Nov 20

More Random Videos! (+ EB2 DVD Update)

We posted a couple of new videos recently!  First off, we have Mother:  The Movie, a respectful film adaptation of the classic NES game Mother. This skit was originally shot as part of our new offshoot EB episode entitled From the Fans with Love, which will be appearing exclusively on our new Earthbound DVD, so be sure to order it if you haven’t already!

In addition, we posted another old video from the archives – a short film based on Animal Crossing, which we shot back during Christmas break of 2009.

For those of you who have already ordered the new Earthbound DVD, we’re expecting them to arrive sometime next week, so they should be shipping out to you before the end of the month.

Thanks for your patience, and have a happy Thanksgiving!

Oct 20

Earthbound: Part Two

Earthbound Part Two

PRE-ORDER NOW FROM THE RIDGWAY FILMS STORE

After over a year of no tangible Earthbound releases, we finally, finally have some good news – we are very nearly done working on our latest DVD, Earthbound Part Two!  And seeing how today is the official five-year anniversary of us beginning the series, what better way to celebrate than by formally announcing the new DVD and opening up the store for pre-orders?  Watch the new commercial below!

The store page has the full list of everything that’s contained on this new DVD, but probably the biggest and most exciting thing about this DVD is the brand new, DVD-exclusive episode Earthbound:  From the Fans with Love, the culmination of our side project we started a year ago, when we asked everyone to send us questions and requests for scenes.  The project ended up being way more complicated and time-consuming than we ever could have anticipated (which is one of the major reasons why Earthbound Episode 6 has experienced so many delays), but it’s finally done, the result is suitably goofy, surreal, and entertaining, and hopefully you guys will love the way we answered/interpreted your comments.  And yes, we did answer EVERYTHING (with one or two unusual exceptions).

The DVD also has the most recent two episodes, Dark Side of the Moon and Cake, with a ton of bonus stuff, like commentary, deleted scenes, bloopers/outtakes, footage of random strangers stopping to talk to us while we’re shooting, and more!

Also, we’re doing a special bonus promotion offer – the first ten people to order this DVD will receive a one-of-a-kind exclusive prop that was used during Earthbound shooting!  The next ten people after that will receive actual pages from the scripts we used on set.  A real chance to own Ridgway Films/Earthbound film history!

Keep in mind that these are pre-orders – the DVD is not actually done yet, and we’re expecting to start shipping them out mid-to-late November (just in time for your Christmas shopping, if you want to give that special someone the awkward experience of unwrapping a low-budget DVD from a film company nobody has ever heard of!)

Oct 19

“Super Creepy Pokemon Hack” – The Dramatic Reading!

SO SCARY, MUST LOOK AWAY

Recently, we were asked to contribute a segment to Fangamer’s podcast on the subject of non-horror games that are scary.  Specifically, we were asked to do something related to creepypasta.  And so, we decided to do a dramatic reading of the original story that started it all for us – “Super Creepy Pokemon Hack,” better known as “Pokemon Creepy Black.”  This was the story that eventually led to the creation of our own Creepypasta short film, so it’s still the quintessential creepypasta for us.  Better yet, we had Phil narrate the segment using his recognizable narrator voice from the short film, so those of you who have asked us for “moar creepypasta” can pretend this is the official sequel to our short.

Anyway, enough preamble – give the podcast a listen! (The segment starts around 57:00, but we highly recommend listening to the entire thing.)

Also, come back tomorrow for a HUGE announcement!  Like, really big.  We mean it.

Oct 08

New Old Videos!

Just recently, I got around to posting three “new” videos from our backlog of stuff we’ve been meaning to put online.  Check them out!

Diddy Kong Racing – a stop-motion animation I made at age seven, and as far as I can remember, the very first movie I made without help.  The story is about Diddy Kong, as he struggles to fight four bosses, fight Wizpig, and finally get in a rocket with his friend Drumstick and go fight aliens.

Harry Potter and the Much More Worser Video – an alternate cut of our third Harry Potter film, showcasing a ton of bloopers, bad takes, bad camerawork, as well as a few alternate/deleted scenes from the original film.

A Year in Ten Minutes – an experimental film from 2011, in which we aimed to take at least one shot of something on every day of the year, compressing the events of an entire year into ten minutes.   (For our Earthbound fans, this video also contains a few seconds of footage from the unreleased Earthbound Episode 6!!!)

Sep 06

The Status of Things

It’s been a really, really crazy month for us.  I apologize for us pretty much dropping off the map recently, but a ton of stuff has been happening to us in the last couple of weeks.  As such, I feel like I should at least briefly bring you guys up to speed, and also talk about the future of Earthbound and our other projects.

First of all, our main editing computer completely crashed at the beginning of August.  It was a four-year-old computer, and it wasn’t clear whether its refusal to boot up was due to years of wear on the magnetic disks, or simply a driver error.  After trying various things just to get it to boot up (and failing), we eventually resorted to taking it in to a Best Buy in Tulsa.  A week later, they informed us that the first partition of the hard drive was completely corrupt, but the second partition was safe.  What this meant at the time was that most of our half-finished computer game projects would be gone (as well as a few miscellaneous Earthbound files), but all the raw footage and visual effect files for Earthbound were safe.  After bringing the computer back home, we were able to rig a setup using a new Windows 7 tower from Wal-Mart that read from our old hard drive partitions as massive external disks.

The mutant computer

We quickly transferred everything off of the second uncorrupted partition, then tackled the supposedly corrupt first partition.  CHKDSK hacked away at the first partition for the greater portion of the following night, and the next morning, we were actually able to get into the corrupted partition and access most of the files!  There were still a lot of files that were mysteriously missing, but most of them had been moved to a hidden, protected folder in the C drive called “found001” (which apparently is created by CHKDSK to house files that it found on the corrupted part of the disk).  After sifting through literally over a thousand subfolders with meaningless numbered names, we were able to locate most of the remaining missing files, including pretty much everything Earthbound-related.  At the end of the day, 99% of the files from our old editing computer were salvaged and safely backed up.  I guess the moral of this story is don’t take what the Geek Squad tells you at face value, and don’t ever give up on your data until you can get into the drive for yourself.

But what does this mean for Earthbound?

The bottom line from all this is that no work has been completed on Earthbound for about five weeks.  This sets back our previous release schedule considerably – at this point, it seems that the Earthbound Part Two DVD will most likely be finished somewhere near the end of September or the beginning of October.  Meanwhile, Earthbound Episode 6, which was previously predicted to be finished around Christmas of this year, may get pushed back to early 2013, depending on how much time I can find to finish the visual effects.

Which brings me to my next major point – I have finally moved away from home for good, which is both exciting and deeply melancholy all at the same time.  Living in Alva, Oklahoma for the first 22 years of my life was great, but now I’m living in Kansas City, Missouri, where I’ll be developing software for Cerner.  It’s not quite the dream video game developer job yet, but it will definitely help me pay this newfound thing called “the bills.”

Joining the real world doesn’t mean the end of Ridgway Films, and certainly not the end of Earthbound.  If you followed our earlier posts from the summer, Earthbound has been (more or less) completely shot, so all that remains is to throw in the visual effects.  So don’t worry about that – regardless of how long it takes, Earthbound will get completed.  Plus Best Served Cold (formerly Three Day Weekend) is still coming down the pipeline.  There are also a ton of backlog videos to entertain for quite a while, which I’ll be uploading in the near future.  And we’re all still talking about what other future film projects we may work on together as soon as time permits.  The frequency of videos will probably diminish, but that’s been happening for a while now.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that we’re by no means signing off from making videos, but I wanted to make the few of you that still read this blog aware of the changes going on behind the scenes so you can adjust your expectations accordingly.

Anyway, on a lighter note, Earthbound is, in fact, still coming!  I’ll update you guys as soon as the new DVD is ready to ship, which will be the next major thing to look forward to.

Also, here’s the final Episode 7 production video update from the end of July.  This video is fairly old but we never got around to posting it on here, so here you go!