TWO is slated to be finished within a year. That means it's time to start considering what comes next. Assuming there is another project, I wonder what you'd like to see......
PS You can multi-select.

Let's finish this one first.

And, by the time this ones done, I'll need a vacation.

This would make a great story: Martin goes to Washington. (Wait a minute, he's in Washington...) If he wins, that will change everything that happens here.

My oldest Daughter is feeling better now and she is an amazing story writer I am bugging her to write down one of her many stories as a script and If she is able to finish it I am going to submit that for the next movie. Ken is right it took six months to get things ready for animation for TWO so so should start thinking of next soon! so Animators and continue working.



I hear you Mark but there plenty of time to rest once were died

Although pursuing another story sounds exciting, wouldn't there some significant benefit to reusing the assets from TWO in another Oz storyline? If the purpose of TWO was to learn how to make a movie as a group over the Internet (among many others), wouldn't doing the same thing again with a different story be a little redundant for most? It seems that there is a core group of people contributing to TWO and they might want a little "rest" after all of their hard work. They may not come back for another round of the same basic project of developing a movie from scratch.

It seems to me (in my completely inexperienced mind) that the challenges of using the assets from TWO to create a sequel would be different then the challenges of creating another new movie from scratch. Improving the characters rigging, facial animations, actions, textures etc. would be an education in and of itself; kind of like a movie making advanced class. Not to mention that ability to use known good assets as another testbed to continue improving A:M like Martin has been doing through TWO.

If the desire is to simply make another movie, then go for a new script and new story. If education and A:M improvement is the goal, then stay within the TWO world and make a sequel.

Just my opinion

-Doug

Adapting another of the 13 Oz books is probably the easiest..... Doing something original is the most appealing (to me).

I bet not many people are aware that this movie project started out as a "short". A 22 minute TV series "pilot".

Yeh. You could call it, "T.H.R.E.E.", (The Hash Renderer's Educational Epic).

I agree that Hash should continue to use the TWO assets for community projects and learn from the experience of making this movie to map out how to do it again even better especially if it is going to be promoted more in schools. Next time maybe it would be better to aim for a shorter story. Perhaps have each school write and produce their own 2 to 5 minute short about an adventure in Oz or have them collaborate. The combined efforts could produce some interesting results each year and take students through the whole process writing and producing an animated episode in Oz.

I would think that most of the people who are working on TWO now will want to do their own thing or take a rest.

I sometimes think to myself that the best outcome of TWO would be that there are so many people pissed off at how it didn't turn out the way they wanted that they decide to do one the "right" way and two or three years from now there are five A:M movies being made and not just one.

That's sort of the goal anyway, right? To show it can be done so people will start doing it.

the leader now is "do a short", which is misguided. a large group needs a large project.

a killer short is best made by one crazy, determined individual, or at the most three crazy determined individuals who will still end up hating each other by the end of the project.

a large group working on a small project would quickly implode, or produce a grey goo unworthy of drive space.

-jon

oh, and 'another oz project' is also wrong. ' ' )

every time i look at bill shatner, i see james tiberius kirk.

don't kirk animation master. show some range.

-jon

Is the community growing? If so, perhaps enough to support two (2) projects? - one different and / or more advanced for those who want to move on, and another original feature from scratch for those who haven't had their fill of TWO, or missed out on it altogether. Of course by next year any of us could have a new situation and perspective...

I chose "other"....I liked the idea of the apprentice program that was done before TWO, although I'm not sure any of the productions got finished. Something like that would (in theory) create several (perhaps quite a few) high quality shorts and improve the skills of the participants. As for myself, I've got several personal projects that I'm going to see if I can finish on my own...we'll see if that actually happens.

I can guess Martin wants this production cycle to be completed. And see if this works out financially. This is very important and makes this film crucial. Without money, nothing is funny. (or everything is funny!!)

Making this film doesn't mean anything until it's financially rewarding. This film is not successful (financially) yet. So, first, let us bring our baby to this world and stand him up on his feet, then judge the feedback and critique. That could be the deciding factor for future production planning.

Martin must be expecting this film to be successful not only within this community, but beyond that. Hash A:M community will always buy this film, but that will not mean anything. We are family and regardless of the quality, we will buy TWO. So, to make this run competitively parallel to Shrek and Pixar films we would need some quality bashing at the end. To make this a winner in every front.

TWO can have only two outcome, either Martin will lose money or gain money. Martin is trying his best to ensure the profitability before it's even released. His marketing ideas are solid and well tested. So, we can be sure that the marketing is in good hands. So, if at the end, Martin makes this profitable, there's a good chance that we'll see more productions like this.

Satyajit

You need to start watching Boston Legal. Denny Crane is a lot of fun.

Depends on the size of the group.

A short would have a faster turn-around time. The smaller size of the project would give each member of the group more opportunity to refine, polish and add bits of panache ("plus" in Pixar/Disney slang) to his piece of it.

If the available manpower is large enough, several shorts could be made at the same time.

In this YouTube/Internet video age, shorter pieces are a lot more popular than longer videos.

If the goal is to try to make a movie to make money on DVD sales, maybe the longer project is better.

If the goal is to crank out high quality animation to promote Animation:Master, a plethora of well-made shorts in different genres and styles would appeal to more audience segments. And a DVD full of good shorts could be popular, too.

A key question (which I don't know the answer to): Which get more play at animation festivals? Short films or longer films? What about at independent film festivals?

brain: sorry, i can only handle one fake conservative: steven colbert

satyajit: i'm sure everyone will be happy to get rich from two, but that's only one goal.

-jon

Yes, I agree, but it's an important one. Otherwise there's no reason to make TWO a 75 mins direct-to-DVD film within a span of 4 long years. If promotion is the main goal, shorts could serve the purpose better. But, didn't we have enough already to prove the animation capabilities of A:M?

To an aspiring student (who's still a layman regarding animation skills) a well done feature quality long format movie which made money in the market can mean a lot than short films.

Collection of shorts : That's a nice idea, shorts are festival friendly too.

TWO is a community collaborative filmmaking project. This is something new and productive by every means. It's not about getting rich. It's about giving a reason to all of this. If TWO returns money, we can expect more producers/financers into this. It can be a beautiful way to get ahead.

Satyajit

Well Pixar Has come a long way with there shorts i mean they are all amazing to me!

I think that "getting rich" , or making a living doing what you love has got to be one of the goals--If AM:Films is going to be a production company, not just a hobby.

I agree!

I am not thinking of getting rich so much is being able to make a living but that has alot of different meanings to different people. If we can do this again while being able to be paid enough to do this full time that would be what I would like to see. Doing this again for the sake of it is a hard sell to my wife and family. It's too hard trying to juggle two careers one that pays the bills and the other which gives me so much fulfillment! in learning how to Animate and working with this great group of people! Not that any of what Bob said to me has any meaning now but I signed on to a production company which goals was to make enough money from TWO to fuel the next Project with some of us being full time! I signed on as an Animation apprentice with the hopes that I MIGHT get a chance to be one of those full timers someday. If TWO can not be sold then I learned alot of positive things from this and I will be happy to ad this to one of me positive life experiences but to sign on again for another 3 years as a hobby?

Mark, I also agree with everything you are saying.
Only by being able to at least afford a humble (maybe even only parttime) living by doing this, there will be a continuity possible for the ones participating. (OOps, hope I could make myself clear?)
Otherwise its the priceless learningexpirience.
But I think the chances for selling this movie when it will be finished are clearly there.

;>) Jake

Hey,

I voted on making an original movie, i am a writer and would gladly volunteer my script that im working on right now or anything else i write. I think that thats the best way to go.

Geoff

Sounds interesting. You should shoot Martin an email in case he doesn't see your post. Who knows what could happen.

ok i will talk to Martin

Doug has a good point. Those of us who have spent so much of their time working on TWO, creating from scratch, would I'm sure want to see as much longevity to their work as possible. An Oz sequel would be much quicker to finish, because a lot of material is already created. Besides, the land of Oz can be taken anywhere in a whim of imagination.

Why don't we take a chapter(s) from Alice in Wonderland and run with it?? ..The Mad Tea Party, The Queen's Croquet Party, Alice's Evidence...

They are all short, sweet, well-known and popular. Unless that is the copyright got in the way. those are a pain to work with, especailly when they charge for the rights.

But we can do something similar.

We could make another glorious, surreal film, albeit a shorter one. Or we could do one a bit more hardcore, like Equilibrium or the Matrix

A number of classic science fiction short stories are suited to this medium. To name a few:

"A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum
"Surface Tension" by James Blish
"Microcosmic God" by Theodore Sturgeon
"Tenderfoot in Space" by Robert A. Heinlein

Or for another full length feature, Hal Clement's novel Mission of Gravity.

I'd vote for any of those.

Yup, that does make sense. Reminds me of other animated sequels where they impove on the characters, the look of the water, hair, etc.

>Doug has a good point.


Yup, that does make sense. Reminds me of other animated sequels where they impove on the characters, the look of the water, hair, etc.


<I think the same now, so I made a mistake in that poll.

One idea I've always thought would be neat would be to take an Old Time Radio program and animate it. All your audio is already there and most of them are now in the public domain. You could take your pick of subject matter: comedy, drama, noir, sci-fi, western, children's stories, etc.

That sounds interesting can you give us a more detailed layout on how this would look. Would this be like a 20 minutes to 30 minute radio show not sure how long they were and would the set be the radio studio and we just animate the voice actors talking into there mics. There would be oportunities for alot of expersion as we can have them hamming it up and we could have some cut scences of sets and charaters in the story setting acting out parts of the story with the voice actors voices then back to studio and then have some tech at radio controls maybe the star actor is trying to pickup some coffee serving lady for some comedy?

Hum maybe a quick story boarding is in order maybe the "war of the world"?

I like that idea alot. Most of those old shows come with voice acting and sound special effects. Did you find any that are in public domain? Are they on the web?

http://www.radiolovers.com/


Here's one for starters. Some old time radio. What a great idea.

Mark, OTR has been called "Theater of the Mind." Many of the programs told incredible stories that you saw in your head. I can't even begin to imagine how many stories there would be to pick from.... tens or hundreds of thousands? Like I said, you could pick the genre and it would be like having your soundtrack for the movie already produced.

Program length varies. Most of the program types we think of with television came from OTR. Even many television programs were just TV versions of the original radio program (like Gunsmoke and Dragnet).

Some of the great sitcoms like "The Great Gildersleeve" would involve multiple sets and great characters.

It's sad really that so much of these are forgotten and lost. Sure, some of them seem a little corny now, but many of them are still very funny and I know personally that the destruction of the planet Krypton in the first episode of the Superman radio program is by far the most vivid and amazing one I've ever seen, because what I saw in my head was beyond what any special effects movie has ever done.

That would be the #1 argument for not making a movie from a radio soundtrack, right?

Good radio drama worked to make the visual unnecessary.

Make a movie where the visual is your starting point.

At any rate, I think the subject of the next A:M movie has already been chosen.

But with A:M, you can do whatever you see in your head, right?
Many programs were serialized, so you could find stories of various length.

One of the requirements that Martin set when he first came up with the idea of a Hash movie project was that he couldn't afford to buy the film rights for a copyrighted novel, so he only wanted to adapt works in the public domain. That's why he ended up settling for Oz.

At the time, I suggested Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but it'd require a lot of ocean wave effects.

I wouldn't agree. Great radio invoked great visuals. Humans are immensely visual. We fill in visuals whenever they are not present. We can be talking to a stranger on the phone and we'll try to imagine what that person looks like. Radio wouldn't have worked otherwise. I've never read a book without visualizing the characters and the situations and I've never judged it as whether it worked without having pictures, but rather by what sort of pictures it created in my mind.

my point is the radio soundtrack is already a complete work. It doesn't need us to add visuals. Our visuals will never be as good as what a radio listener imagined.

And radio drama has a convention that is absurd on screen... the characters spend a lot of time describing what they are seeing and doing even when everyone in the scene would be aware of it already.

TWO has some of that trouble, inherited from the book perhaps:

They're standing looking a huge castle, which we see too, and still Woot has to say "that's the biggest castle I ever saw"

Remember how Chuck Jones complained about post-Golden age limited animation? "Illustrated Radio" he called it. It's a show you don't have to watch.

Why would you want to go thru the enormous effort of animating something that no one needs to look at?

Before animating a radio show, the assumption is that it will be edited for a movie. Things like "that's the biggest castle I ever saw" would be replaced with visuals only. The radio shows that I was imagining would use sound effects (seagulls, waves slapping against the beach) to indicate the location rather than a narrative by the actor.

And yet somehow... they stay in.

I don't agree with your example Robert. The line "That's the biggest castle I ever saw" does at least give us some insight into the past experience of Woot. However if the line were "That castle is as high as the clouds!" I would agree. And I agree there are some areas in the script that exhibit this problem.

All valid points, but the same could be argued for any kind of adaptation.

Here's why I think it would be worthwhile to animate a really good radio program (academic, of course, since the decision's already been made):

1) Audiences today (especially young people) are probably never going to expose themselves to some of the great works of entertainment that radio programs provided. They would be more likely to watch an animated radio program. As a lover of OTR, I personally, would love to see people get enjoyment out of it.

2) As powerfully important is the performance of the animator, the voice acting can be equally as important. OTR offers up the greatest voice actors who ever worked performing in a medium that required them to truly act with their voices. How amazingly inspiring would it be to an animator to get to animate a performance by such a talent. Let's not forget that Mel Blanc and June Foray and their ilk came from radio.

3) Chuck Jones' complaint wasn't so much about the quality of the voice work as it was about the animation (or lack of specifically). There would be opportunities for some amazing character animation and all sorts of business around some of these programs. Myself, I'm partial to comedy, so my thoughts are about how truly funny you could make these. Sight gags could be added to the sound gags and something unique made because of it.

4) Yes, there are some shortcomings in the fact that the material wasn't originally written or produced for animation. There are times when weaker radio writers gave in to describing the actions in a less than normal sounding way. There were, however, some really good writers who found away around it. A bad writer might have a character tell another character, "I'm going over to this desk and hiding the gun in this drawer." A good writer would have the other person say, "Do you really think the best place to hide that gun is in the desk drawer?" You would hopefully pick an episode of a program that was written well and particularly lent itself to the translation.

But to a degree, especially if there's some tongue in cheek or comedy, this can be made part of the humor of it. The same with the fact that anything that would have been contemporary then is now a period piece. The viewer would be in on the joke.

5) The wealth of diversity in programs to pick from is a big plus. How neat would it be to be able to do a sort of anthology picture with three different programs handled three different ways in the animation? A comedy, a detective story, a classic sci-fi or horror tale.


Ideally, is this the very best idea for an animated film? No and for all of the reasons you've mentioned. But I don't think it's a bad idea and there's some real plusses that it would bring.

Like I said originally, I just thought it was a neat idea. :-)

It's a good neat idea. I listened to a few of the shows and I can see the characters doing the actions. What fun that would be to animate to. Also I think it would be great to have a dialog in the box (bar editing).

However, I think I would prefer to create something new.....these radio shows exist already and I think a movie made to them would have a "cheapened" feel for an audience.....who might get better visuals if they go online and listen to the shows without our restricted vision of how it "should be".

Add to that, if we used these audios, we wouldn't be using Roberts voice! That would be a shame.

In saying all that, I would urge you to look for your "best shot" and ask Martin to listen to it.

The original premise presented here was to take a radio play already recorded and animate to fit it. That's what I'm arguing against. I'm not saying that radio is bad or that voice actors are bad or that good stories are bad. I'm saying that taking something that was made to not need a picture at all and then add pictures to it would be a non-ideal target for your efforts.

If you plan to ADAPT a story from radio to the screen, that's valid. There will be lots of adapting to do however. There won't be much left of the original if you make a good screen treatment.

Well, at least we both agree it wouldn't be ideal. :-)

Just a footnote, if anybody's interested in checking out old time radio, here's a site with over 12,000 episodes available to listen to for free:

otr.net

A while ago I thought it might be neat to use something from here:

http://www.kiddierecords.com/

as a soundtrack, but I wasn't sure what the copyright is.

that's one I've been listening to. I was listening to a Jack Benny episode last night. There was a scene where Rochester is playing craps with the porters on a train. (!) I was impressed that they found a humorous way for him to verbally suggest that he was kneeling on the floor to throw the dice. But it reminded me that radio writing is not like movie writing.

Why do people have to kneel on the floor to play craps, anyway?

Another show I've tried listening to is "Jack Armstrong the All American boy". Every episode starts out with a long, long wheaties commercial and then the actors race thru their lines like they have 30 minutes of script to cover in 10 minutes.

BTW, "Jonny Quest" was originally pitched as a Jack Armstrong adaptation, but the owners wouldn't go for it.

Orson Welles' Mercury Theater is usually pretty good. If you were going to animate radio, those might almost work.

About animating radio shows. First, I agree completely with Robert that those script are complete in themselves and were written to include bits of dialogues that were designed to provoque images of what the actors were supposedly doing and what they were supposedly seeing and what they were supposedly confronted to and what sort of internal conflicts they were supposedly living. In some writing, it may possible to edit the descriptive parts but I would be surprised if we could find one show that could be fully editable in that way.

But I see another bigger issue with animating old radio shows: Copyrights. Those radio shows are not old enough that they are now in public domain.

This said, I think those shows could be a very good basis for individual animators to practice and perfect their animation skills in a similar way as the 10 seconds club.

And I thank those who posted links to thos OTR.