Bunny Blog

Last Friday the American Cinematheque screened another installment in its “Blows Up the Internet” series, this time featuring STRIKE TV. (The first was apparently Dr. Horrible and the third will be Crackle.)

photo credit by Genevieve Webster

Our web series, Coma, Period. was featured second, and I got to join a panel together with Steven de Souza (writer of Die Hard and Unknown Sender) and Timothy Dalton (played James Bond in License to Kill). Susan Miller (writer on the L Word and Anyone But Me), Matt Enlow (director of Mountain Man) and Andrew Miller (creator of Imaginary Bitches).

It was a fun night with some good episodes, notably Joe & Kate and Speedie Date. It was real neat to see Coma, Period. on the big screen. Dan’s coma is so amazingly, blindingly white!

I have an unabashed love of movie titles.  A good title sequence is a work of art all on its own, and can bring incredible value to a film - in mood, story, and production value.  Nobody knows this, or analyzes it, better than The Art of the Title, a site/blog that features great movie titles, detiled analysis, and interviews with some of the biggest title designers out there.  If you’re interested in the thught process behind some of your favorite title sequences, this is the place, and f you just want to watch some incredible titles, everything is available in SD, HD, and even for iPhone.

Some of my favorites:

Alien Quadrilogy analysis

Dexter

Freaked

The Impostors

Tension in Title Sequences

The numbers are in, and the Wall Street Journal put together a graph of consumer movie spending in 2009, compared to 2008.

This echoes a lot of Hollywood whining about slumping DVD sales, but as usual I find it hard to have much sympathy for their plight.  In every other category (including DVD rental!) sales are up versus the year before.  Growth in theatrical spending, in fact, nearly compensates for the loss in DVD sales alone.  So I would like to offer the world’s tiniest violin as a concession to those who thought DVD was going to be a cash cow forever.  Maybe I should offer a history book as well.

(image blatantly stolen)

Online transactions are still a tiny slice of the pie, but nearly doubled over the past year.  If that trend continues then digital delivery will be a viable mechanism within a couple of years, which bodes particularly well for indie filmmakers with direct access to the means of distribution.  Despite a lot of big talk, it didn’t happen last year.  Will 2010 be the year when someone steps up with a substantial platform for online film?

Remember back in the heady days of 2005, when Lost was a huge hit and there was a sudden flurry of longform serialized sci-fi dramas on network television?  Ha ha, yeah, those all got cancelled in a season or less.  But at least one of them was well worth watching, and while it’s a shame it only lasted one season, I am here to highly recommend “Surface.”

The show follows a disparate cast of characters as they uncover the secrets behind a strange new aquatic life form (giant sea monsters!).  The creature FX leave a little to be desired, but the characters and stories are engrossing, and continually paying off in new ways.  What begins as a mystery centered around these sea creatures and where they came from swiftly opens the door to a much larger mystery, with much more radical implications.  There are several moments of “whoah! Awesome!” and a few “I can’t believe they did that!”s.  The series ends on something like a cliffhanger, they’ve resolved enough mysteries that you still feel satisfied.  It’s just a good solid sci-fi mystery/action show, and at 15 episodes, it’s easy to watch the whole thing.

12 of the 15 episodes (for some strange reason) are on Hulu, and you can get the whole thing on Netflix Instant Streaming.  Do yourself a favor and enjoy the ride.

I’ve noticed recently that all the movies I don’t want to see all have the same basic design for their poster, which looks like this:

The main characteristics, I think, are the white background, the red type, and a bold sans serif font.  Let’s take a look, shall we, at a few similar posters which should prove my theory true:

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We are a hurricane of doing things over here at Psychic Bunny. As you can see below, we just completely finished a horror feature, and have now also completely finished our first web series, “Coma, Period.” It’s an existential comedy starring Rob Delaney, who we don’t know if you’ve noticed, has been blowing up all over the internet, starring in “Warner Bros Responds to Christian Bale” and this Mad Men parody from Funny or Die.

We have just completed 10 episodes comprising the first season, and are distributing them through Strike TV. They’ve been getting great writeups from Tubefilter, Markee Magazine, and NewTeeVee. Jill Weinberger, the reviewer at NewTeeVee Station, actually said that the result of all our work “fueled by Delaney’s pitch-perfect and exuberant performance, is a satisfying blend of dark humor and goofy whimsy - a fusion often attempted in web video that’s rarely done as well as it is here.”

Please watch a few of the episodes over at www.comaperiod.com! We’re very proud

Much thanks to Lawrence Everson (Sound Designer), Jeff Waldron (Cinematographer), Ringleader Stages, The Maybe Happening, and everybody else (and there are tons) who made this production possible. I think you’ll be hearing a lot more about Coma, Period. in the future, so stay tuned!

You might not know this about me (which means we’ve probably never met) but I am a sucker for pulp fiction of all sorts.  Here at Psychic Bunny we’re big on short form content and freewheeling creative expression, so it’s no surprise that I’ve fallen a bit in love with Popcorn Fiction, a website created by Hollywood writers as “a place where new popular short fiction could flourish.”  The stories range from macabre to humorous to action-packed, as any good pulp compilation should, and who knows, this is meant as a lab for new ideas, so you might just be seeing the seeds of the next hit TV show or blockbuster film.

Their latest story is from Patton Oswalt, and it’s a delight.  Check it out.

Just when we thought it was totally dead, The Golden Egg was invited to screen at the Milwaukee Film Festival on Friday, October 2nd.  It will be screening at Midnight, which I think is about the time of day I first had the idea for the film.

I will be on hand at the screening as well, so if you’ve got folks or family in Milwaukee, tell them to come on out! It’s going to be a rip-roaring good time. If you ARE going to the screening, email me at rick (at) psychicbunny (dot) com and let me know. It’d be great to meet you.

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Avatar just got all nostalgic on me in an unexpected way.

Sure, I’m a sucker for all things Cameron (yeah, that’s right, my 16th birthday party was a trip to see Titanic. We all dressed up. You wanna make something of it?) but, like everyone else, I’ve been underwhelmed so far. However, I just learned that Wayne Barlowe worked on creature design, and, well, my geekmeter just went off the charts.  You see, for a certain subset of the populace, Barlowe’s Guide To Extraterrestrials was a little handbook of pure awesome.  Published in 1979, it contains Barlowe’s designs for a vast number of creatures from sci-fi literature, complete with write-ups.  My ratty old paperback version has been thumbed through on countless rainy afternoons, and inspired me to read more than one great sci-fi book. In fact, in my head, “Barlowe” was more some mythical chronicler of alien species than a dude who could draw real good.  He felt like my own personal shopkeep in the Neverending Story.  It’s almost funny to think of him having a concept design job on a movie, rather than traversing interspace searching for new species to document.

So way to go, Barlowe.  You’ve suckered me into another story.

YouTube has been beta-testing their new channel layouts. Eventually all YT channels will look like this, but in the meantime they’ve let some channels switch over to the new design, which I really, really like. Since we were rebranding our YouTube channel anyway, we decided to take the plunge.

So first of all, why are we rebranding our channel? Well, our YouTube channel consists mostly of original content - be it web series pilots, short films, animations, or trailers for our films. Since we now have launched an entire original content brand, we decided that it made more sense to convert the present channel rather than creating a new one. So here it is!

They allow you to upload your own banner now, fitting across the entire length of the screen, and also upload your own background.  The main design change is that now people can watch all of your videos without clicking away from your channel.

For the most part, the change-over was really easy. Sometimes the design editor wasn’t very responsive, however. I had to upload the background about three times before it actually kicked in. A lot of the font color pickers were the same way. The nice thing is that YouTube saves your previous channel, so if things really aren’t working out, you can just switch back. I haven’t tried this, however, so no promises that it works perfectly.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new look!

To learn more, go to this explanatory video from YouTube.