Adventures Of Atom Smith

Haven’t updated in a good while…

Auditioned for another student movie last week. Got an email saying that they are redoing the auditions in June. Not callbacks, they are just redoing the auditions. That makes the first audition just an annoying waste of time.

Went to Wyoming, camped in Yellowstone. Took pictures. Installed Gallery so you can look at the pictures. I’ll be adding some more pictures over time. Ashley and John, with whom I was camping, both took pictures, but I haven’t gotten them yet. I’ll probably also add all the pictures currently in my facebook profile and pictures from my trip to Europe a while back once I make time for it.

Visit the gallery here!

Got an email from a fellow at the Bug Theatre about bringing improv to the Bug. Haven’t had a chance to talk to him about it, but we’ll see what happens. (That’s the theatre where they have Freak Train.)

I know Intercourse, PA still isn’t up. It will be.

Well, the movie didn’t make it into the film festival, annoyingly enough, so I still haven’t seen the final version. I’m going to be catching up with El Diréctor today to get the movie and some footage of it. I’ll try and get permission to throw it up here alongside the vector. I have also been making some progress in getting Monkey Tango turned into an AVI. Pete did something crazy when the DVD was made, so it has been giving me all sorts of fits and issues.

I’ve been busy lately, so I haven’t updated, so I’ll post about a whole bunch of things in one hyper-mega-uberpost in multiple topics. Enjoy.

I’ll start with some positive press I recently recieved. It was for my last Freak Train, and you can read the Freak Train blog post at http://myspace.com/freaktraindenver and reading the blog post called “April’s Freak Train and 365!” If you aren’t a member, you may not be able to read the post, so I include the relevant excerpt here:

Slot 1: Saint Lazarus Points Out the Saints: Will Rosecrans signed up for this play that night and, asking for all the lights out, ducked behind a platform with his script and a flashlight and created a radio show of it. Brilliant.

yeah… Somebody thinks I’m brilliant. One down, something like five billion nine hundred ninety nine million and some odd to go…

Westminster Wife Show (Part Deux) — Last week, the guys from Westminster Wife Show called me back and I got to do another day of shooting with them, and also I got to know the crew a bit better than the day I was an extra. New Frontiers Media Group is apparently not just a front for TEN. They are said to be a substantial group with their fingers in all sorts of productions. Also, the day of shooting that I did last week involved no nudity. Lastly, the crew was actually quite good, and clearly was trying to do good work. So, it looks like my brief impression of the production that I got while I was an extra was quite biased and unfair, and I’m actually quite looking forward to seeing the final movie. (I may or may not share it with family…) I actually made a point of calling one of the guys on the crew today to inquire about getting some of the raw footage from what we shot so that I can use it in my demo reel. Hopefully, that can get pulled off.

The Markle was in a student production called “Gumshoe” recently. It was “premiering” at a student film festival at Front Range Community College, so I decided to check it out. Unfortunately, it was just about the first thing played, and I was running late so I missed it. However, it seemed I was extremely lucky because they were giving away DVD’s of the show, with “everything” on them. And “definitely Gumshoe is totally like on there.” So, I excitedly got the DVD home, and tried to find Gumshoe. The only little quirk is that the DVD only had six clips on it, and none of the was Gumshoe. So, I still haven’t seen it. If you see it pop up online, let me know. Also, I got to see like seven different skin cancer PSA’s. That sort of surprised me. I also saw the worst demo reel I have ever seen in my entire life. Seriously. I know you are supposed to be nice to student work, but I just really want to say that one of the demo reels I saw was absolutely the worst I have ever seen in my entire life. The other demo reel I remember was merely bad, but not so memorably so.

An email forward is going around lately declaring May 15th a day when you shouldn’t pump any gas. Maybe Atom Smith needs to have an episode about “Atom Smith and the concept of an inelastic fucking good?” Hey, let’s all buy gas the 14th or 16th and not reduce actual demand for gas and all by having (for example) a day of no driving. That’ll teach the bastard oil industry. You all realise that per-week sales figures won’t even show this “protest” right? ::sigh::

The comment period for Real-ID ended yesterday. You all send comments to DHS, right?

Intercourse, PA’s probable premiere is Thursday – directions and everything are a few posts down.

A friend of mine and I have an idea for a reality TV show. Need to figure out how one pitches such a thing.

Craigslist is filled with scammers. Tip for the day: If they have stuff available “In your area” but don’t know where you are, it’s a scam. Doubly so if they try to use poorly executed high pressure sales tactics, “If you are serious about this, you need to call me right away…”

Many of you are completely unaware of AACS. That’s fine, it hasn’t been in the mainstream media much. It’s a new technology on Blu-Ray and HD-DVD discs which is designed to make it difficult to access a movie you buy however you want. (Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are basically high capacity DVD’s for watching High Definition movies on your whizzy new HDTV.) You see, they encrypt the content on the discs using AACS so that only people who pay a bunch of money to the licensing authority and agree to a bunch of rules can make stuff which will play these movies. This means that if you use an uncommon Operating system like Linux, you can’t just buy and play the movies. If you want to buy a movie and then copy it onto a Media Center PC that you have plugged into your TV, that is supposed to be impossible. If you want to buy a movie and burn a backup copy for the kids to watch and drool over so you don’t wind up having to buy 50 copies of the Little Mermaid HD or something, they want to stop you.

Recently, one of the primary AACS encryption keys was leaked. With this, tinkerers all over the world can write software and modify hardware that will allow people who have legally bought High Definition movies to dow hatever they want with them, including reasonable, legal fair-use activities. This encryption key is basically just a long number. You can’t legally copyright a number, incidentally. However, the folks who make AACS have vowed to pursue legal action against anybody who publishes it. In my own effort to join the civil disobedience happening all over the Internet right now, I would like to share a small short scene with you which just happens to have a very similar pronounciation to the number in question, when it is expressed in a mathermatical notation called “hexadecimal.” (Hexadecmal means it uses 0-9 and also A-F as digits, so the number can be written a little shorter than if you just used 0-9. ‘A’ means ten, ‘B’ means 11, etc.) Don’t read the character names out loud — just the dialog, and you will be on the verge of invoking the wrath of the AACS people, too.

It’s about a man called Dee who is trying to proposition several prositutes, but insists that that he has won the services of one or two in a previous (unspecified) eating competition. The german madam disagrees and insists that the rate will be seven (hundred Euros) for the three women, “If I have (a) [body guard]” – and the refers idiomatically to her body guard as if he were a bumble bee, given his ability to “sting” the stingy patron.

One of the employees at the brother claims that Dee only “ate for one” at the eating competition. He insists that he must have eaten five or six meals and then pulls out a card which he says shows he ate five. Then he claims six. The employee looks at the scorecard and realises it only says three. He continues to insist that he ate five, correcting himself and saying six. He indicates the front and back of the card white saying “ate, ate” to indicate that he ate the quantities on both sides of the card at the eating contest.

Dee – Oh, “nein?” F— “nein.” Won one o’ two!
Madam – Nein, Dee. Seven for ‘e three, ‘f I’ve bee.
Lady – Dee ate for one.
Dee – Five? Six? See, Five! Six!
Lady – Three!
Dee – Five… Six! Ate. Ate. See?
Madam – Oh.

Feel free to copy that scene or perform it or put it on T-shirts. I do ask that you let me know if you do so.

I recently responded to a craigslist post which mentioned a company looking for ideas for a cooking show. I hadn’t mentioned it on the blog because even I can’t imagine there is much of an audience looking forward to reading every pointless little detail of every email I send.

I got a reply back from “Taste This Production, Inc.” about the email that I had sent, asking for me to call and discuss the possibility of making a TV show. So, I called, and then was told that the producer would send me an information packet to review. Since they hadn’t yet asked for money, I figured it might not be a scam.

I recieved the information packet. Apparently, they were not only vaguely interested in making something, but ready to proceed with making a pilot. Of course, they hadn’t seen a photo of me, hadn’t seen a demo tape, hadn’t seen a recipe, hadn’t seen my cooking, or anything else. Reading a little further in the information packet, and I found the clincher — they were really interested in making the pilot, but I would have to pay $5000 of the costs. ::sigh:: I had actually managed to convince myself they might be completely legit. Oh well. So, no cooking show for me any time soon. May have to try and talk to an aspiring director at CFS and try to actually shoot a pilot of a cooking show. You know, for not five thousand dollars.

Freak Train was last night. Finally figured out something to do.

They were doing some of the plays for “365 Plays / 365 Days” last night. If you don’t know what that is, then you aren’t one of the cool kids. Five of the slots were pre-scheduled, but two were kept open for last minute signups. I decided to sign up for first slot. So, I was given a one page play. At first, I had rather intended to recruit folks from the crowd to assist me with the play, but I ultimately decided against doing so. You see, some of the guys for the pre-scheduled slots had brought costumes and set pieces and whatnot. So, I realised that even with several random audience members, I would be hard pressed to compete. My inspiration was to go in the exact opposite direction. Rather than trying to compete with costumes and set pieces, I would try to do my play as minimally as possible. The most minimal version of the production I could imagine was just me, in the dark. In the style of a radio play. I borrowed a flashlight so that I could read my lines in the dark, explained to the lighting guy that I needed it completely dark, and performed my play while hiding behind a staircase so that most of the audience couldn’t see the flashlight.

There were only two speaking characters, plus my decision to add a narrator to introduce the radio play and read the stage directions, and a fourth voice for the horrible screaming coming from “off stage.” So, with only four voices, I apparently didn’t have too much trouble keeping them apart. People seemed to get it, which was nice. Anyhow, It has forcibly convinced me that Atom Smith might just work if I bother to write it. Yargh.