Can you feel the excitement?

Hi All,

While the majority of our robots are made of recycled parts found at the recycle center as well as the coop, sometimes they are just not robot-y enough for us. Whenever this happens, we rush to one of our favorite places on earth, the TOY SHOP (aka. Home Depot)!!

One of the most challenging and exciting parts of our project is seeing how far we can stretch the dollar. The best way to do this is to either use recycled parts, or using interesting looking parts we might find at the depot.

Thanks to all the cool people that came to the booth at the Sustainable Living Festival this past weekend, hopefully we will keep in touch. Anyway, here is  a taste of an upcoming short doc we are working on. Enjoy, and look for a documentary on here in the next week or so. Keep rockin!

Tryin it on for size

Robot foot maybe?

uuuummmmm, see ya next week!

-Jefferson

Hey Everyone,

This is Jefferson, and this is my first postage on the bloggage (with many more to come!). Just wanted to post a couple of picts of the filming on set of the no longer freezing warehouse in Albany. I picked a couple of nice shots from a database of many, to give you a taste of the actors that will show up in the first movie. You can see some of our state of the art filming techniques, as well as the lighting that we have been using up to this point.

Were excited to be working from the new editing studio (more to come on that), and working with all the live action shots we have recorded. We will also be posting some short documentaries of the production process, from our secret missions to the toy store (home depot), building robots in the warehouse, and most importantly the filming. We hope to make these updates a much more regular thing, so stay tune in. For now, here ya go!

***just the highlights, the rest can be seen at the Flickr site***

The actors look on

Alyssa pretends to be Ben.

Friends, Rodents, Quadrupeds, how are you? Thanks for checking in. No new visual material this week (or last week, alas, I was sick) - plus production assistant Jeff Chu went on vacation, so I decided to turn to the music for the project for a while. I’ll post a clip of a rough mix I’m doing before next Wed… it’s very sweeping and dramatic!

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Thanks!!! -Ben

This past week has been really fun - working on music, primarily, for a “music video” intro for the animated storyline. The opening track has really turned a corner. I broke down and did what I said I wouldn’t do and busted out some strings and horns, but I think that’s really what it needed - some cinematic flare, mystery, and atmosphere. I listen to it now even when I’m doing boring tasks, like tediously grafting huge swaths of video clips together - making them move like they are all the same shot. Here’s an example, actually where I’m taking a model robot we made and mixing it with a human character so that the robot looks huge. I’m in the process of animating this now, but before it becomes a cartoon it all looks like this photo over here. My goal right now is to have the opening sequence completed by mid April - pretty doable, I think, at this rate. Jeff’s on vacation so it’s just me and the Mac for a couple weeks. It’ll be good to blast through it.
See ya next week,
-Ben

Hello again! Been awhile, eh? Yes, indeed. Well, while fumbling around with WordPress for a couple months (I accidentally deleted my database) production has blazed forward with Reverie behind the scenes, so to speak. Please allow me to get you up to speed:

Foremost of importance, joining me in on this trans-media adventure is now Jeff Chu, who is both documenting the production and assisting in pretty much every other aspect of things.

This past couple weeks has been particularly exciting as we completed construction and filming of a difficult model/costume - a gigantic spider robot we call, Spiderbot.

Prior to that, my pals Ludo rolled through town and dropped by for a cameo at the studio. My old band, Jupiter Sunrise, and Ludo played a bunch of shows together a couple years ago so I hadn’t seen those fellas in a long time. The portion we shot with Ludo features them dancing amidst a troupe of partying robots. These robots, having newly acquired software that emulates human emotions, are all freaking out so Ludo stop by to check things out. It’s shaping up to be a pretty rambunctious scene.

It’s been a really productive couple months and things are really picking up steam!!!

-Ben