"Fanboy Soze" DVD is finished!

[Scott A Melzer]

Hello everyone!

I'm extremely happy to announce that the "Fanboy Soze" (NoN.D.E. Fanfilms' brand new and third Anime Fan Parody) DVD is now finished and available for download. It's been an extremely arduous journey, fraught with technical issues, glitches, crashes, frustrations, and lots and lots of lost sleep, but I BELIEVE it is now 100% playtested and polished.

This is probably the most packed fan produced DVD, certainly out of all of those that I've seen. It's got a ton of features:

The Movie (duh)
Writer's commentary
Actor's commentary
Interview from DaizenshuuEX
English Subtitles
Pop-up video guide to in-jokes and things you may have missed
Cut/Alternate Scenes
40+ pages of Behind The Scenes info including "making of", "technical stuff", "alternate plot/script ideas", and "jokes/lines we didn't use"
A guide to the background graphics
All five of the Fan Parody Panic! panel films we've done
Actor Bios
Info on the parody groups that contributed, including a clip or video from each
Wallpapers
An MP3 of the closing credits song
The script

I'm probably missing something, but that's the gist.

How to get it:

One big huge 4.29 gig file: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3656068/Fanboy%20Soze%20DVD.iso

You'll get an .iso file, which is a DVD image. You can then burn this to a DVD to get a playable DVD, or it can be played directly in VLC or another media program that handles disk images.

Please let me know if you have any trouble with this, or if you have a better solution for distribution.

Thank you very much! Let me know what you think! We used to have MegaUpload links, but the site has been taken down by the Virginia Department of Justice. If anyone knows any other legitimate ways to host the files, please let me know.

[Reddthesock]

First off, I'm a big longtime fan and thank you for the excelent work you've done.

I'm having no luck getting this to work. The big file comes up 404 file no found. I've downloaded the multipart file, but am having trouble extracting it. WinRAR says the file type is either unknown or damaged, and I can even get WinZip to recognize it. It is possible I'm doing something wrong? Help please.

[Scott A Melzer]

Sorry you're having trouble with the "Fanboy Soze" DVD! Several people have, so I must be doing something wrong...

The 404 error on the Dropbox link is fixed now. Try that. It's one big file, so you won't have any issues with zips.

I haven't had the error that you are having with the multi-part file. I've re-downloaded the file and it works fine, so I can only offer some suggestions since I do not know where the problem is.

First, you need to have all of the parts in the same folder. Trying to open the first won't work unless all five parts are in the same folder.

Second, don't click on it. Try dragging all of the files onto Winzip or WinRAR.

You can also try right clicking on the file and select "extract here".

Finally, I'm using Peazip which seems to work fine. Try downloading that at http://www.peazip.org/. It's a free program and is very small. Once you install it, all you have to do is right click the part one file and "extract here". Not sure if WinZip or WinRar work differently, but I know Peazip works fine.

Feel free to send me a personal e-mail if you are having any other issues. My address is scott.a.melzer over at gmail.

[Scott A Melzer]

We've fixed the Dropbox link. You should now be able to download the full-featured DVD of "Fanboy Soze" at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3656068/Fanboy%20Soze%20DVD.iso

Please let me know if it works for you!

[Reddthesock]

Thanks for the help, but I mentioned it to the computer guy at work and he pointed me to a freeware program that did the trick, and I finally got it to work late yesterday.

An excelent work that gave me a lot of laughs when I could use a few. Thank you again for all the hard work.

[Scott A Melzer]

I'm glad you got it to work! Can you post what you did, in case others are having the same problem?

I hope you like the full-featured DVD. We worked really hard on it, putting a ton of extras on it. The extras are things that I'd like to see for other people's films so I assume that others will like them, but I'd like to hear what everyone thinks. Are the extras cool? Are they helpful and/or interesting? Check out the first post for a list of what's on the disk. Let me know as that'll help with our next project.

The next DVD we're likely to do is the "Fan Parody Panic!" documentary. One of our panels (Bakuretsucon 2007 I believe) was filmed. I'd like to cut that together into something watchable, and also put in all the cut/alternative lines that we didn't use for each of the panels. Probably won't be a LOT of extras on that one, but it'll definitely take time. I've never edited live action before!

We're also developing our next film, which should be a musical! God help us all...

[Reddthesock]

The program I used is called hjsplit. It's a small freeware program that doesn't even require an install. I'm not sure why winzip didn't recgnize the first file as valid, but hjsplit had no problem.

www.hjsplit.org

Strangly, I did want to try peazip, but my computer flagged it for malware.

And I LOVE the DVDs. Even though I had a no frills version of This is Otakudom, as soon as I found this site and the links to the extras filled DVD version, I downloaded it again (with no trouble this time). I got STEAM off a torrent a couple of years ago and still watch it every couple of months.

Why the love? I don't like watching video on my laptop, and I like the idea of a "personal copy" I don't have to worry about going off line someday. The commentaries are fun to listen to. The pop up track points out what I may have missed or not understood (I'm thankfully not up on most internet memes) and information and trailers for other fan parodies can be the only way to find some of them.

I know they are a lot of work, but the effort put into the DVDs really shows. Please keep them up.

[Scott A Melzer]

Thanks for the info about hjsplit.

Weird about peazip. Definitely not malware. I used it to make the files in the first place! I also don't know why Winzip didn't recognize the file while your hjsplit did! Very very strange. I'm very new to all this and am learning. I've had many people ask for the DVDs, but I don't have any direct way to get them to them, so we're trying the MegaUpload and Dropbox as a way to get them to people for free.

I'm really REALLY glad that you found the extras on the DVD to be good. Obviously it takes a long time and a lot of work. It took over a month to write the pop-up videos alone. Plus, I have to use a much more sophisticated DVD authoring program (I use DVD Lab Pro 2.51) to do all of those things. A much higher learning curve, and I've had to "master" (use the term loosely) several new programs. It's also hard to get everyone to submit their bios, do the research on other groups, organize the commentary & interviews, dig up bonus material, etc. For "Fanboy Soze" all those "altered scenes" had to be either reconstructed or finished enough to be shown.

I also do the extras for myself. Years later, I want to check out a commentary and say, "Oh, yeah, I'd forgotten about that!" So much of my life I have forgotten, but the DVDs allow me a way to gather a lot of the ideas, documentation, and stories in one place and preserve them. I'm glad that we both win.