A Clockwork Baptism: First Scouting

Today, we scouted the Marin Headlands and China Camp for locations to shoot A Clockwork Baptism. I aim for this to be a more professional production, devoid of the freeform style that has defined a lot of our work - in doing so, I hope we reach a higher level of storytelling quality. We will go into this with a screenplay, schedule, and full casting, and it will be glorious.

Several key scenes will take place in an old battery, where the "resistance" faction in the narrative can escape from prying eyes to organize. Although I plan to look into more obscure locations in the Headlands and the San Francisco Presidio, we have some solid location candidates after today.

I'm also left with some photographic material for reference as I write the screenplay - if the film is tailored to its setting from the start, then all the better.

Digital Video Development

Production is nearly complete on the Noukon Studios: Anthology I DVD. I'm finalizing some of the extra features and the basic menu design (lots of variety there!) and looking into producing the last few bonuses. Aim is to have it complete within the next week.

I'm sort of considering putting up an ISO so that people can download it and burn their own copy, but that's a pretty big file...

Peaches Valentine: International Trailer

Peaches Valentine: Gradual Progression

Over this past weekend, we went out and did a location shoot for Peaches Valentine. The footage is far more varied than anything we've captured before. Keep an eye out for a brand new trailer, coming soon!

Digital Video Delay

Putting together a DVD or two collecting our films has been a priority of mine for so long that it might as well never have been a priority to begin with. I think I bought a DVD burner for the specific purpose of producing one about three years ago... so much for that! Still, the bug's been there, and as I write this I'm in mid-production on two DVDs: An anthology of our short films and related material, and a disc specifically collecting season one of The Depths of Addiction.

The main hurdle has always been getting the digital elements together - all of this material is most conveniently collected in small, compressed files easily digestible online (a lot of it only in WMV format - barf). To get it all together in high-quality MPEG is a heavy task. After re-ripping the DV masters back from their miniDV prisons, however, I have everything necessary to move forward. A nice bonus to waiting this long is that the DVD can include a couple of Peaches Valentine teasers.

As far as the DoA collection goes, I never did meaningfully export the master project files from Adobe Premiere, so it all exists in the original (50+ gigabyte) Premiere project itself. I'm currently parsing it all and getting it exported back out into a DVD-ready format. In the process, I'm cleaning it up here and there. While I can't do much about the audio noise and interlacing problems endemic to the camera used to film the series, I can improve the titling and fix up a few editing and audio errors here and there. This may just be after-the-fact fussing, but screw it, I want this DVD to be as shiny as possible.

Part of me wants to go in with scissors blazing a second time (given how much better the "director's cut" versions are than the originals), but I think I'll leave that for whenever I decide to go through with cutting the episodes down into a single, 45-minute feature.

Astral Projection

Getting Noukon Studios properly re-launched is tricky business. That little thing called real life with its meandering obstacles like jobs and social responsibilities and such can be fairly pesky. Planning out any kind of film production these days is nearly impossible (and is why you haven't seen anything of substance in... wow, three and a half years now!). Let's take a look at my road map through the current haze, shall we?

If this group had an ingredient list, ambition would be at the top. This, in most ways, is a bad thing - it leaves less room for substance and feasibility. While I always have larger projects on the backburner, I've realized that cycling in some smaller, easier productions into the forefront would help us to actually get something done.

Shadow Age may be my pet project, but it will need lots of development time and production capital. While it stews, there are plenty of ways to create content. Peaches Valentine is now, I think, back at the forefront of our docket, and I've pushed in a couple of short film projects that are "weekend filmable" (this includes a simplified version of A Clockwork Baptism, a project I've been wanting to do for some time).

To drive this, I'm setting a personal goal (backed up by time taken off from work to get it accomplished): Film something by the end of 2008. It doesn't have to be complete, it just has to be in the can.

We can only go up from there.

Shadow Age: Evolution

Trying to consider where the Shadow Age premise came from at this point approaches on being speculative. It started as a basic narrative idea I had around seven or so years ago that had nothing to do with the current world, and I developed it as a story for film. I actually think there were alternate realities and time travel involved in the beginning - there was something in there about a feudal society gaining access to futuristic atomic technology. I grew to like the characters I had developed, but wanted a more down-to-earth environment to play with them in (thinking of the Shadow Age premise as down-to-earth is absurd, I know, but when compared with the original idea it's practically a documentary).

Shadow Age then developed as a single screenplay idea - a war between feudal lords, one of which is a genocidal madman, set in a wasteland. This story has become the basis for the entire saga, and has remained intact all this time, except now it's just the biggest, most climactic part of a much broader tale.

When we produced the original Shadow Age short film in 2003, it was mostly a construction of throw-away ideas to act as a proof of concept for the larger story. I really enjoyed playing with the world, though, and eventually developed that throw-away story into what could have been a feature-length prelude to the main film. We actually meant to produce some of this story at one point, but the production demands would have been too broad and costly for us to shoulder, so it's been shelved all this time.

Fast forward to now, and I have dozens of smaller ideas to build the world out of. Settling on an episodic web series has finally given me an outlet for these ideas (and perhaps an outlet for others to collaborate with us with their own interpretations). At this point, the series will begin with smaller stories that develop the canon and characters, and if all goes well, we'll eventually lead into the "prelude" story arc mentioned above.

On the Docket

It's been a long time since Noukon Studios pushed out an original production. The last project to reach true fruition was The Depths of Addiction, which completed its first run over three years ago. Various other projects have come and gone without hitting a full post-production stage, and remnants of those are floating around in our YouTube channel now.

We're still here, though, and we're still planning. I'm currently working on another new revamp of the website (inspired both by new development momentum and a recent hacker strike on the site), and developing scripts and ideas for two new episodic productions...

The Chronicles of Peaches Valentine
Peaches has seen a few concept iterations without much follow-through, but I've finally settled on a format and we're planning to get full episodes in the can by the end of this year. The series is character-based, and follows Peaches on brief, non sequitur adventures spurring off from a sculptor's attempt to create an action figure based on him.

Shadow Age: Episodes
Our first release was a Shadow Age short film, and it's pretty much an embarrassment at this point, as it was hampered by an extremely rushed production schedule and looks pretty terrible as a short film (you'll note that I've never even made it available on YouTube). I've always wanted to revisit the concept, and there are lots of story ideas floating around - a series of short episodes is just the ticket to revamp and explore the concept.

More info will be forthcoming on these projects as they continue to develop... and, as always, we have other ideas waiting in the wings as well...