www.vladstudio.com
You can download “low quality” versions of all the wallpapers for free or you pay a membership for “high quality” versions. I say “low quality” in quotes because even the free versions look awesome to me. I’m so impressed that I think I’ll spring for a lifetime membership to support them. Right now they’re running an Easter special of $19.99 for life.
I was using a text replacement program called “Texter” and a program called “Ditto” that let me paste from a list of things I’d copied recently instead of just pasting the last thing copied. I had some problems with Texter causing issues so I ditched it. Today I found “Phrase Express” which replaces Texter and Ditto and does a whole hell of a lot more! You can use it to easily insert text, auto-correct, launch programs and web pages, paste from a list of recently copied things, execute macros and a whole lot more.
For example, every time I send out a letter to submit for cast or crew, instead of manually typing the same thing every time I can now just type “cast@” or “crew@” and it inserts my entire cover letter. Or I can type “sig@” to insert my signature. The hotkeys or keywords are completely configurable by you. I put the “@” symbol on my keywords just so I don’t accidentally cause an insert without meaning to. If I wanted to I could also make a hotkey if I wanted to such as ctrl-alt-S for my signature, or windowskey+s, or any combination of ctrl-alt-shift-windows+any key.
Check out the website for a much better explanation of all the features. I’m totally digging it so far.
Thanks to all of you who have been supporting our “Sweded”, “Be Kind, Rewind” style remake of “The Princess Bride.”
We are officially in the final fifteen and will find out the winner Thursday night! You all rule!
Remember that bad-ass commercial I got paid loads of money for? Well it appears I may be getting residuals for it too. I received another check in the mail for it today (much tinier but still not insignificant). @008 is going to be my year!
Our “Sweded” version of The Princess Bride is receiving rave reviews (hopefully we’ll win the grand prize of a totally bad-ass Dell computer or the second prize of a Dell laptop), we’ve got another short film in another contest (hopefully to win a 58″ plasma HD TV), and I just booked a 4 day Production Assistant job. Let’s keep this train a-rollin’!
So I already posted about our film, “The Princess Bride” in my last post. Now I calling everyone to arms! I try not to call in favors like this too often so hopefully it carries some weight.
When you click on the link above, you will see a place whee you can rate the film 1-10 stars, but you can’t rate the film without having an account on filmmakingfrenzy.com. To anyone who can be bothered, we beg you to take the few seconds to make an account, verify your account, log in, rate our movie (hopefully 10 stars but I won’t ask anyone to go against their own judgment) and leave us a nice comment. I totally understand if you can’t be bothered but it can’t hurt to put out the rallying cry!
In the spirit of the new movie, “Be Kind, Rewind” starring Jack Black and Mos Def, The Alamo Drafthouse and Filmmakingfrenzy.com are holding a contest to make a 5 minute “Sweded” version of a Hollywood movie.
We chose to make “The Princess Bride”. Larry and I also starred in our friend, James Pound’s remake of “Back to the Future II”
Sadly there was one other remake of the Princess Bride which had some of the exact same ideas we had, but luckily I think our two versions are vastly different. Go check them out and vote for us!
I have started uploading our content to FunnyOrDie.com so if you feel the hankerin’, head over there and give us some “funny” votes!
On a complete side note, there’s a very short teaser trailer for a short film I did here. You might only be able to view it if you have a myspace acount. Sorry, but I think that’s the only place it’s posted.
I have always been a big fan of “The Twilight Zone”. I remember my uncle and grandmother watching reruns when I was growing up and I think that it probably stuck in my psyche somewhere pretty deep and played a part in forming who I am.
A while back I bought the entire series on DVD (box set with episodes in order of airing). We’ve started watching them from the beginning and I’ve noticed some peculiar things. Now let me first say that, yes, I do realize that TV was a completely different beast back then as well as movies and probably just general storytelling techniques. I still love this show but have noticed it’s tendency to assume that the viewer is so stupid as to be just shy of brain dead. This is kind of funny because on the other hand it can go to some pretty cerebral places too so it almost seems as if it’s catering to really smart folks and people who are dumber than a box of non-sentient rocks.
For example, in one episode, Burgess Meredith plays a man who loves to read. So much so that at lunch time he goes into the vault of the bank where he works to read. One day while in the vault, the world gets destroyed by H-bombs but he survives since he was in the vault. We see all this on screen. Well we don’t actually see the H-bombs and such but it’s all illustrated quite clearly.
Then, upon leaving the vault and seeing the state of the world, he monologues to himself (since everyone else is dead) something along the lines of:
“Oh my god! The world was destroyed by H-bombs! Everyone is dead except for me! *a look of realization* I survived because I was in the vault!”
Well. That was a bit of totally unnecessary exposition! And we just won’t mention the two dimensional character that was his harpy of a wife who refused to let him read at home.
Then there was another episode where these astronauts go missing off the radar as they launch. It turns out they’ve crash landed on “an asteroid” as they call it. An asteroid with an perfectly human compatible atmosphere and mountains and stuff. O.K. so they really should have just called it a planet. Then they have a conversation about how, from the looks of things, the sun appears to be the same distance and trajectory as from the Earth meaning that they must be on an asteroid in the same orbit as the Earth!
So basically, five minutes into the episode, they’ve just hit you over the head with their “twist” ending. OMG! It wasn’t an asteroid at all! It turns out they had just crashed in the Nevada desert! All that strife and killing wasn’t necessary after all!
As I said, I just find these things fun to nitpick. I still think The Twilight Zone is an awesome, brilliant, landmark show.
A while back my talent agency got me a gig working as an extra on a SAG national commercial. Most of the extra work I’ve done pays basically minimum wage. This one ended up paying about $300 a day for two days of work.
Today my agency called to tell me I had been upgraded to “Principal”. Basically this means that I ended up being seen too prominently to be considered an extra.
With this upgrade comes an additional check.
To the tune of around $3400.
In addition to this, I’ve been on three auditions in the past two weeks for actual real paying gigs including two commercials and one feature film lead. Let’s hope this trend continues to rise throughout the year!