coverage). However in terms of Space, it wouldn't be far fetched for a large spacecraft to have an in house news network that would cover such a con, so it could go either way.

I dunno, maybe as a background joke have two people, one named Marco and the other named Polo who are constantly looking for each other in the hallways before they get blown up or something and hopefully kill that trend once and for all.

If any other random ideas come to mind I will post them.

[Gaelstrom]

For a news organization potential in Space, using the news footage from Martian Successor Nadesico would potentially work depending on the context. But using Ruri and Yurika as the news feed could be a fun nod and be amusing in its own right.

Does all that mean Scott that we can be involved in the brainstorming sessions via Skype and see how that works? Granted on-site brainstorming is always better, but in the end, we could be 'beta testers' of ideas here to see what would work and what could use some improvement in general idea format. That's a bit more of a concrete involvement and less hassle to organize.

[Scott A Melzer]

Soul & Gaelstrom:

Good ideas, though the thought of somehow encouraging the retarded "Marco... Polo..." behaviour at cons... *shudder* I'm so thoroughly sick of that, though it's not as bad as "Butt scratcher!" and other internet memes. Don't people realize how annoying it is for everyone else?

For the news show, I was thinking of using the same guy from "S.T.E.A.M." who did the "SSDDN" news. Matt Pyson did the voice so that shouldn't be a problem, and it is from a science fiction show, so that might work. I'm about 10x better at ripping and matching footage as I was then. Though I'm also up for doing something new. I think using the same thing is a fun in-joke, but whatever works best for the film should happen first.

I'm very concerned with putting too much text on the screen. We tried cutting back on that with "Fanboy Soze". I thought that text was something that made it worth having the DVD so you could pause and read it all at home, but the criticism that I've received over and over again is that even if it's not important and you don't HAVE to read it, having text makes people (especially those trained to read subtitles quickly) focus on it and get frustrated if they couldn't absorb it. So having something on a website would be cool, but we'd need to keep the text down. I'd probably want to do a spoof of "YouTube" or somesuch. If there's a better idea out there, let me know!

Yes, I want to be able to invovle people through Skype. I tried really hard last time to involve people on the forum, but it was just impossible. By the time I posted something and someone got back to me, things had changed and it was no longer relevant, plus it took a long time to get the notes organized and try to explain stuff that we'd bantered back and forth. Posting ongoing blogs about every development was ineffectual and e-mailing individual people with everything we talked about was ovewhelming. I'll try Skype and see how that works, but I've got to somehow rig a system up in my living room where there are more people. There were five at the last session, so we could hang out in the studio. Any more and we'll have to move to the living room.

[Gaelstrom]

Don't knock the memes simply because they exist and are done by attention whores ^^ Actually it's because of that that you could actually generate a very fun joke with the right footage and timing to describe how annoying they are, but that would require the right circumstances.

[Scott A Melzer]

I don't knock anything for just existing, but do I have to help them exist?

People running around calling out stuff like that at cons... I (and many many people I talk to) find it very annoying. Just because it'll get a laugh is no reason to do it. I believe you need to live your life according to your ethics first. There are a ton of things I don't agree with that I could have put in my movies to get a laugh, but then what would we be? Nothing but pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Now, if we think of a CLEVER sex joke, that's something else...

[Gaelstrom]

I rewatched Fanboy Soze with Troy last night, and for the most part, we both agreed that it was very solid and beautifully done after the first five minutes, but that the first five minutes were rife with a lot of issues that just didn't work for the overall production. Basically we came to a consensus as we watched that the point where the plot finally had the time to sink in was during the Code Magenta Box Set advertisement, where the overall theme joke was very clearly established in a context. It even went on longer than it needed to, but contained a lot more jokes, so of course was fun and it didn't matter that it went on so long.

But the true issues I believe existed because of lack of establishment of characters. That first scene with a bunch of random voice overs and the city explosion just didn't work to establish much of anything in the context of the story we found. The voice overs were all old dub parodies and such, and yet then this explosion happens, and then suddenly there's an establishing narration, so it comes off very disjointed, especially with the later scenes. In general we believed that the 'past' should have been given another half-minute to a minute of making fandom in the 90s and the horrible dubbing rewrites into more of an antagonist setting.

After that, the big thing I caught was the lack of establishment of any of the characters. They're all walking out of this room (I never caught the 'Video Two' reference at all, the sign was too covered) and thankfully there's enough references to help you get the con reference, but it's pretty quick. It could have used a title card of some sort like in Otakudom. After that, you do the double flash-back, which as a self-contained joke was good, but unfortunately only managed to be even more confusing. Somewhere in there, you had Tetsuo speaking as Glados and the tanks exploding and all that to Linkin Park, and all of it lacked any cohesive context to help really establish what was happening. Even having seen it before, I was trying to figure it out.

The last major element which coincides with that is establishing our main character. Fanboy Soze is introduced very late in the game, and not given much screen time to establish him as the character to follow. If we've seen Akira, we know, but we don't know why we should follow him. The weakest plot connection in the whole thing for me is when he ends up being Fanboy Soze and having some kind of connections and such. I know it's a parody, so it was fine as a twist, but I found that you should have started off juuuust a bit slower and sacrificed the flashback joke to help establish the past and future scenarios, and then more of an establishing shot of the setting and what the downfall of anime has done to the culture and how the people need the help. Things began really picking up and being far more cohesive around the point with the Megatainment board meeting and that Magenta Box set. After that I don't really have any major issues with the rest of the parody. The lip-syncing got exponentially better compared to the beginning scenes, and as such was far less distracting from being drawn into the whol thing.