Find the clues in the widget - the more it’s downloaded and played, the more clues appear!

Avatar returns, The Prisoner is in the works, and there’s something strange going on around The Fringe. It’s a quick look at the fannish TV news.

IN THE WORKS
AMC is developing an American version of the cult British classic The Prisoner. Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen are slated to star in the series about a government agent who finds out the hard way that there’s no quitting the biz. He’s drugged, kidnapped and dropped in “The Village,” a mysterious community where people are just numbers and from which there is no escape.  The original was known for its perplexing plot and highly metaphoric imagery, a style that is much more popular today in TV. I expect the new series will be highly ficable!

CASTING COUCH

Clea DuVall is taking over co-pilot duties on Ronald D. Moore’s Virtuality.

WATCH THIS

Calling all Avatar: the Last Airbender fans! The last 10 new episodes of book three, including the showdown between Aang and the Firelord, are about to begin.  Read more »

Welcome to the first edition of TV Talk, a round up of TV news for all your favorite fandoms. So let’s get started.

WATCH THIS

If you haven’t been watching The Middleman, you must! Don’t let the fact that it’s on ABC Family fool you. It’s witty and fun - kind of Austin Powers meets The X-Files and every episode is a pop culture trivia game. Check it out Mondays at 8:00 on ABC Family.

Start your jumpers, Stargate Atlantis returns for a fifth season starting on July 11. It begins with the exciting “Search and Rescue” effort for Teyla and her unborn baby and it’s a non-stop action-palooza with the promise of much more to come. I can’t wait.

CASTING COUCH

Supernatural’s Eric Kripke told TV Guide that Katie Cassidy (Ruby) was being let go due to budget cuts. Months ago, Lauren Cohan (Bela) was also released so we’re back to square one. Spoilers for the season opener include two new characters and rumor has it that both of them may become recurring.

In a related note, Cassidy is said to be appearing in Chris Carter’s “secret movie” Fencewalker. Yes, the X-Files guru is keeping quiet about the project which may, or may not be shooting right this second in Los Angeles, somewhere. . .

Read more »

And now, for our second first of the day, we bring you the world premiere of a video created by the lovely folks over at FanLib Studios - but first (the second first…of this sentence), a foreword from director and co-creator Chandler Evans:

Moving at the speed of millimeters (mmph), we are proud to present FanLib Studio’s World premiere of SPACE (spah-chay). SPACE chronicles the moon misadventures of the first lunar pioneers. These are the stories NASA doesn’t want you to know about.

SPACE’s stop motion took 3 days to shoot on a SLR Olympus E-1, 50-200mm lens with +1-2 diopters (F16-22) and we averaged about 10 seconds a day (slooooooowwwwwww, hopefully we’ll go faster if we make future eps). To animate we shot 12fps, but doubled all the frames to output at 24fps. All Legos are original Space Classic sets from 1978.

Enjoy!

It’s Thursday and everyone knows what that means! Git yer contest hats on. A bunch of fun stuff this week to get involved with. As always there’s a bunch of Twilight Contests - you Twilight fans are so active - plus, make your own FanLib Fortune Cookies. Cool Huh?

Member contests open for submissions:

Read more »

Guest blogger Dee Doyle returns for yet another Fandom 411.

My first introduction to The Incredible Hulk was in the comic book store my parent’s owned, but it became more of an interest due to the 1996 animated TV series on UPN. The creators were no doubt trying to compete with Fox for the popular opinion of the fans that enjoyed the X-Men and Spider-Man animated shows in the 1990s. The Hulk is about the inner darkness of the human heart and, while personal demons are usually kept inside, Bruce Banner’s demon is there for everyone to see. And he’s green! The Hulk was created in 1962 by the amazing team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who also created such popular teams as the X-Men and the Fantastic Four. While the comic had some difficulty gaining attention at first, the Hulk was used as a guest star in several other comic books until a small fan community started to gather, especially in the college age bracket. Originally, the Hulk was gray and he transformed back into Banner during dawn, but in modern comics he transforms due to emotion or triggers and is that glorious shade of emerald.

Dr. Bruce Banner is a mild mannered scientist who designs a gamma bomb for the government. He saves a teenager named Rick Jones who stumbles onto the testing grounds and ends up being caught in the explosion himself. The radiation causes him to turn into the savage beast named the Hulk whenever he loses control. The Hulk is a creature of quick anger and violence, but he is able to think enough to form full sentences and refers to himself in the third person. Banner is pursued by the US government because of the damage and devastation he causes as the Hulk. His long suffering girlfriend, Betty Ross (who eventually becomes his wife and adopts his last name) is often used as bait to draw him out and is capable of calming even the Hulk with her presence. Her father, General Thaddeus Ross is the main force behind the armed forces trying to capture the Hulk, much to Betty’s dismay. The teenager Banner saved, Rick Jones, remains with the Hulk as his friend and sidekick. The major villains in the series are the Abomination and the Leader, both of whom are also radioactive, super dangerous monsters.
Read more »

Finally, it’s final the part after all and we look at what Mike Dow is a fan of - and believe you me, he’s a fan extraordinaire.

Me: Now, the fannish questions. What are you a fan of? And what have you been a fan of in the past?

Dow: I have very crazy…not crazy - eclectic - tastes. I’m a huge movie and TV fan, so if you look at my DVDs I have new wave Italian cinema films next to the Three’s Company third season boxed set, and I have the old Battlestar Galactica complete TV series and the new Galactica. I would say Three’s Company, when it comes to sitcoms, is my favorite. I mean, Seinfeld is everybody’s favorite, but… I’m dorkily into Three’s Company. Huge Star Wars fan in my younger days - not so much now, but definitely many, many presents were given to me that were Star Wars related. I can pretty much kill anyone in Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. When I play it usually lasts one roll if I get to go first. I can get all six wedges and get in the center and win before the other person gets to go, which is usually the goal. And that’s true.

Let’s see, what am I a fan of recently? Definitely Battlestar Galactica, I love that show. Sopranos - huge fan of. I’m a big, big 30 Rock fan and I like to boast my credentials as someone who watched it from the pilot and has watched every aired episode. I wasn’t a late adopter, didn’t give up on it. That’s one of those shows I tend to be a little bit of a - I don’t think there’s a word for it - a fan snob? We need to come up with a word [for] when you really love something that not a lot of people are aware of and then everyone becomes a big fan of it and then you’re kind of bummed that everyone likes it now and it’s not your own little niche of people. I kind of feel that.

Me: (laughing) I think that’s called being elitist.

Dow: Maybe it is being elitist. It’s not elitist, it’s almost like it’s your little thing. It’s almost like when you have a dog and he only listens to you and then you get five roommates and now the dog loves everyone and you’ve kind of lost that exclusive dog love. I kind of feel that way with TV shows. I like that everyone loves 30 Rock now because it means it will stay on the air, but I loved being the only one who knew what I was talking about. I would go to a party, and be like, “Have you seen the 30 Rock where they made the GI Joe Sigma Six joke?” and no one knew what I was saying. I kind of dig that. Those are the things I’m a fan of. There’s got to be a term for that - it’s its own feeling.
Read more »

It wasn’t as big as “Who shot JR?” but still, David Lynch created quite a stir when he posed the question, “Who killed Laura Palmer?”

Twin Peaks was a serialized drama/mystery that would fit in better in today’s TV landscape than it did in 1990 when it premiered. On the surface, it was a show about a detective (Kyle MacLachlan) looking for answers in the death of a young woman. But underneath there was an intriguing cast of crazies all coming together to form one of the most twisted plots ever written for television. A critical darling, it also became a fannish favorite and it wasn’t long before references to the series began seeping into pop culture.

Secret diaries, The Log Lady, suicides, murders, ghosts and psychics - if you like your mysteries on the paranormal side, Twin Peaks is made to suit. And now you can watch full episodes at Fancast and have your questions about the show answered by series star Lara Flynn Boyle.

Lara will be blogging at Fancast for a week starting Monday, June 16. It’ll be your chance to have all of your burning Twin Peaks questions answered - and given the complexity of this series, I imagine fans will have a lot to ask.

If you’re a fan of X-Files, American Gothic or even Lost, you’ll love Twin Peaks.

Now that you know how Dow does the voodoo that he do, let’s learn what the affects of making a viral video that gets seen by millions can be.

Me: How many views has “10 Things I Hate About Commandments” had, and what’s it’s history, online-wise?

Dow: I’ve honestly lost track a little bit of how many views it gets or has gotten. It’s really hard to know. There was a time when I would whip out a calculator and try to add them all up because, in the Internet world, views are kind of equivalent to box office grosses with movies. You know, if you make 40 million dollars in your first weekend with a movie then it’s a big hit and everyone’s so excited for it, and if you get millions of views with your video, it gives you a certain sudden legitimacy for one reason or another. So, the views have always been really important. I would say about six months ago I added everything up and it was somewhere around four million for all of them, for the three trailers. The MTV views I don’t know, they track that on their own, but I was told the “Laguna Beach: Summer of Stupid” trailer was over a million views at some point. So it’s well into the millions, which is, for me, the most satisfying part.

Laguna Beach - Summer of Stupid

I just love that people love to watch these things. It’s been almost two years now since we did “Ten Things I Hate About Commandments” and it still gets about two thousand hits a day and the main site itself is about to hit two million, which is… I don’t know, it’s just awesome; I love it. It’s a disappointment when they don’t get a lot or don’t get sent around, but it’s just the best when they do get sent around. When we first did it and I put it up, I don’t remember with “Must Love Jaws”, but “Ten Commandments” skyrocketed in the first week in terms of the hits and it was so thrilling. It must be the same feeling when you have a movie and it starts to make money; it must be very exciting. “Must Love Jaws”…had two hundred hits the first couple days and then I sent it to some blogs, people posted it and one morning I woke up and it was at seven thousand. And then the next day it was at fifteen thousand. And it was just amazing how it went, how it multiplied and multiplied. “Ten Things I Hate About Commandments’ was at two hundred thousand in a week, which was just astonishing to me when you think about all the people it takes to forward it from one to the next to get two hundred thousand people to look at it. It’s just really shocking. It’s really exciting and really fun.

Me: So then what happened?
Read more »

Yesterday, we got an introduction to Mike Dow, super creative member of Team FanLib. Today, we learn more about what goes into making a popular viral video. Take it away me and Mike!

Me: What software do you use most? What do you find easiest when making these?

Dow: Final Cut Pro is what I use to edit; pretty much everything I do is on Final Cut Pro. There’s a program called Cinamatize2.0 and that…allows you to take DVD files and turn them into Quicktime movies and Quicktime movies are what you need to edit in Final Cut Pro. So that’s a very necessary part. That’s basically it. I mean some of the other Final Cut Studio programs to do titles and such, but for the most part it’s just getting the files off the DVDs, turning them into Quicktime [movies] to throw them into Final Cut and then just uploading them onto YouTube. It’s really a very a basic operation when it comes to the technical parts.

Me: Are there forums that you use for software info?

Dow: There really are no forums. I did searches in the beginning for how people did things. Getting information off of DVDs can be hard and each DVD presents different problems depending on which studio made it - getting the audio and video in synch, etc. Really I just put in a lot of time – it wasn’t even that much time – researching, putting different search terms into Google when I had a problem. I’d just type in “DVD of Ten Commandments doesn’t work”, or “how to do X, Y, Z,” and I found a couple different people who had put up their information and that was useful. The technical part is really not the hard part.

Me: What is?

Dow: Totally the creative part - having the right idea, knowing which shots to use, creating a story. Even though the things are only maybe a minute and a half long, really by far the hardest part is doing the creative stuff, which is why Ari and I work together. I do all the editing and that’s very creative too and that has a lot of important aspects to it, but in the end there’s no point in even starting to edit one of these things if your idea isn’t really good and your story of how you’re telling it isn’t really solid. For example, when we did the Ten Commandments one, it was really – and this seems funny now when everybody likes it, blah, blah, blah – but in the beginning we really had no idea whether or not anyone would even understand what it was. I literally had no clue, if I showed that to somebody, if they would have any idea what the joke was because we were taking this movie that takes place in the time of Moses and trying to make it a teen movie that came out last year. So the beginning, the first line of [the] voice over is, “At Pharaoh High, Ramses was the biggest player around…” and the decision to put the pyramids in the beginning and call it a high school was a really hard decision to make because we wondered if anyone would understand what Pharaoh High is and do people know that we’re making that joke?
Read more »

Behind the scenes here at FanLib, we’ve got all sorts of interesting, creative people working on the team. One such fella is our Mike Dow, who, along with his creative partner, made the hugely popular viral video, “Ten Things I Hate About Commandments”. We chatted recently about how they made the video, the experience of having a hit, and what he’s a fan of personally.

And now, with no further ado, Part One of my interview with Mike Dow.

Mike Dow: Hi, Ellen.

Me: Hi, Mike Dow.

Dow: How are you?

Me: This is some interview… I’m fine, how have you been?

Dow: I’m good.

Me: Okay, well first, what is 10 Things I Hate About You?

Dow: (laughing) About Commandments or about You?

Me: Either.

Dow: Well, 10 Things I Hate About You is the movie that we copped the title from, but the “10 Things I Hate About Commandments”, I guess it’s a movie trailer mash-up, I guess that’s what people would call it. I don’t really know what it is. I like to just call it a parody of Ten Commandments, that’s basically what I see it as, but it’s a movie trailer mash up I guess.

Me: What does that entail?

Dow: Basically we - me and my creative partner, Ari Eisner - took the movie Ten Commandments and re-edited it into a faux movie trailer with the idea that, instead of making the Ten Commandments about the bible and about Moses, it was more about a teen comedy. So the idea was to kind of “take something that we all know and love and have fun with it by kind of turning it on its head”.

Me: What was the inspiration for that?

Dow: The first mash-up we did was called “Must Love Jaws”, and that was a mash-up of Jaws and turning it into a kind of Free Willy family movie and really the inspiration comes from a bunch of different places. The first thing was that Ari and I have been friends since NYU, we met at film school, in college our freshman year, and we’ve kind of been making fun of people and movies and TV, putting our friends into different types of movie trailers in our heads - taking our friend Steve and putting him into the JFK trailer, because he cheated on a test or something - and we would twist all these movie plots around people. We kept doing that and all through our adult lives we’ve just been doing that, and we kind of got to a point where the technology of digital video editing had caught up to the point where you could actually take movies and edit them and screw around with them at home, add music and do all sorts of stuff. And then we saw The Shining trailer, which is kind of the granddaddy of them all in terms of taking a movie and turning it into a faux movie trailer that has opposite the intent of the original movie, and I called Ari up after I saw that and I said, “Hey, you know what? We could do this. We do this all the time, and I can edit this and I have the stuff so we could actually do one.”
Read more »

One year ago today, hundreds of FanLib members joined forces to help create the largest group project we’ve ever had - a script for an episode of Star Trek. But this was no ordinary script, mind you. These writers had to find a way to incorporate that age old debate, “Kirk vs Picard.”

And thus, KvP was born.

We had some bobs and bobbles along the way (character count, formatting), but the level of enthusiasm kept everyone going strong. In addition to our in-house FanLib cast of characters (myself included), we had three guests who went above and beyond to make the event truly special.

First off, Star Trek writer Andre Bormanis brought his story ideas to the table, crafting the scene scenarios that kicked off each week. Then we had the sterling duo of Wil Wheaton and George Takei filming weekly video recaps and sharing their best Star Trek memories. And who can forget those fabulous line readings by Wil, acting as Ryker, Kirk, Picard and, of course, Wesley Crusher.

And then there were the writers and readers who never gave up, even in the face of a one-star response. They wrote and read and commented and, slowly, a community began to emerge. Everyone wanted to win, but that didn’t stop them from offering up advice and support for their fellow writers.
Read more »

Veronica/Weevil shippers, rejoice!

While I’ve always considered Veronica/Logan to be my Veronica Mars OTP, I was pleased to hear that Francis Capra, known to fans of the late series as Eli “Weevil “ Navarro, will be reunited with ex-co-star Kristen Bell (granted, if only for a scene) in the next season of Heroes.

While I’m sure we’ll have to wait until season three starts to discover what his power will be (though it has been confirmed that he’ll have one), here’s what we do know:

1) Capra’s character, who’ll be featured in a three-episode arc, will be named Jesse and he will definitely be one of the series’ new villains.

2) At some point during the arc, Jesse will have a run-in with hero Peter Petrelli.

Not much info to run with, but I’ll definitely be (im)patiently awaiting the appearance of my second favorite of Ms. Mars’s bad boys; however, I can’t help but wonder – what will his power be? Will we be given the Elle Bishop (Bell’s Heroes persona)/Jesse romantic entanglement that many fans wish had gone down in the Veronica-verse?

In the end, I guess I should thank Tim Kring for giving me yet another reason to get all fan-girly over the next season of Heroes. So…thanks, Tim!

How do you feel about the newest addition to the show’s line-up of goodies and baddies? Is the Kristen/Francis reunion making your week the way it’s made mine?! Discuss!

It’s a day of the prequel! Let’s check out some of the prequel news in “unexpected” places.

Books

A Harry Potter prequel will be auctioned off June 10 by Waterstones book store. The 800 word outline by J.K. Rowling ends with the line “From the prequel I am not working on – but that was fun!” Thirteen other authors are contributing to the auction, with the proceeds going to charity. Man, do I wish I had a couple million to spend! Maybe the buyer will share their prize with the world.

Movies

Unexpected Party Wrap Up: On May 24, Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro were online to answer fannish questions about the upcoming Hobbit movie from fans across the globe. Over 7000 questions were asked, and Peter and Guillermo did their best to answer each one. The two were very informative and frequently a bundle of laughs. When del Toro was asked how he and Jackson met he quipped, “We finished a tray of shrimps together and agreed that NEW LINE should keep hiring round, bearded directors with funny accents…” You can find the entire transcript of the chat online at the WETA fansite.

Gaming

Read more »

Want to become a Dragon Rider? All you have to do is enroll in the Vroengard Academy and you’re on your way.

This new, team-based online game is designed to take you fully into the world of the Inheritance cycle novels by Christopher Paolini. In order to complete the missions online, participants will have to look off-line for clues delivered by the author, as well at participating bookstores. It’s mystery and magic combined with a good old fashioned scavenger hunt and did I mention there are prizes?

Vroengard Academy will last from June 2nd through September 26th, concluding just after the launch of the third book in the Inheritance cycle, Brisingr (on sale at 12:01 a.m. on September 20, 2008). The game will also consist of a weekly sweepstakes, plus a grand prize for one lucky player who will win a trip to meet Christopher Paolini near his home in Montana.

Do you participate in any fannish RPG or other type of online game? Leave a comment and tell us about it.