Not long ago Man vs Food came to Indianapolis to face the Big Ugly Burger at local establishment Bubs Burgers. I had to give it a shot. I went with some friends, most notably Ryan who had defeated a single burger before and was return to face down the two burger challenge.
I only went for a single burger and here's why: it's a full pound of beef after cooking! I did manage to finish, it but next to Ryan's accomplishment, it looked like I did nothing.
All told I got a little picture of myself put on the wall somewhere featuring the worst hair I've ever had. Meanwhile Ryan got a full 8 by 10 looking like a champion
A week ago Google announced that they were sending out 60,000 free laptops out to testers for their new Google Chrome Operating System. I just found out I was selected when I received this in the mail.
This is the coolest thing ever. The notebook is completely blank of any markings or stickers. It has no caps lock key and the surface is a perfect matte black. It's the antithesis of the shiny over-designed stuff you see at Best Buy today. I'm so proud to be a tester for Google. It's like a Christmas Miracle!
I used Apple Motion for a now canceled project at work. Here's the point at which it was canned. Imagine an animated Indianapolis sprouting up at the end of the road.
Dr. Dirtbike VS Dr. Guitar Solo VS Exigieron La Mascara in Fire Pro Wrestling Returns.
Check out Awesome Hospital by Chad Bowers, Chris Sims, Matt Digges, and Josh Krach.
I'm a little worse for wear but I was given a clean bill of health earlier today. The extreme chest pain was ascribed to an "Esophagus-Stomach Event" so the good news is my heart is fine.
The real comedy of all this comes from trying to tell my new employers about my situation. You'll recall that I was supposed to go to the hospital for a tb/drug test. They needed to know why I missed it. I told a nurse to call them and tell them what was happening. Unfortunatley policy says they can't give out details other than name and location so my new employer got a message saying,"Andrew is at the hospital." which didn't seem out of the ordinary at all. I called them once everything had calmed and said no I'm "in" the hospital. Problem solved. At least I didn't go to a different emergency room, then they would have wondered why I was at the wrong hospital.
So I was driving to Community Health for TB and Drug tests when I was struck with extreme chest pain. I suppose I was lucky that I at the hospital anyway. I drove toward the emergency room and saw the Chest Pain entrance. I was in so much pain that I thought I might have been halucinating the sign. I was not, and moments after walking in, a team of nurses went to work.
In response to my last post Mike McGee, co-creator of El Gorgo tweeted: “Oh man, you guys, @ewzzy made the best thing: El Gorgo Vs. Eddie Devil!!” Little did he know I was working on this. Expect formulas for these guys posted in the near future so you can recreate them in your own FPWR games. You all have FPWR right?
I just started playing Minecraft for the first time. It is one of the best games ever. I’ve built a quaint home on a hill (now used as a quarry) and an epic castle. Nothing I’ve done compares to the REALLY EPIC works available online, but I can’t help posting my own little creations.
Joanna and I hit up Birdy's to see the Quest for Glory Tour! Here are the pictures I took, Joanna will be posting her much better ones soon.
We gave the girls a bottle of Jose Cuervo as a thank you gift for coming to Indianapolis. Making friends with three of my favorite musicians made tonight one of the best nights ever.
A month ago I started a new life of healthy living through daily exercise and better eating. The results have been largely positive.
You don't get to see the first 10 lbs I lost because I hadn't had proper measurements but the starting spot would have been ~310lbs. That is to say, I've lost 20 pounds in the last month. It's a step in the right direction, but I've still got a long way to go.
I didn't discuss this on the EwzHealth site, but I have a big problem setting goals for this. Mostly because the publicly supported method for deciding ideal body weight, the Body Mass Index, it bullshit. No, itreallyis. [NSFW links]
You see the Body Mass Index or BMI was never meant to be used for what it's used for today and it shows. When I started my plan I was ~310 which is a 44.5 on the BMI scale. That's obese. 20 lbs less at 291 and I'm at 41.7 which is still obese. That's fine. I know I tip the scales and that 20 isn't all that much at my current size. But here's the thing: to be "Overweight" and not "Obese" I would need to get under 30 on the BMI scale. To reach that I'd need to lose a total of 100lbs. Doing that might kill me. (no really it wouldn't be healthy to lose that much) The next big hurdle would be get out of "Overweight" and in to "Normal Weight" which is between 18.5–24.9 on the BMI scale. I would need to lose another 50 lbs to be at my "Ideal Weight" by BMI standards.
The end result of that would be me (at 5'10") weighing 150lbs. I would be half my starting weight and it would incredibly unhealthy to make that big a change. In fact it might not be possible to do without outright starving myself. The amount of work it would take to lose that much weight would lead to muscle mass which the BMI scale doesn't take into account. That is why my current goal is to reach 240. It's a great number to be at (it's on my driver's license) even though it counts as "Obese".
No it’s not a video game. That’s the name of the tour coming to Indianapolis that I am SO hyped for.
I have a mad crush on Allison Weiss and the fact that she’s coming to Indy has me freaking out. By freaking out I mean blogging. My emotional scale might not be set right. Nonetheless you should be excited too because if you are my friend you’ll want to be there. I’m not kidding. I paid real money for Allison and Bess’ albums. Do you know how rare that is?
On the second day of Random Action Extras weekend I present to you first a rap song written and performed by our actor and sound guy, Nic Belmonte.
Isn’t that amazing? Our composer was none to pleased about getting the Puff Daddy treatment but it’s something I’ll always have over Nic.
Finally we’ve got the Random Action collection Trailer that aired before the showing of Without Troy. My good friend Matt O’Neal cut it together for us. He’s a talented guy and really captured the series well.
It’s Random Action Extras Weekend so let’s get nuts. This was one of the original promised extras for the RAEP5 DVD that never got finished at the time. I finally got around to it this week. ENJOY!
Ah, but this isn’t the first fight choreography video I made. The last one was just a slideshow which just doesn’t earn the love that the above video deserves.
At this point in my life I get as much joy out of watching the choreography as I do the fight in the finished film.
I made a final cameo as Weezy in this Random Acts video. Yes I’m ghostriding the whip. Sorry the video is LQ. I didn’t shoot this so I don’t have the HD video it was originally shot in.
I wrote the first and second appearances of Crazy Weezy but this one I took a really hands off approach. The reason for that? I wasn’t in Random Acts at the time. I had moved on to new projects but I kept getting pulled back in for guest spots. I don’t have a lot to say about this. Un-fun fact: I dented my car by slamming myself against it in one scene. Yeop.
I thought I was done with Crazy Weezy but as the most successful character to come out of Random Acts eventually I would be pulled back in. It turns out that Crazy Weezy is just me plus 5 espresso shots. Those were real by the way. It takes quite a bit of caffeine to actually get me going that sure did it. Those reactions were only slightly exaggerated. The real problem? That wasn’t the only take. We did a practice one that I didn’t know was a practice so I did the a shot without the camera rolling and had to refill.
It’s Crazy Weezy Week here and that means starting here. This was the first sketch to use my character of Crazy Weezy and our first sketch to use all of RA on set. Turns out that makes it the most error prone sketch ever. You can assume the reason that booms are in all the shots, crew are in reflections, shots are overblown, and every other problem is because we wanted it to look like a bad used car commercial. Too bad that ain’t true. Coolest feature? That car was in the 2 Fast 2 Furious. That’s what makes this the most requested video Random Acts ever did.
You’ll really want to watch this one in HD. 720p probably. 1080p starts to show the flaws too well.
This was a great undertaking for us at the time, like nothing we had ever done before. In HD no less! All of the other episodes were shot in a day but this one was shot over a month. Our crew was much larger, in that we had one. I’m particularly proud of our transition to color. Scene to scene we used color to create mood which was a lot of fun to engineer in post.
The fight scenes were a lot of fun to choreograph. You can even watch a slideshow of photos taken during our practice sessions.
The actual shooting was… interesting. There were injuries and interruptions around every corner. Tom gut hit in the head with a sword. “Gospel Fest” was in the next room while we shot the first fight. Somebody called the cops on us while we shot the last sign. I busted my ankle scrambling to the door to greet the cops on the roof.
I wasn’t there the day the basement scene was shot. I would have stopped Jeff from looking like he was molesting Tom after he gets shot.
The Roof scene is my favorite part and I hope yours too. Suprisingly, it was the easiest to shoot as well. Jeff and Steve has such great chemistry that there’s no way it could have gone wrong. Such great chemistry that some of the fighting is real. Brothers.
We weren’t sure how the fall from the roof would work till the editing stage. We shot it a few ways and none looked good. We had a plan to take a cheaper camera and rigging it to a balloon/parachute to drop off the roof for a perfect shot of the fall but it didn’t come to be. I still think it could have worked but I have my detractors.
All available for download on my Freedom Force site. Yes, Freedom Force, the only game that lets you play as Axe Cop, Dr McNinja, and then combine them.
There was a yearlong break between the release of ep3 and ep4, despite us having shot it just a week later.
Tom, Jeff and myself drove to West Lafayette to shoot on the Purdue campus with my friend Jarrod. He worked with me on most of my stuff from high school. In this case he plays El Oso.
We were forced to use a MUCH worse camera than we used on our other episodes and we shot after dark resulting in near unwatchable footage. I had a rough cut ready a week after we shot it but I couldn’t bring myself to release it.
The next year I had an assignment to do an open ended video project so I finished my cut and synced it to the Raveonettes and turned it in. At that point our parent series Random Acts had started a new season with a new title style so we adopted it resulting in a new color scheme.
I still have the footage for a secret non-cannon ending that has an old flame of Jeff’s save his life. She was played by Jeff’s girlfriend at the time. At the time the script was written at least. They broke up days before we shot it. The footage is so… so bad.
When we shot Episode 5 we changed the ending so that it’s Marlowe who saves Jeff. I still regret there being no women in the series but at least they were behind the scenes for episode 5.
My good friend Tom Otero thinks this is the best thing we’ve ever done. It is the first time we used any literary devices in out story. It’s amazing how much a framing sequence to make a story seem so much more interesting.
This is my only on screen appearance in the Random Action series. Adam Rickabus survives this video to return as High Pockets in the finale.
When I first came up with the concept for Random Action, I didn’t know about Jeff Brown but I was friends with his brother Steve. When I found out he had a twin who would act for me every changed.
That hubcap is hanging in my room in my Mom’s house.
My glasses really broke on set so we had them fall off toward the camera. Lots of quick compromises were made to make this happen. I wish I still had the gumption to do that on all my projects.
Music is by Scott H Biram. He is a badass.
We bought a mattress at the Salvation Army to make landings easier. $24.
After avoiding the NERF aspect in Episode 2 we really embraced it here with the NERF shotgun.
At the 2:40 mark you can see Tom’s shadow fall across the actors when the camera spins. He feels he can never atone for this sin. I’m still upset about him hitting my knee on the one good drive away shot.
Tom ran the camera for all of this episode and it really shows. He’s fantastic at getting really dynamic shots. I have an old joke about telling which one of us was holding the camera in a given shot. If it’s a low angle shot Tom did it. (He’s short)
Steve speaks enough Spanish to correct my awful bit of writing at the end. Thank god.
If you read my last post you now know more about Random Action that some of the people who were in it. You may ask yourself, what else could possibly be known about a series of student action movies? You may ask yourself, how did I get here? Well prepare to find out.
The most important thing for you to know is that our poor attempt to shoe-horn in plot weighs heavily on us to this day. We’re still working on making a coherent storyline long after the series is done.
So real the reason we shot in high contrast B&W is because we didn’t know how to white balance or get good contrast on the school’s camera. The Sin City motif didn’t was just a great excuse.
The sword sounds were recorded in my dorm room by myself. I used a cheap hammer and a piece of metal. This was surprisingly effective.
That is my robe that Jeff is wearing. Well, it was mine. I gave it to him as a gift at the premiere of episode 5.
You can see the bending of our plastic swords in several shots. We shot in order so it get’s worse as the video goes on. During the battle on the steps, Jeff is holding the blade so as to keep it from breaking off.
We’ve talked to people who do actual sword fight choreography. I’d like to take this moment to apologize to them again.
Finally, the last shot of Jeff getting hit by my truck is based on one of Robert Rodriguez’s 10-Minute Film School videos. The trick is to have the victim lay on top of the car and roll down onto the windshield. Brilliant right?
I’m trying something new. New for me. I’m taking control of my health and I’m going to posting about it to keep myself in line. I won’t be clogging up my site or my twitter but rather I’m starting up a new twitter account @EwzHealth where I will be tweeting my weight every day. This will help me keep motivated to lose those lbs. BUT it will only work if you follow me and show support, so please follow me on twitter or if that isn’t your thing keep checking in here and follow my posts on the right sidebar.
I just got a new computer and as such I’ve been able to do a lot more with video compression and finally put my old videos online in HQ. As such I’m going to upload them here with commentary. These certainly don’t exemplify what I’m capable of today, but it should be fun to see what crazy crap I made going back all the way to high school. We’ll start off with my baby the Random Action series.
A loose history of the Random Action series is this: In January of 2006 I read Penny Arcade’s Official NERF Rules of Engagement. The middle panel, which takes the absurdity of NERF guns and mashes it up with overdramatic noir style stayed with me. The April before, Sin City, hit theaters and as a big comic nerd I was hooked. That led to the Sin City style open for the 2nd season of Random Acts. Random Acts was a sketch comedy group that I was a founding member of at Butler University. Tired of doing just comedy my friend and oft-times business partner, Tom Otero, and I decided to do an action piece. I remembered an idea I had come up with the year before that would have featured future Without Troy star Kent Livingston. Kent was out and our new friend Jeff Brown was in. The title, naturally, would be a pun based off of our parent series.
The shooting of the first episode took about an hour. Right behind the camera people were walking to class so all of the voices were re-recorded later. Eric Weiher made his sole appearance as our ninja kidnapper. He’s a much better actor than what you see here. My co-director Tom makes an appearance at the end as the eventually named, Marlowe. Marlowe would grow to be possibly the most compelling character in the series due in no small part to Tom’s performance.
Music is by the amazing Tomas Diablo. He kindly gave us permission to use his music and I can’t thank him enough for that.
The Random Action series grew out a lot from here. It’s incredible how much it’s changed.
This was actually my first show at the Vogue. It’s a cool place.
The music was great. The opening band, Blue Moon Revue, deserves much love. We chatted briefly after the show. Check them out. I’m breaking my no linking to MySpace rule for these guys.
Robert Randolph was amazing. Seriously great. My only problem was the crowd around me. One girl was angry at another girl for dancing too much and so she poured beer on her back. Some people just want to cause trouble.
The real highlight of the night was Joanna getting on stage. Seriously. So. Cool.
I am so pumped about this. I’ve been saving up for a new computer for work purposes. My laptop wasn’t exactly high end when I bought it and couldn’t handle exporting large projects from Indesign. My new Dell Studio XPS? Unstoppable. It’s name is Balder.
One little problem. The dang thing didn’t come with an OS! I promise I ordered one. This wasn’t a decision I made. Seriously check out this completely clean partition table:
That is an empty terabyte you’re seeing. After some wrangling I got Windows 7 installed on it and I love it.
Demon in a Bottle is probably Iron Man's most famous storyline so it's only natural Marvel would want to pay tribute to it with their next line of variant covers. Last time it was Zombies, this time we get vampires. I would normally be skeptical of the idea, but using the non-reflection of vampires as the gimmick for the cover is brilliant. Kudos to Salvadore Larroca for his genius tribute cover to Invincible Iron Man #31.
I’m sure that I posted this before but I’m now convinced that this image is the greatest picture I’ve ever taken. Here’s the story: I was spending a lovely day on the Santa Monica Pier when two children walked up to the fence in front of the flying trapeze. They were both wearing capes. Capes! These children wear ready to fly. I wish I was better equipped to capture the moment but my camera phone did its best. Liberal use of Photoshop has enhanced the photo to printable quality.
I went out to the Pokemon National Championships at the convention center because this is what I've wanted since I was 10. I wish I entered in the tournament. I'd be in the senior division along with everyone else over 13. I feel so old and yet so young.
Meet Mantra.
An eternal warrior named Lukasz was reincarnated, to his shock, into the body of a woman, Eden Blake. In addition to being forced to deal with life as a woman, Lukasz also faces the particular challenges of Eden's life — in particular, her two children and her ex-husband. For the first time, Lukasz confronts the fact that for 1500 years he had been destroying families by stealing men's bodies and forcing them to walk away from their lives. He fell in love with her soul, which still existed within him.
Skin includes mesh and keyframes with credit given to original authors in the readme.txt file. Skin and mesh enhanced to work in Freedom Force vs The Third Reich. Skin released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.
Eddie Devil has been described as the Jimmy Olsen to El Gorgo's Superman. That is, if Jimmy Olsen was a luchadore who double fists cigs and a coffee to get ready to fight mermen. Actually given the wonders of silver age Jimmy Olsen... that's possible.
Skin includes mesh and keyframes with credit given to original authors in the readme.txt file. Skin and mesh enhanced to work in Freedom Force vs The Third Reich. Skin released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.
I’ve been a fan of Chris Sims’ work for while now. Check out his Invincible Super Blog to see why. He’s started writing a few comics at Action Age Comics and they’re pretty much universally great. I’ve been working on a concept for a comic of my own but the biggest snag is I need an artist to draw it. Sadly my Photoshop skillz stop where drawing begins. I tell you this because you can read Woman of A.C.T.I.O.N. for free online right now.
Skin includes mesh and keyframes with credit given to original authors in the readme.txt file. Skin and mesh enhanced to work in Freedom Force vs The Third Reich. Skin released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.
I created an unnecessarily long treatise on textures and compression in Freedom Force. You can read it here on my Freedom Force sub-site. I did this because I wanted to know how best to get my skins out to the people who so desperately crave them, (3 people tops) but I am so dedicated to those few that I struggle with how to better please them. They where not however my core reason for doing this. This is:
It may not be immediately obvious but what I’m getting at is that Minute Man, the main character, has gotten worse looking between the games. The problem is that all the textures in FF1 where at 256 pixels while FFV3R were at 512 pixels. The original characters weren’t upscaled for the sequel but they were compressed in the change to DDS from TGA. I ran the texture from FF1 through a professional level upscaler to 1024px and then compressed to DDS. This is what should have been done when FFV3R from the beginning.
The marvelous Mike McGee and the tangible(?) Tamas Jakab are the creators of the impossibly amazing webcomic El Gorgo! I unleashed a teaser image of my El Gorgo skin on Twitter a few days ago and these kind gents followed me. I wasn't even following them yet! (my secret shame) I continued my work on El Gorgo and posted it to the Freedom Reborn Forums and then debuted Axe Cop. Not long after I posted my my teasers of Eddie Devil I found that Mike McGee had tweeted about it. I had yet to tweet about it myself! This level of connection between artists and fans (becoming mutual fans even) is why I love living in the future.
Skin includes mesh and keyframes with credit given to original authors in the readme.txt file. Skin and mesh enhanced to work in Freedom Force vs The Third Reich. Skin released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.
I just jumped back in to doing Freedom Force skins. It’s hard to believe the original is almost a decade old. Here’s everyone’s favorite homicidal officer with the mind of a six year old: Axe Cop. If you aren’t reading Axe Cop you should be ashamed. It’s free on the web at AxeCop.com so go there now!
Skin includes mesh and keyframes with credit given to original authors in the readme.txt file. Skin and mesh enhanced to work in Freedom Force vs The Third Reich. Skin released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.
My boss sent me out to our medicinal herb garden to take some pictures to use for an in-house display. I figured they weren’t half bad, so I thought I’d share :)
You might know this plant as clover! It’s actually the current background on my computer. I made use of the Macros function, and I’m pretty proud of how my camera performed :)
This bee is hanging out on a Purple Coneflower. This plant (Echinacea) is used for cold and flu symptoms.
Yes, Dracula. From Konami Krazy Racers another Mario Kart clone. It’s a good one though. This is Dracula from Castlevania driving a Go Kart! That is mind blowing.
Yes, I put together a Crash Bandicoot vehicle. The sprites are pulled from Crash Bandicoot: Nitro Kart a generally awful Mario Kart clone for the GBA. If you thought this was a surprise wait till Friday.
Bowser involved a lot of ‘shopping up before he would look good on the Nuvi. The original sprite was so faded and ill-colored that it need significant alterations. But hey, that’s what I do.
