1/22/08
Yes, it's been a while since we've updated our What's New page...
You can blame Return of Pink Five for that. Most of the news we would have posted here went into the Pink Five production blog instead.
However, we've been doing other things as well - for example Trey just wrapped up a stint as a consultant on the new Simpsons attraction at Universal Studios. (No spoilers, nothing to see here, move along.)
Working on launching some new projects shortly... and also on releasing the final chapter of the Pink Five saga. We promise you won't have to wait another four years for an update on either...
12/20/04
We are thrilled to report that Woody Burns... a Life was awarded the Grand Prize in the National 48-Hour Film Challenge !
We also won "Best film of the Pacific Time Zone" - a category we also won last year with "Hooves of Destiny".
Best of all, we got the news while we were on the set of Return of Pink Five, practically the entire cast and crew of "Woody Burns" was present, and heard the news together - and so the contest organizers got to hear the hootin' and hollerin' in real time via cel phone.
As Grand Prize winner, Woody Burns will screen at the Cinequest film festival in March... right around the delivery deadline for Return of Pink Five. Figures.
12/02/04
Our National 48-Hour Film Challenge entry Woody Burns... a Life has been selected as one of the Final Fifteen finalists (from a field of one hundred and sixty films)!
The Grand Prize and other category awards will be announced December 15th. Hey, it's an honor just to be nominated.
10/09/04
Well, last weekend was National Film Challenge time again.
On Friday October 1st at 7 PM, we received a list of required film elements, from which our crack filmmaking squadron would have forty-eight hours to create an 8-minute movie.
Our required elements were:
Genre: Fantasy
Prop: Monkey
Character: W. Burns, Ventriloquist
Line of Dialog: "I never knew you felt that way."One weekend and six hours of sleep later, we FedEx'd Woody Burns... a Life to Challenge headquarters in Washington, D.C.
There were over 160 entries this year, and judging is scheduled to take approximately two months. But until then, you can watch the film right here!
9/21/04
Trey just wrapped up several weeks as a puppeteer on Team America - the all-marionette feature from the makers of South Park. It's the biggest marionette movie ever made, and definitely the raunchiest.
Team America opens nationwide on October 15th, so you won't have to wait very long to see Trey's work on such characters as "lady who yells from a window" and "puppet standing in the corner of the shot not doing anything".
We also just discovered that both Pink Five and Pink Five Strikes Back are scheduled to be screened at the Los Angeles Comic Book and Science Fiction Convention on Sunday, October 17th. Admission is only 6 bucks for the whole convention - we might have to check this one out in person.
And finally, the National 48-Hour Film Challenge is coming up again on October 1st, and the whole team from last year's award-winning "Hooves of Destiny" is saddled up and ready to ride. Can we possibly top our incredible performance in last year's Challenge? We shall see...
8/7/04
Trey will be at SIGGRAPH on Tuesday August 10th, as a member of the Special Sessions Panel on Puppetry and Computer Graphics.
So if you want to hear him tell the same stories in person that you can already read here for free - hey, that's up to you!
7/26/04
Well, we didn't see this coming. Really, we didn't.
On Thursday July 22nd, before an audience of some two thousand Star Wars fans, Pink Five Strikes Back won the Audience Choice Award in this year's Star Wars Fan Film Awards.
Last year the George Lucas Award, this year Audience Choice... looks like we have to make the third one now.
Amy Earhart and Trey Stokes accept their party's nomination...
7/6/04
An article about Pink Five Strikes Back and the other Star Wars Fan Film Finalists is the top story on today's edition of Wired.com.
Overall a very nice article, but for the record, Trey is not a "visual effects supervisor" on Polar Express - he is a "lead motion capture integrator". And now you know... the rest of the story.
6/30/04
Another big video week for us...
First, our we-didn't-tell-anyone-we-were-making-it sequel to last year's award-winning Pink Five is now online.
Yes, the somewhat inevitable Pink Five Strikes Back was accepted as a finalist in this year's Star Wars Fan Film Awards, and thus far has been receiving (mostly) rave reviews.
Second, our latest 48-Hour effort Double Shot - about as different a film from Pink Five Strikes Back as it could possibly be - is now online at ExtremeFilmmaker.com.
Getting to work with both Yoda and Curtis Armstrong... it's like a dream come true, really.
5/1/04
So okay, we're going to a convention. There, we admitted it. But not just any convention, oh no no no! It's FanzillaCon, the first convention entirely devoted to fan-made films.
Trey, along with Amy (Pink Five) Earhart, will be at FanzillaCon in Worcester, MA from June 11-14. They'll be screening Pink Five and possibly participating in other convention events, subject to the whim of the convention organizers.
And they're sure to be giving away lots of leftover Pink Five trinkets (we've got to get rid of this stuff somehow).
So if you're in the Boston area in mid-June, or if you have your own private jet or something like that, come on out to FanzillaCon and say hi.
3/6/04
More screenings!
Our perennial fave Pink Five can be seen all this week at the Durango Film Festival in Colorado. Strap on your snowshoes and get on up the mountain for that one.
And we're happy to announce that our National Film Challenge Top Ten winner Hooves of Destiny will soon be available on DVD. To kick off the DVD release, there will be an L.A. screening of all the Top Ten finalists on March 22nd at 8:00 PM at CineSpace in Hollywood.
And we're still helping our pals Sandy and John with American Scary, their documentary about local TV horror hosts. A new trailer has just been released - it'll give you an brief glimpse into the incredible interviews they've collected thus far. Check it out at the American Scary website.
By the way, in the midst of all this entrepeneurial filmmaking, we've also been earning a living. Trey, for example, has been putting in some serious overtime at Sony Imageworks as a "technical animator" (don't ask what that means - he still doesn't exactly know) on The Polar Express, due to hit theatres 'round Thanksgiving 2004.
2/21/04
This 48-Hour film thing is getting to be a habit with us.
This week, the gang at Extreme Filmmaker selected our latest 48-Hour flick Double Shot, written by Christopher Reed and starring Curtis Armstrong and Amy Earhart, as a finalist in their 6th 48 Hour Film competition.
Double Shot and the other final films will be shown on Thursday, Feb. 26th at L.A's awesome Arclight Cinema. Tickets for the first screening sold out within a day, so a second, later showing has been added.
Admission is $11.00... but that includes the reception and awards presentation afterward. All in all, a good price for an evening's entertainment. Or something.
Double Shot with Curtis ArmstrongMeanwhile, the National Film Challenge chose our entry Hooves of Destiny as one of its Top Ten for 2003, and will include it on their "Best Of" DVD, available for sale soon.
1/05/04
Screenings, screenings, screenings...
First off, our award-winning Hooves of Destiny will be screening at L.A.'s CineSpace theater on Tuesday, January 13th, along with all the other West Coast entries in the National Film Challenge. Admission is a mere $5.00, so come on down and say hi!
Meanwhile, our entries in the most recent Extreme Filmmaker 48-Hour competition are now viewable online. Look for Fish Guys and Life In Two Dimensions on the Extreme Filmmaker films page.
12/16/03
The National Film Challenge winners have been announced, and our entry Hooves of Destiny rode off into the sunset with three awards!
Best Film in its Genre (Western or Musical)
Best Film in its time zone (Pacific)
Best Use of the Required Character (Pacific time zone)Seventy-five entrants, and we snag three awards... proud? You bet we're proud!
A screening of the LA area entries is being planned for mid-January - check back here for details on that!
10/20/03
If you see one politically-incorrect interracial silent Western musical this year... it'll have to be this one.
This past weekend The Truly Dangerous Company's repertory company whipped up another 48-Hour film - this time for the National Film Challenge contest.
At 7 PM on Friday, October 17th we received our randomly-generated assignment: A Western or musical, which had to include the character of T. Griffin Sanders - jetsetter, a ping pong ball, and the line "You gonna eat that?" On Monday October 20th, we delivered the end result - a seven-minute epic Western oddity entitled Hooves of Destiny.
Seventy-five teams across the country entered the competition, and the judging will supposedly take several weeks. Stay tuned to see if Hooves of Destiny goes all the way.
In the meantime, the official poster for "Hooves of Destiny" is available here (suitable for framing!)
10/11/03 - Special Super T-Shirt Closeout sale!
Long, long ago, we made some Truly Dangerous Company T-shirts.
9/21/03
We're helping our pals Sandy "Crazy Watto" Clark and John "Jedi Hunter" Hudgens with American Scary, their upcoming documentary about local horror movie hosts. They've been traveling the country taping interviews, and we've been shooting some additional interviews for them here on the west coast.
So if you were once a TV horror host, knew a TV horror host, or just have a great memory to share about your local horror host, contact John or Sandy at the American Scary website... and maybe we'll end up interviewing you!
9/9/03
First Pink Five gets a new life on Atomfilms, and now this!
Land Of Many Uses was originally created for L.A.'s 48-Hour Film Festival (scroll down for more info about that...). Months later, when Atomfilms picked up Pink Five for their Star Wars contest, they asked us "So, what else do you have?" And the rest is history.
So if you haven't seen it before, drop by Atomfilms and have a look at Land Of Many Uses.
8/11/03
Our latest short video projects, Fish Guys by Trey Stokes and Life In Two Dimensions by Maija Beeton, have both been accepted by the 48-Hour Film Festival in Hollywood.
The rules of the 48-Hour Fest are simple: contestants have 48 hours - measured from the first time the camera rolls, to delivery of the final cut - to make a short film.
Fish Guys, Life In Two Dimensions, and the other 48-Hour finalists can be seen at 8 PM on August 23rd at the Chaplin Theater, Raleigh Studios, Hollywood.
Check the 48-Hour Festival website for further details. See you there!
7/21/03
We still can't quite believe it, but on July 17th Pink Five won the Grand Prize in the 2003 LucasFilm Fan Film competition. George Lucas personally chose our film as his favorite among the entries... trust us, we're just as shocked as you are!
The winners were announced an awards ceremony at San Diego Comic-Con - we were on hand to accept the award, and afterward the film was screened for an audience of two thousand Star Wars fans.
The "George Lucas Selects" prize includes a cash prize and an audio mix at Skywalker Sound... coming soon, Pink Five in THX Dolby Surround!
6/17/03
And the Pink Five bandwagon keeps on rolling...
After a successful run on IFILM and another at TheForce.Net, our Star Wars spoof has moved yet again - to the AtomFilms website, as a finalist in this year's LucasFilm Fan Film competition.
But the version now playing at AtomFilms isn't the same old Pink Five seen elsewhere, no, no, no! It's Pink Five, The Special Edition, featuring brand-new 3-D animation by our own Maija Beeton. That's right - if George can go back and "fix" his original, so can we!
And this time there's actual cash money at stake, so once again we're making a shameless plea for votes. Tell your friends, alert the media, reformat your hard drive, and get on down to AtomFilms and vote for Pink Five, The Special Edition.
4/11/03
Jimmy Neutron's Nicktoon Blast! is now open at Universal Studios Orlando.
Trey spent several months programming the motion simulators in Florida, and also serving as an animation supervisor for the film production at Nick Digital in Burbank. (The frequent flyer miles were a nice bonus.)
Jimmy Neutron's Nicktoon Blast! replaced the equally-awkwardly-named Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera, which Trey programmed thirteen years ago. And so the cycle is complete...
3/20/03
March 20th marked the world premiere of The Mechanical Rabbit, a multimedia production combining actors, puppets, music, and projected imagery into a "darkly comical and surreal tale of a young boy's search for identity and free will."
Trey directed the video sequences for the Sacred Fools Theater production, which runs through April 27th.
For more info about the show (and reprints of reviews that say nice things about the video sequences), hop on over to the Sacred Fools website.
1/31/03
It's 48-Hour Film Festival time again, and our entry this go-round was something we've taken to calling simply "The Russian Film".This one's rather hard to describe, but we're happy to report that it was a great fave with the standing-room-only audience at the 48-Hour screening on January 25th.
See it now at the Extreme Filmmaker website.
7/31/02
We've gone film-festival-happy!
It seems like every other day another festival is showing one (or more) of our projects. For example, last weekend our short film entitled Land of Many Uses was screened at the 48-Hour Film Festival in Hollywood.
The rules of the 48-Hour Fest are simple: contestants have 48 hours - measured from the first time the camera rolls, to delivery of the final cut - to make a short film.
In addition to the achievement of simply completing the film in the first place, Land of Many Uses received three "commendations" from a panel of industry professionals, in the categories of Writing, Editing, and Directing.
Only a few days prior, Pink Five was part of an evening of "Sex and Chaos" presented by Exploding Cinema L.A. And Santa Monica's YardFest also recently screened both Pink Five and Cody's Commercial.
5/24/02
Our Star Wars spoof Pink Five was chosen as IFILM's "Pick of the Day" on May 15th - the day before Star Wars: Attack of the Clones hit theaters.Twenty-four hours and 15,000 viewings later, Pink Five peaked at #2 on IFILM's "Most Popular" chart. (We were denied the #1 position, which was held by... a documentary about people waiting in line to see Attack of the Clones.)
A week later, Pink Five was prominently featured on CNN's Moneyline, as part of a feature story about Star Wars "fan films".
That same week, our short film Cody's Commercial was accepted by the New York Independent Film and Video Festival.(You can read up on Cody's life story in our Creature FX section.)
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