We'd like to tell you Episode Two's been sitting in the wings for four months and we just forgot to hit the "post" button, but alas, the reasons for it taking so long are much more humbling. We won't bore you with details --- beyond saying that our attempts at building our own 2 TB RAID 10 ended poorly, we've gone through many more hard drives, our composer's PC crashed and needed to be replaced altogether, one of us moved (Zack, to Fort Greene, Brooklyn), family visited, we overate at Thanksgiving, blah blah blah. Then again, maybe we will bore you, but we'll save it for future posts! Regardless, we've suffered many of the pangs typical of an independent production, and we thank you for sticking with us.

In addition to the new episode, we've also made some changes to the site. Check out the new full screen option by clicking the icon in the lower right corner of the video player. Also, take a look at our Press page, which links to a couple recent interviews we've done and a few of the (mostly) nice things people have been saying about The West Side. And finally, in case you missed it in our last post, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes and download the first two episodes to your iPod or iPhone.

All that said, we're proud to release Episode Two of The West Side. For those of you returning, we hope it's worth the wait; and for those of you just joining us, welcome (and be sure to check out Episode One). And as always, tell a friend!

At long last, Episode Two | posted on November 29, 2007 3 comments

3 Comments

jump to comment form ↓
  1. Adam St.Pierre 30 Nov 2007

    Love what you’re doing guys, looks amazing
    I’ll spread the site around

  2. VC 6 Mar 2008

    Glad to see you back in action.

    I don’t know how much of this you can help, but I can hear the sound cut in and out before and after the characters speak in episode 2. It’s like you’re turning their microphones on and off, so the dialogue sounds like its been dubbed.

    I know nothing about film, but it does break the illusion a bit for me.

    Good luck and keep it up, everything else is great.

  3. Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo 27 Mar 2008

    Yeah, it’s a problem.

    The reason you’re hearing that is, we’re shooting on location. In New York City. While we’ve been successful so far at making it look empty (on our budget), we’ve had a harder time making it SOUND empty (on our budget). Basically our options are, cut out all location sound save the dialog (and leave you with the walkie-talkie effect you speak of), or leave in all the background noise of cars, people, and construction, and break the entire illusion of our ghost town.

    We tried to filter out the noise but it’s fairly wide-band, and even after trying spectral analysis in Soundbooth (what Adobe calls
    visual tools    ), there wasn’t much we can do. Alas, such are the shortcomings of no-budget, on-location, run-and-gun filmmaking.

    Any audio experts out there have any tips?

    Anyway, glad you like it. Episode Three’s coming any day now.

Leave a comment