Studio8.net » Blogs

Studio 8 Update: June 2011

Brock — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:00:32 +0000

Oh goodness. Where have we Studio 8 boys been for the past year? Few new videos, sparse website updatings, hundreds of self-involved Tweets. Sheesh, do we suck!

Well, ever since Comedy Central aired our short film/TV pilot “The House That Drips Blood on Alex” last October, it’s afforded us with some cool opportunities and we’ve been super busy with some bigger projects that I’m going to briefly talk about here. Some of them are ongoing, some of them are up in the air. And all of them are awesome. Here we go!

The House That Drips Blood on Alex

Whoo boy, this has been one fun ongoing project. It’s definitely our most ambitious thing we’ve ever done and we have high hopes for it. Even though we initially wrote it as a one-off short film, we’ve been treating THTDBOA as a pilot presentation for an anthology horror series, starring Tommy Wiseau and lots of other fun actors from TV, the internet, and some people who just plain don’t belong on camera. So for the past few months, we’ve been pitching the show to lots of companies, and I can’t really say much more about the project except that we have written more episodes, and if you like what we did with the first one, wait until you see what we’ve got cooking for future episodes…

BONUS POLL QUESTION: If we were to auction off original props and swag from the actual THTDBOA film set, would you be interested in bidding on them? Tell me in the Comments Section below…

The Air Sex World Championships

Last month, we kicked off the third season of the Air Sex World Championships! This year, believe it or not, we actually secured our first company sponsor, Fleshlight, which is a really cool device that looks like a flashlight, but it acts just like a horny vagina. Chris Trew is still hosting the show and I’ve been touring a bit with him as the Longest-Running, Hardest-Working, Most Qualified Air Sex Judge in the World. We’ve done shows in LA, NY, Boston, and other places thus far, but we’ve got LOTS more cities to visit and hundreds of air-gasms to witness, so be sure to check the official Air Sex website to keep up with where we’re going next. We’ve also been posting all of the performances on the Air Sex YouTube page, so go there and get inspired. We also might have a super big reveal about this Air Sex Revolution and where it’s going next, but I have to shut up.

The Megaphone Marathons

If you’ve been reading this site and watching our videos for the past few years, surely you’ve seen us mention that we run not one, not two, but three improv training centers/comedy theaters called The New Movement Theater (in Austin, New Orleans, and Houston). We’ve even got a kickass sister theater named The Dallas Comedy House in Dallas (duh!).

Well, for the past two weekends, Chris Trew has organized a touring improv festival of sorts called The Megaphone Marathons. It’s roughly 100 improv shows in 4 cities over the course of 3 weekends. very ambitious and ridiculous.

Thus far, we’ve already done Houston and New Orleans. This weekend is Dallas and then it’s a super fun long weekend in Austin. I will actually be traveling to Austin to perform in many shows (June 15-20) live, onstage, in-person with all of our wonderful TNM Austin friends and students.

Check out the full schedule on the site and come watch us do our thing and then let’s all hug and kiss each other’s booties simply for the fuck of it!

You Are the Messiah!

A couple of months ago, my second book was published. It’s called “You Are the Messiah!” and it’s an interactive, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type of book in which you play Jesus Christ having adventures in the Bible days. I’ve been working on some fun videos and a neato website for it, so I haven’t been able to properly launch it out into the world.

Until now!

The site is live at www.whatshouldjesusdo.com, but I’ve still got many fun updates to put on it. If you go there now, you can read some info about it, look at the book’s Twitter account, and see a few places where you can order the physical book and/or download it onto your preferred reading devices. If this book gets enough support, I fully intend for it to launch a series of dorky interactive books that feature twisted retellings of various historical figures’ lives.

Other than all of the above stuff, I’ve personally spent the last year or so doing the following things:

working on a feature film called “Vamps” that we shot in Detroit (it’s a really cool movie directed by Amy Heckerling and it’s my first Associate Producer credit!),
living in Poland for over a month while we finished post-production on “Vamps”,
ending a 10-year relationship with my girlfriend, moving out of our house, and crashing on the floor of the Studio 8 house (after almost a year of living out of a suitcase, I finally have my own bedroom!),
picking up the shattered pieces of my life (I think I got all the pieces, but I may have missed a few, sorry.),
writing on some bigger projects (more on those at a later date!),
farting on friend’s heads,
producing some neat commercials with talented new comedic friends like Payman Benz from AwkwardPictures,
taking a thousand meetings about a thousand different projects,
dealing with the Macho Man’s death (I’m pretty much not kidding about that. I get bummed sometimes about it for some dumb reason. Especially when I watch the below video over and over.).

On top of everything, Chris has been so busy running our theaters that he hasn’t had time to visit LA to shoot any new videos with us. Not that we would have had much time to shoot and edit them anyway. So it’s been a different year than the previous few years, where we could shoot tons of videos and release 1 or 2 each and every week.

But now I’m back in the writing saddle and I’m already cranking out scripts and ideas for new stuff. I don’t know if we’ll push out a video a week, but maybe so.

It’s going to be a fun year. Happy to show you people a bunch of dorkiness in the coming months.

BONUS! You want to see me eating some morsels? Here ya go!

The Sean Patton Collection

Brock — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:00:08 +0000

Studio 8 has had the enviable pleasure of working with standup comedian Sean Patton for many years now.

Mean mug.

We’ve shot videos with him, we’ve written TV pilots with him, we’ve even performed onstage with him in various standup, sketch, and improv shows. Hell, next month, Terp is going on tour with Sean Patton and Kyle Kinane (view details of that HERE). Anyway, you may recognize Sean’s name and/or cute face as one of the brightest up-and-coming standup comedy dudes on the planet. I won’t delve into his impressive resume…that’s what his narcissistic website up above is for.

What I do want to talk about is the sad fact that you can’t watch most of the stuff we’ve produced with Sean over the years. Mostly that’s because many of the videos we’ve done with him were sold to websites like Break.com and we can’t use their video code in our website except as simple embeddings within posts. In other words, if you click on “Videos” up on our menu, all of what you see has been uploaded to YouTube and then integrated into the inner workings of our website (we love YouTube!). And since Break won’t allow us to upload the videos they bought from us onto other sites, they have to live forever in their old, shitty non-HD forms on sites like Break.

Until now. I went ahead and uploaded the videos in question to Vimeo and below you will find them embedded in slightly higher quality, along with all the other videos that we’ve put up on YouTube (which are also not really in great HD form because many of the videos weren’t shot in HD).

So I’m creating this page as a sort of all-inclusive archive of the stuff we’ve done with Sean. And it’s a celebration of him as a man, as a child, and as a person. Below each video, I will include a little behind-the-scenes tidbit or description so you know why it’s relevant and what Sean did in the video.

The Amateur Streaker

This was not only one of the first videos we ever shot with Sean, but it was also one of the first videos we ever produced and sold for a client. So it’s extra special (just like Sean!). In this, Sean plays a news reporter who freaks out on a streaker who keeps running behind him. Shooting this involved Sean grabbing the genitalia of another man, the talented Eric W. Pierson, but he also had to scream, strip naked, and run around for several long takes in the cold night. Hats and pants off to you for this, Mr. Patton.

We also shot an alternative version of this video, as we thought we were going to produce a longer series of these streaker videos, and you can see that one here:

News Streaking Goes Wrong

35 Topics

In this silly sketch, Sean pops up all over the place as a variety of dumb-looking guests for this talk show that never gets to actually interview any of its subjects. My favorite shot of Sean is when he portrays Magnificent Carl, who hopes to discuss the mustard shortage. I wish Sean looked like that all the time, but I bet none of the women who have dated him share that wish with me. The host character, Jack Picklebush, is one of the favorite characters that I’ve ever played on-screen. We’ve actually written more episodes of “35 Topics,” but for some dumb reason, we’ve just never gotten around to shooting them because we do so many other things. This was another sketch that we sold to Break.com, even though they never really promoted it. Weird!

Discount Dare Salesman

This is one of the dumbest commercials we’ve ever done. I think Sean actually wrote this one himself. We sold this one to Break, too, and NBC wanted to put it on some weird “internet on your TV” show a few years back, but we couldn’t let that happen since Break owned it and we had to just let it sit there amongst videos of crotch-shots and hot woman boobs or whatever. This is one of my favorite things that Sean has ever done, partly because the character he portrays here is almost exactly what Sean is like in real-life.

All the Beers in the World

This epic short film is the first thing we shot after we left New Orleans and moved to Los Angeles. I’m extremely fond of it for many reasons – the writing is top-notch stupid, the direction and performances are retarded, and it all adds up to one dorky pile of weirdness that clearly shows how little we knew about what we were doing, but it’s a fun celebration of our ineptness, too. Sean’s Chester character ties the whole thing together, of course, from start to finish. This film actually won the Silver Outhouse Award for Best Comedy AND the award for Best Performance in a Lead Role (Sean Patton) in the 2007 Outhouse Film Festival. And it’s the perfect blend of Twilight Zone/Tales From the Darkside/absolute garbage that we at Studio 8 are still producing to this very day with shows like “The House That Drips Blood on Alex.”

Couchy

With only 10 words of dialogue, this is the shortest script we’ve ever shot. It’s a pretty simple premise – a guy (Rory Windhorst) catches his buddy (Sean Patton) performing oral sex on his couch, then months later, the couch poops out a bloody pillow baby, which the guy’s buddy then adopts as his own child. We shot it cheaply and quickly on a really shitty camera (it was before we had all the fancy equipment and know-how that we do now). What makes this short even more fun is that I had an idea to shoot a bunch of extra insert shots that would later be edited into the short and re-released as a special director’s cut version. You can see that below:

Couchy: The Uncut Extended Unrated Director’s Cut

So basically, this version is three times longer than the original and none of the extra footage adds anything useful to the story. Do we need to see how Rory unlocked the door, put away his keys, turned the knob, and pushed the door open? Do we need to see another minute’s worth of couch fellatio? How about the long, boring stock footage-heavy opening credits? The answer to all of these questions is: NO! But we thought that it would be a funny experiment. And it was!

Mr. T’s Lesson Learning Hour

We only shot 2 episodes of this series, but I wish we had shot 50. Aside from Rory’s excellent Mr. T impression, what makes this series special in my heart is Sean’s dope-ass performance as the bully Phillip, who tortures Rory’s Tommy character in every episode. Sean’s taunting of Rory were always spot-on awful and I can fondly look back on this short-lived series as something that we definitely did at one point in time. In the above episode, I love Rory’s revenge on Sean and how it’s not really revenge and I also love the poopoo on Rory’s butt, especially when he’s hugging the tree. In the below episode, I love the scene where Sean tricks Rory into taking the fake drugs from him and I also love Rory’s pathetic sobbing at the end. And I love everything else, too!

So that rounds up all of our Sean Patton videos! What’s your favorite? Do you want us to make more things with Sean? Have you seen Sean do his classic standup routines? Did you hear his jokes, too? Man, I wish you did!

Thanks for everything, Sean! And thanks to you, readers, for reading this!

Comic-Con= Success!

Terp2it — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 02:00:22 +0000

This FlickR photo set might not do it justice, but boy oh boy, this past weekend was crazy. The first-ever screening of The House That Drips Blood on Alex went down on Saturday night where the line was wrapped around the corner and then again around the next corner.

There was action everywhere all weekend. People flocking to Tommy and Joey and saying nice things about the project, loving the show and wanting more. A big fat sincere Thank You to everyone who supported Studio8 this weekend. If you’re new to the site, please head to our videos page to see what else we’ve been up to. We’re also on Facebook and a collection of our Twitter accounts are below!

@Studio8
@OneBloodyAlex
@Studio8Jared
@ChrisTrew
@JoeyGreco

Terp & Brock Talk About Wrestling (Week of 3/29/10)

Brock — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:52:05 +0000

Click To Play

Brock and Chris take their Monday Night Wars podcast over to the Hey Terp! Podcast, where they discuss falling asleep during TNA and all the happiness and sadness they felt during Wrestlemania 26.

Terp & Brock Talk About Wrestling (Week of 3/21/10)

Brock — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:43:12 +0000

Click To Play

Brock and Terp discuss the writing and theatrics of the WWE and TNA wrestling programs. Will their hopes and dreams be crushed or will they persevere and be satisfied? Listen and see!