Blimey, has it really been 12 months since the last post on this blog? Best get my act together and make an effort going into 2012… I’ll be aiming for at least 1 update a week, probably on a Friday evening, from this Friday onwards. Let’s see how I do with that, although I’ve now got weekly notifications set up on my phone, so if I don’t do an update it’s because I’m being lazy.
So… where are we at?
Trent Samuels
Right now I’m writing yet another Trent Samuels Festive Special – this one will, weather permitting, be released Christmas week 2011, rather than February 2012 as last year’s was. I’m aiming to have the first draft written this week, 2nd draft done in a fortnight and then the relatively speedy process of recording the episode will follow. If our esteemed audio guru Tommy Dempsey isn’t available to record it, I’ve recently purchased a Zoom H2 audio recorder which we’ve also introduced on our normal podcasts. The audio quality is much better than we had previously, and hopefully should lead to a somewhat more palatable sound.
Anyway, back to Trent – once the Festive Special is written and in the bag I’ll be moving back onto Trent series 2 which will hopefully get a Q1 2012 release (for those who don’t know what Q1 means, it’s an insanely optimistic hope of mine that the series will be ready by March 2012. The first 2 episodes are pretty much finished, the main reasons why we haven’t recorded it yet are twofold. The first is that I wasn’t happy with the second half of the series, the story felt flat and a bit too formulaic, thus another session of planning was required and that took some time to finalise. Suffice to say the series should end on what will hopefully be a fantastic final showdown between Trent and Rikkmann, the villain of the series. The second reason was a lot of upheaval at work and the potential risk of redundancy (thankfully that’s now passed), so much of my spare time was spent focusing on job interview prep and generally taking my mind off the matter. Ergo, series 2 isn’t ready for a 2011 release and I have the opportunity to write another Festive Special. Should be fun. If not, be thankful I’m not charging for it.
I won’t go into too much detail about the plot, but essentially it’s a very loose adaptation of A Christmas Carol, featuring everyone’s favourite despot (no, not that one) Tony The Absorber in the central role. For anyone who has listened to Trent Samuels so far, you can see the possibilities in visiting Tony’s past, present and future. And it also ties nicely into series 4. Yep, that’s right – series FOUR.
In other Trent news (last bit of new info on this subject, honest), Ant is currently working his musical magic and re-recording the soundtrack for last year’s Festive Special in order for us to re-release the episode on physical media for the Random Stoat shop – the Mp3 will still be available for free on the website, so don’t worry about that. The CD version will be provided with some bonus special features that aren’t available on the website, so if you don’t need the extras then you can just download the episode with no obligation to buy. We’re still finalising the extra stuff but there’s some good ideas floating around. Don’t expect to see the CD release any time soon either, it will be ready when it’s ready. Series 1 may also receive the remastering treatment (with a new, original score from Ant once again), more details on that when we have them.
60 Second Gamer
We’ve released 2 episodes since moving all our editing to the Mac (visit www.youtube.com/randomstoat for the latest releases). More are coming but due to conflicting schedules we’ve not released a new video since the end of September. Rest assured that we have a LOT of new videos coming as soon as we find time to record our frankly cheap and somewhat shoddy intro sketches. Reviews of Batman Arkham City, Assassins Creed Revelations, FIFA 12, Gears of War 3, Battlefield 3, COD Modern Warfare 3, erm… and some more are on the way over the next few weeks. We’ve also got plans to release a DVD of the first 50 episodes at some point, watch this space. De-interlacing is a pain in the backside, but they’re lessons learnt for the next DVD release!
New Podcast
Following a conversation with Ant last night we’re going to see about releasing a new podcast that has no particular theme – instead we’ll talk about various random topics including the week’s news, latest music releases (that interest us), new TV etc. We’ve not got a plan yet but we’ll look into releasing a new episode every week or two. More details on that will be released here and/or on the Random Stoat homepage. On that note I’m looking into adding a few pages to the site and possibly making a few changes going into the new year, but again that’s in the early planning stages so nothing set in stone as of yet.
New Projects
I’ve got a few new projects on the cards (but then, haven’t I always?), so I’ll be releasing more details on those as we go into 2012. Again, any new project we release will be available as soon as it’s ready. I’m not going to set release dates as that creates unnecessary pressure and as we’re still only doing all of this for fun it seems a pointless endeavour. Suffice to say there’s about four immediate projects on the list, and I might even start writing that novel I’ve had fermenting in my head for the last couple of years. Or that other one. I’m trying to find a balance between releasing video and audio projects, with any luck we’ll get the balance right next year and actually expand into new projects rather than releasing the same old 60SG, Trent Samuels and The Movie Review. Not that there’s anything wrong with them, it would just be nice to give folks something new to tune in to. There are a few short film ideas floating around in my head, so hopefully some of them will be up on the website (free to view/listen to as always) in the next 12 months. A couple of scripts are at the drafting stage and I feel confident enough editing on the Mac now, so with any luck we can start churning stuff out that’s of a reasonably high quality. And hopefully funny where appropriate!
I’ll end this post by adding one of my favourite clips I found recently on YouTube – Alan Rickman doing what he does best.
Comments are very much appreciated, even the negative ones. See you crazy cats on Friday!
1 comment
Alan rickman deserves and oscar.