Eric Ingrum's Project Blog

The blasphemous, tabbo, science minded film podcast you all know and love as “Double Feature” may be on it’s last episode of all time.

We created a Kickstarter to save it.
http://kickstarter.doublefeatureshow.com

As you might imagine, fans of a free internet podcast aren’t the ideal candidates for pledge drive. That’s ok though; they’ve actually pitched in a ton of money! The thing is, those resources alone are not enough. If this Kickstarter makes it, it’s going to be because of my friends. So if you’re reading this…help me out!

If we can’t fund this Kickstarter, it’s over for us. Yikes. I explain a bit on the page:

When this show began, there was only one goal – to put out a show every single week, even if we didn’t quite know what we were doing. We figured we’d learn. It was content creation through brute force. We started planning for the show almost half a year before even publishing an episode. It seemed like an easy goal at the time. We were self employed, barely twenty years old, and lived maybe a mile apart. We saw each other every day and we never stopped scheming.

Over the years, an afternoon of slasher films went from a recurring activity to something that required strategic planning. Time went from our most abundant resource to our most scarce. We eventually started mapping out the show like a war game. Every year, our real world responsibilities made planning more difficult. In recent years it’s been a near impossible task. The show’s been hard, but we’re thankful for it. We stopped having time to hang out. Working on the show together became the excuse to stay in one another’s lives.

Jobs and responsibilities are what usually end podcasts, and we were determined not to let that bury ours. We found a place to record at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, and it started to look like things were going to be alright. Not a month later, work unexpectedly pulled us to opposite sides of the country. We started scrambling for shows anywhere we could fit them. We were deciding next week’s movies just minutes before we hit record, it became impossible to plan. When we began, time was our most abundant resource…now it’s the one thing we’re without.

With less than a week left, I really don’t know what’s going to happen to the show. It’s such an important part of my life, but it’s become really hard to do. We’re so fucking close now. I really hope we can make it through.

I mentioned a little bit ago that I’m working on a film noir site. I don’t have a name or branding or anything yet, but my concept is to go on a film noir journey and write about it in an easily digestible way. I’ve further refined that idea a little bit.

I’m going to try to watch a few movies a day and write an entry I won’t publish yet for each. When I have a bunch of them I can refine them a bit and start putting them online. Make them a little readable first. I like the experience of figuring out something right along with the writer, but I also need to know enough to deconstruct a topic. If I get a pile of these entries in draft form I can really work on my own writing skills and try to make them as good as possible. Give people a reason to actually read any of this stuff!

I think I’m going to do one film a week. I’d like the site to have a couple posts every week, but I don’t want to actually put out a big heavy post more than once. I just feel like that’s more content that people want to read. I’ve written so much less in this project blog since the proliferation of Twitter. I’ve gotten good at condensing ideas in short bursts, and I think collectively the internet is changing. People don’t want to read really long things. This will give me a chance to play with that form more, but I don’t want to overindulge.

See what I’m talking about? Look how long and boring this entry is already! Aren’t you bored? You’re bored.

I thought I could do the big entry a week, and then a few smaller posts through the week. Stuff that makes the site a bit more modern. Focus a little more on that accessibility. Maybe three posts a week – the main one on a film, and then two on tangential stuff. A post explaining a film noir concept or going into some motif. A post about something more modern. A neo-noir film post, a post about noir style or something being used somewhere else. A post about some of the books I’m reading to try to understand noir. Maybe I’ll eventually get into pulp novels or Jazz. L.A. Noire. Really fresh stuff.

I thought this would also be a good tie in for Double Feature. I could mention that every time it’s relevant and maybe cross post some content. I always liked the idea of advertising alternatives. How do I bring Double Feature to a wider audience without just blasting out ads? I used to write about alternate reality games (ARGs) all the time as one way to do that. As much as I don’t like Gawker, I think they have a good model. Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jezebel, Lifehacker. Let’s have a bunch of sites about different things. They’ve created this sort of empire.

I always wanted the Double Feature site to post about more than just the weekly podcast. When I redid the website I built in the ability to post blog entries, but it never seemed like a good fit for us. Now I have another outlet, and maybe even space for more in the future.

This noir thing is going to be fun. I love having a specific topic with room to write about broader things. There’s a lot of ideas already floating around in my head, and I’m really excited to write about them all.

Well hey there, look at this!
IMDB Profile: Eric Ingrum

That’s kind of surreal. I’m on the International Movie Database a sound engineer. That seems kind of fitting I suppose. It’s for work I did on a short called I Am Ana in 2010. The short itself was pretty terrible and I don’t think you can even see it anywhere online. The production was a little rushed and everything had to be over-lit because of the awful camera they were using. It totally ruined the mood of the film.

While the short was terrible, the director was amazing. Her name is Gracie Hagen. She doesn’t have a lot of film stuff up right now, but she churns out photography work like a monster. You can see it on her Tumblr.

The picture posted to the left here isn’t from I Am Ana, but rather one of her photographs posted as Erotic Adventurer. I also really like one she did recently as the post Run and Tell Your Mother. Her stuff is really atmospheric and naked. It doesn’t hold anything back. It’s these great bodies with no kind of apologies about anything. Her sense of aesthetics is really astonishing.

I was really quick to dismiss I Am Ana as awful, but in truth I’m really proud of the opening scene. The sound design I did for the project was mostly foley and the actual audio mix, but the opening scene has a good deal of score and visually is the most interesting so that doesn’t hurt either. I did the sound for the whole thing over three days, and it was all software. The musicwas done with virtual synthesizers in Logic Pro and everything was mixed directly in Final Cut 7 so she could edit it easily if she need to.

I’m really hoping to work with Gracie on some more stuff soon. I’ve been pestering her about getting back into film. We have to add to our IMDB pages now, right? Can’t have I Am Ana dangling there awkwardly, all alone.

I actually had something submitted to IMDB way back when I did The Birthday Massacre Bootleg Live DVD. I shot, cut, and produced it on my own. I never really followed up on it, but now that I have a big fancy IMDB page I’m also credited as a director for the Bootleg! It’s got an entry all its own with a picture of the cover and all that. It’s a real, no fucking around fifty minute video I made. I wouldn’t call it a film, but what I would call it is a start.

I want to start editing film more regularly. I’m going through Final Cut certification now as an excuse to keep my working with the program when I’m not actually making stuff. Of everything I’ve done I think editing is one of my favorite roles. Getting in and cutting stuff up, I could really get used to that.

I’ve been kicking around a lot of ideas for a new project. That seems like something I’m always doing. Every time we get a break from our Double Feature schedule, I’ll start thinking about what else I can do before we start planning next year’s pairs. Last time we had a break I focused on making the Double Feature website not suck so much. It was a huge update, but it came out pretty well.

A lot of times I come up with these project ideas, and they can’t get done because the scope is too large. There’s too many moving parts. I want to film something, I want to collaborate with some people, I want to work on a musical something…so I started thinking about something I could do little by little and on my own terms. I wanted something that would still have some kind of a revealing at some point. I like having a finished product, and that small moment where it goes online and I can show it to people. Something like the Double Feature site, where I do a lot of work bit by bit and then get the satisfaction when the whole thing comes together.

This break I’m working on something else that’s film related. It’s a film noir site.

I’ve been out of college over five years now. I’ve been out of college five years, and if I could do it all over again I wouldn’t have even gone. I’ve written about this a little before, but I’m a huge fan of autodidacticism. Autodidacticism is a fancy (read: bullshit) word that basically means teaching yourself. Learning on your own. Not paying a big unnecessary business like a college to teach you.

I really like education and learning more – that’s where Double Feature comes from – but I like the ability of individuals to do it on our own. It’s like working out without needing a gym. It’s things we can accomplish as human beings without being held up by others. Maybe it goes back to the greater “No Gods No Kings” kinda thing, I don’t know. My point is I wanted to start another project that would help keep me sharp and analytical while also teaching me something new. Refine the things I know and do already and learn something along the way.

I decided I don’t know film noir enough. There’s a lot of unanswered questions there. I don’t know the era very well. I don’t recognize many of the names, especially for how much of it I’ve seen. The studio system, the Hayes code, all that stuff is pretty foreign to me.

Sometimes when I don’t get something in film I’ll marathon the movies until I eventually comprehend it. I’ll watch everything from a slasher genre, or every Star Trek movie. I recently saw every single episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. I want to really get something, so I exhaust it. I was going to simply do that with film noir, but I thought it would be worthwhile to chronicle the experience online. It’s not a very accessible genre, and if I’m good at anything it’s making heavy stuff accessible. I thought “Hey, there might be a place for me here!”

Now comes the part where I figure out how to do that in a way where my voice is valuable amongst the sea. If I’m going to contribute to the marketplace of ideas, I want to really make a contribution.

It’s finally out!

Buy Final Cut X on the Mac App Store.

Double Feature takes up a lot of time. Michael and I always plan these other projects, but we just don’t have time to complete them before Double Feature starts kicking our ass again. We move the work around (year planning, mixing, research, etc) in a such a way that we have little vacations for ourselves a few times a year, and it allows us to work on a few extra things…but revising the website always seemed to get pushed back. With my mini vacation once again coming to an end, it seemed like now or never.

http://doublefeatureshow.com

This new site is crazy awesome. The design is a much cleaner, Helvetica driven sort of look (despite the single mass use of Arial – ease up, font nerds!) It uses our year end artwork for both the background and main header, which is neat and modern looking. There’s a bunch of new features, and the backend now allows us to expand in a way that’s stupid easy. Easier expansion means a lot less of “wouldn’t this be cool? If only it wasn’t such a pain in the ass to actually roll out.” A few of those things have gone up already.

Double Feature Gallery

We noticed the most accessed page on the site (besides the main page) was the A-Z list of films. People who are seeing the site for the first time want to know what we’ve covered. I used to have to update the list manually, which not only took a lot of time but always seemed to get pushed back and ensured it was never really up to date. Now the list gets updated automatically whenever a new show goes up.

With the revision comes a database of artwork for each individual movie (a bit more on that in a second) so it seemed like an obvious choice to build a gallery of every movie we’ve ever covered. This way people can browse our shows like you’d browse DVDs at a store. Similar to the A-Z film page, you can look at that gallery and click any cover to immediately go to that episode’s page.

This database also gives us the ability to post a count down to the next show in the upper right hand corner of every page. This way it’s easy to figure out what we’re doing next week so you can watch the movies in advance. It also clears up a little confusion about what “Wednesdays at midnight” means, since that’s technically Thursday morning.

New Entry Example: Lost Highway + Psycho

The show entries template has been updated too. Each entry now features the chapter times so you can skip between the different movies covered in the episode. It also has details for the movies themselves!

There’s more obvious links to IMDB and Wikipedia, and buttons to purchase the movies on Amazon or iTunes. My favorite thing about the new site, however, is that there’s now high resolution cover art for every single movie we’ve done. I removed all the text from each cover and conformed them all to 1500x1000px. It helps make the Double Feature site a more legitimate resource to find useful things (which is part of the overall goal looking forward).

There’s also release date, director, writer, actors, a synopsis…all of this goes into a database as well, so now you can click a director’s name and see every movie of theirs we’ve done on the show. If we’ve only covered a single movie of theirs, the site doesn’t bother showing the link – that way you don’t go through a bunch of clicks just to find out you’re already looking at their only episode. We’ve given each of these director’s their own page with a brief description of what the director is all about. It’s a great place to go if you’re not familiar with their work.

I’m still writing up a lot of these descriptions and working on some new features. We have a new contact page on the site if you’d like to leave any feedback about the changes.

I just finished a live music video for the Glittermouse song Porn Stars and Promises (We’re in Love). You can stream it from YouTube here:

I shot the song with Rob Cornell on February 3rd. It was a spur of the moment kind of thing. I borrowed a Canon T1i and he brought his T2i and we filmed without having any real preparation. Neither of us had been to Lincoln Hall before, so we weren’t really sure what to expect. I’ve been really interested in using a DSLR to shoot video and I thought this would be a great test for low lighting.

I know Glittermouse though their singer, who also happens to be my Double Feature co-host Michael Koester. To be perfectly honest I’ve only seen them live a handful of times and I wasn’t really sure what song to shoot. While we actually shot for the first two songs, I ended up putting together this video for the fourth song in their set. It wasn’t optimal for the coverage we had, but I loved this song so it had to be the one.

I edited it together in Final Cut. I actually cheated a bit and used a ton of b-roll and footage from the other songs. While I’m sure knowing that will ruin the magic for some people, I’m actually really impressed I was able to pull off such a believable video. A lot of that was the magic of Final Cut. This was my first time really using FCP – when I did the Birthday Massacre Bootleg DVD I had made everything using Quicktime and iMovie. Final Cut turned out to be really great. I even did the color in it. I can’t wait to jump back in.

Gorillaz released their new album “The Fall” yesterday, and it’s free. If that isn’t enough to make me go crazy, they also recorded the entire thing on an iPad. Inside the album artwork pdf they include credits to all the iPad apps they used to make the album.

Speak It! $1.99
SoundyThingie $2.99
Mugician FREE
Solo Synth* $14.99
Crystal Synth XT $4.99
FunkBox Drum Machine $2.99
gliss $0.99
AmpliTube for iPad $19.99
XENON Groove Synthesizer $4.99
KORG iELECTRIBE $19.99
bs-16i $4.99
Mellotronics M3000 $11.99
Cleartune $3.99
iOrgel HD $2.99
olsynth $6.99
StudioMini XL $5.99
BassLine $0.99
Harmonizer FREE
Dub Siren Pro $3.99
Filtatron $4.99

That’s roughly $121 in iPad apps, assuming the full versions were used and not free trials.

* I can’t actually find “Solo Synth” anywhere on the iPad, although a Google searches seem to return Moog’s NLogSynth Pro when you go looking for it. Since Filtatron is credited as Moog Filtatron in the album notes, it’s possible Moog’s other iPad synthesizer was used as well. It’s only a best guess at this point.

An AmpliTube iRig was likely used for guitar input on tracks like “Bobby in Phoenix.” It’ll let you jack a quarter inch input directly into the headphone jack. It’s also possible vocals were recorded this was as well.

Various sounds of US travel appear on the album; “California and the Slipping of the Sun” has some samples. There are some samples of what appear to be radio stations on “The Snake In Dallas” as well. The track “The Speak It Mountains” includes the classic iPod click sound, and “Aspen Forest” also has the cell phone interference sound you commonly get when your iPhone is on Edge and near a set of speakers.

We use an iPad on Double Feature all the time. Production meetings, emails and notes, show research while we’re watching the movies…I often wonder how we even did a show before it. “The Fall” makes me wonder if we couldn’t record and even mix the show on one as well.

I play a lot of thought experiments out in my head. I don’t think a day goes by where I don’t think “what would I do in X situation? Then what if Y happened?” For me these little experiments have become a large part of how I determine right from wrong. I think about what is true or right in a situation, what I feel strongly about, and try to apply that to something else to determine how I feel about that thing.

Piracy has always been an odd one for me. I make stuff in my free time, and I have a great amount of respect and appreciation for people who create things. Musicians, film makers, game designers, all of them. I think when someone comes up with an idea or works on some kind of content, they should be payed for it (if that’s what they want). I know I’ve written before about how I would urge artists to put out their music for free, but that was as part of an overall marketing strategy. It’s not force.

So to be clear here, I don’t believe:

After six long years, LOST has finally ended. I’ve been thinking a lot about the ending…trying to convince myself it wasn’t a huge waste of time. Unfortunately there’s no real way to do that. While the episode was emotionally satisfying, it was intellectually offensive. The “flash sideways” in each episode of the last season was all building up to this huge cliche. It was a writing gimmick that would allow the show to end with a lot of hugging and pseudo-religious nonsense. I could never re-watch the show, knowing that’s what it all came down to.

Some people were pissed about the lack of answers. I get that, but personally I wasn’t expecting any real answers. I’d come to terms with that. I just wanted the show to be as creative as it used to be. A lot of people have rejected the flash sideways – this site has even edited them out of the last season. I applaud that, but I still don’t think that makes the last season very compelling. It fixes its most obnoxious flaw, but it doesn’t make me want to watch it.

So now that it’s all over, what do I do? The first few seasons stand as some of the best television ever made, but the last few are mediocre – and the final is downright offensive. Should I purge it all from my AppleTV? I’ve got a solution.

I’m going to pretend season three was the last season.

The Best Ending

Right away I know the season three finale was pound for pound better than the season six finale. All that church bound hug stuff was nice, but that was never why I liked the show. I liked it for the mystery and the writing…something the shows producers claimed was never the top priority, The end of season three (We have to go back, Kate!) was probably the biggest WTF moment of the show. They never had a comparable mind fuck scene after that. It’s as if they forgot that was part of the show. At the end of season three, you know they get off the island but wonder if thats what was best. Its pretty much the same conclusion you get at the end of season six, but without all the sloppy heavy handed stuff. The show just wasted the last three seasons telling you it didn’t matter – they were just going to end up getting off like they did in season three.

Questions!

The biggest problem with pretending season three was the last season is that there are tons of unanswered questions. There’s two reasons that doesn’t bother me. The first is that seasons 4-6 brought up plenty of questions that were never answered as well. I actually think there’s about as many unanswered questions at the end of season six as there are at season three. The questions are just different. the other reason it doesn’t bother me is that it turns out I didn’t want to know the answers to a lot of those questions. Once I found out the whispers were trapped island ghosts, I knew somethings were better left to the imagination.

What does it all mean?

By the end of season six, you find out there is a magic light at the center of the island. You’re told not to ask exactly what it is, or where it came from. Jacob is explained, but you’re told not to ask what mother is or where she came from. That’s fine…going back too far would just lead to a creation myth. Ask yourself though…how is the cave light any different than what we thought Jacob was in season 3? There’s a magical man at the center of it all. We don’t know who he is or where he came from, but people fight over him the same they do the light. If were going to end up with no solid answer either way, why not stick with the undeniably cooler memory of that first encounter in Jacob’s cabin?

This is OK

This is the cleanest out. It doesn’t require any special edits or “looking the other way.” It’ll be as if LOST went out in its prime. At three seasons, it’s short enough that I can still show it to people AND I wont have to feel guilty knowing they inevitably jerk the audience around for three more seasons only to pretty much come to the same conclusion. Rather than hitting the audience over the head, season three’s finale invites a great dialogue and much speculation…something season six failed to do when they forced the fans to get caught up in lame conversations about purgatory.

I mean, we all just pretend Matrix 2 and 3 never happened, right?