Jun 03

A Shout Out to menwithmachineguns

So, Episode 5 has been up for about a week now, and the feedback from you guys has been very positive!  We’re really excited that you all have enjoyed this latest episode so much – it was a lot of work to make, and there were several stretches during production where I wasn’t sure if it would turn out to be any good.

Kraken

I want to take a minute to give a shout-out to Andrew Baum of the band menwithmachineguns for contributing to this episode.  He wrote us an excellent remix of the game’s Kraken song, featured during the Kraken fight scene in our episode.  It’s a great song on its own, and it deserves to be heard without all the sound effects and shouting on top of it – you can download the entire song heard in Episode 5 right here!

Andrew’s band has done some other excellent Earthbound remixes, as well as remixes from other things such as Final Fantasy and Doctor Who.  You can listen to these remixes right here.

May 25

Earthbound Episode 5: Cake

FINALLY.

Earthbound Episode 5: Cake

It’s been nearly fifteen months coming since Episode 4, but here it is at long last – the epic 55-minute continuation of the Earthbound adventure.  We’d like to thank everyone who helped us along the way (including our Internet fans, for your wonderful support) to get this project done at last.  Please let us know what you think of this latest episode!

May 23

A Boy and His Blob Episode 1

A Boy and His Blob Episode 1

Out of the blue, we just released a brand-new short film – A Boy and His Blob Episode 1.  Loosely based on the events of the Nintendo Wii game by the same name, this movie was an experiment film we shot back in the summer of 2010.  We wanted to do a video that was quick and easy, to cut our teeth on the new modeling software that we were going to use for the immense amount of modeling required for Earthbound Episode 5.  Needless to say, A Boy and His Blob got pushed, half-finished, onto the back burners once work began on Episode 5 that same summer, but now that Earthbound Episode 5 production has wrapped, we finally got around to finishing this film.

This is also the writing debut of Alex Ridgway (probably best known as Cato from Shadow of the Pink Panther), who is the only one of us who’s actually played the Wii game A Boy and His Blob.

One other thing – at this moment, we’ve got no plans to make more episodes.  We’re looking at this as a short test film we made to experiment with making computer models and putting them into a video, nothing more.  One episodic series based on a video game is quite enough for us right now.

May 22

Ubsey Fan-Art Contest 2011

We’re huge fans of UbseyMovies – in fact, I have no idea where we would be today if it hadn’t been for their Earthbound Saga inspiring us to try our hand at an Earthbound film series.  And their other film projects have inspired us to stretch as filmmakers in several different ways.

On the way to a new shoot!

Now, in case you haven’t heard, UbseyMovies is having a fan-art / fan-video contest.  Any reason to make a goofball, Ubsey-themed video is a good reason, so of course, we’re going to be submitting an entry this year.  Yesterday was our main shooting day for the video we’re going to enter (the photo above is Phil in the car on the way to the shoot), and we got about 90% of it shot.  We’re now in the process of editing it, and I think it’s safe to say it’s unlike any video we’ve made in the past.

My estimates for release dates are almost always grossly wrong, but that being said, this video should be uploaded within the next couple of weeks.  Keep an eye out for it!

May 17

Grand Website Re-Opening!

Welcome, welcome!  You might be saying to yourself right now, “Whoa, what happened to RidgwayFilms.com?!”  Well, after being online for close to two years now, we felt it was time to tidy things up, put on a fresh coat of paint, and, most importantly, get out of the realm of animated GIFs and the plain black design.

The biggest change to the website is that we’ve updated to a WordPress design that feels much cleaner and more professional.  Pretty much all the same content from the old website is still here, but every page has been updated, expanded, and made much easier to navigate.  We’ve got RSS feed now, as well as a  comments section – yes, now you can give us direct feedback about whatever you want, directly on the website.

So, a new website is all well and good, but what’s going on in the world of Ridgway Films?  Well, one week from tomorrow, we will be launching the fifth episode in our Earthbound series.  This episode is already longer than any of the previous episodes, and hopefully it’ll be more exciting, intense, and Earthbound-y than any previous episode as well!  While you wait, have a look at the new trailer we just released:

We’ve also got some other exciting projects planned for this summer.  Stay tuned!

So enjoy the website!  If you have any suggestions or comments about the website (or anything, really), or you find something that’s broken or doesn’t work, by all means leave us a comment!  Thanks!

Note:  If, for some reason, you want to revisit the old website, we have the original site archived here.