This week in DarkTriforceFilms, I was out sick. As we finally started production for the very anticipated BACON series, we had to change up the schedule after our first day on Sunday. I was exposed to COVID after Kristina tested positive, so to be safe I stayed in for the week (I haven't tested positive yet though, so silver linings). On Sunday filming started around 9 AM but I wasn't able to get there until 4:30 PM because of the ol ball and chain that is my day job.
The morning crew had Woody, Cameron, John, Charles, and Alexis and from what I heard everything went according to plan and for once DarkTriforceFilms was able to finish something on schedule! Closer to when I arrived they were also joined by Emily (who plays Kyra) and Hunter (who was casted to be our Mystery character)! And at 4:30 we all united at John's apartment, which for some behind the scenes - was the first time any of us had ever been in a place that John lived. We're shooting the webseries all jumbled up, so the morning had them filming most of Episode 3, and the afternoon had us filming scenes for Episode 5. And while we were a little bit later than I'm sure Woody would've wanted, we finished as much as we could until we were eventually stopped by a storm that was rolling in as we were filming a scene outside. We were also offered weed by someone while filming that same scene, I think of it as a good luck charm for the rest of shooting. We had a few more days that we were supposed to shoot on this week but ultimately got moved while I was staying in for safety, but on Saturday Woody got a crew together to film some stuff for Episode 1 (I think it's episode 1, he'll correct me later). I wasn't there so I can't report much of what happened, I'd ask Woody but it's about 6 AM while I'm writing this so I don't think he's up. He sent me a few photos to post about Bacon, but they're all kind of the same photo. 
Parts of this image have been censored for spoilers
Other than that, this has been the slowest week we've had in a bit so I don't have much to say. If you want another Narrator update, it's basically done but we're going to have to do some ADR because the last few clips the wind where we were filming picks up A LOT and completely blows out the mic, making it impossible to hear anything that's being said. So that video is getting a bit of a delay! With that waiting I'll move on to most likely The Intervention, or possibly starting to edit down some old Bedpit episodes. We'll most likely be back on Twitch soon, and I'd like to run a DTV on there sometime too. I feel like there was something else I had to mention but I can not for the life of me remember what it was. So, neither will you I guess! Well, I sat on this for a couple hours and couldn't remember anything else, so Woody if you're reading this and have anything to add, let me now and I'll add it below here. Until then however, this is Logan, signing off!
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This week in DarkTriforceFilms, we scrambled to get everything done that we could before BACON starts production! While not as filled as the last few weeks were, we didn't slack TOO much this week. We filmed an entire video (besides the endcard but that doesn't count) named Time Capsule, and finally FINALLY finished filming The New Logan! That leaves us with 4 finished videos to edit with Narrator and The Intervention also on the slate. It's been so much fun to be filming so constantly and really be productive with DarkTriforceFilms recently - we had been calling this the comeback year since May, so it's good that we're actually following up with that, haha.
One of my new year's resolutions (well really the only one) was to upload more videos than the 2 that we uploaded last year and hopefully enough to finally do a proper end of the year montage video again. Right now counting the Tales From Summer Camp set, we're 1 video ahead of last year and we'll have all of these to add to it soon - along with the Gag Reels that will come with them and some extra DT Life videos and such on the side. And after a bunch of consideration - you may be seeing the elusive DarkTriforceFilms Disney vlog EVENTUALLY (it'll take A WHILE to edit). Ok, let's get into what we actually did this week now, huh? 
As tradition, here is our weekly Narrator update, this one will be really really quick, okay? We can stop talking about this soon - but hey this time it's something different than stills! It's a short video, so this week I thought I'd give a quick preview of what the editing timeline currently looks like for the video. This is right near the end, so the video will end up being like 2:30ish minutes long. There's one like big edit I have left to do right here at the end, and after that just color correcting and a lot of audio clean up. I'll say hopefully this is done by next week, but with Bacon starting production this week and every other thing I do as well, we'll see how much time I have. Now let's move onto something new that we did this week!
After the unfortunate attempt at filming Dead Man's Hill last week, we met up with John and decided to film an entirely different video named Time Capsule. This video was one I wrote like immediately after Charles and Woody mentioned wanting to bury a time capsule, and I guess it just struck a nerve in my head because this was finished basically in one day. We were also joined by Kristina Handy, who is responsible for most of the camera work in this video as we stumbled through with our skeleton crew.
We returned to our old stomping grounds for this one, heading to "The Field", a soccer field that was by my old house and has been featured in many videos between both DarkTriforceFilms and even Hamilton Productions - like The Jetpack, Project Slenderman, Spaced Out, The Spook and I'm sure it's made some other appearances - but much like with DarkTriforceFilms it seems times are changing for our beloved field! Almost all the woods and trees around the area were cleared out and there were construction videos all around (which you can see in some of the preview images) and the soccer goals and fences that once stood and surrounded the area were all gone as well. It worked a little bit in our favor since we had to dig a hole for the video, and we were a bit worried we'd get in trouble digging one in a soccer field, but they seemed to be doing some digging of themselves too so it didn't matter. Although, we were worried that now with all the construction and general openness of the area that we weren't actually allowed to be there - we were the only car parked in the parking lot of the church that owns the field, so I'm sure that we looked somewhat suspicious. But despite all of that, we were able to get the video done before the sun set, so big shoutout to Kristina, Woody, and John who all did wonderful jobs! It was nice to actually get something done with John after last week, and I think he did a great job with his performance in this and I'm excited to get around to editing it soon! And then we wrapped up the night with a great trip to Chili's. I didn't need to mention that, but I don't know it was my first time and that felt important. Anyway, want to hear an update on another video you've been hearing about for weeks now? As I said earlier, I'm happy to say that we are officially wrapped with filming for The New Logan (well technically we have 1 reshoot to do because we messed up continuity but that doesn't count)((and also technically another cameo but that filming isn't up to us so that also doesn't count))! After 3 weeks, 4 locations, and a slew of different people within it, we finished up by shooting the opening scene to the video, which you can see some stills from above - and possibly piece together some details about the plot of the video as well! I figure you should get at least some of that after hearing more and more about this each week.
It was great getting to finally finish this up as it kind of kicked off our tour of productivity, even though this isn't going to be the first of this batch of videos, in my head it feels like the start of this new era of the channel, which I originally thought The Year Without DarkTriforceFilms was going to be, but now that feels more like a prologue to it. I haven't even finished editing the first of this batch, but they all feel a bit different than that video at least in terms of how we filmed it and my personal sense of quality between them. I'll have to see what video will start being edited first after Narrator, so maybe this one will start on it's way while we wait for that last little cameo section to be filmed. But that's all we have for now, the last reshoot we need to do is already scheduled to get done in between times where we'll be filming Bacon - so we aren't too lost in finding out when it'll be done. And while we are focused on our live action content right now, we weren't all work no play - we took some time to relax in a blocky little world. 
For those of us who used to keep up with us on Twitch, you are probably familiar with our most popular series Bedpit - our Minecraft survival series that has been going since 2019! While we technically had 3.5 full seasons (Season 4 was kind of half finished, moving into the minecraft series that was on Woody's Channel) and then like 2 or 3 seasons that weren't really seasons, we had taken a bit of a break as it was becoming evident that we were getting a little minecraft'd out. But the other night a group of us got together for what we're calling a "Bedpit Reboot" and started a new world just like we started the original Bedpit - off stream. We've only played like 2 times now, testing the waters to see if we're going to keep going with this world or abandon it like the last few we tried, but so far it's looking good. Our last play session I had recording on OBS, and leading up to when we finally decide to stream I'll have it run on our twitch channel as a rerun, most likely a part of a DTV block.
As for the original Bedpit series, the entirety of Season 1 and I think most of Season 2 is up on our DarkTriforceExtras channel, and I'll have to go searching for the rest of Season 2 and 3. Recently I was going back and watching some of those old streams and I'm back to toying with the idea of cutting the streams down into shorter official episodes, but I've always had the question of where those videos would find their home at. While they could technically go on the main channel, with how many streams and seasons there have been, it would very quickly result in some clutter. So maybe they could go up here as website exclusives? Let me know what you think (you can find me on social media, I'm sure.) I think if I did it would just be Seasons 1-3. You know what, I'll put a poll up on the homepage of the website, so check that out. 
Now to wrap up this varied week, I want to thank everyone who was around to help us this week like I do every week, Woody, Charles, John, and Kristina - a bit of a smaller crew than usual, but that's okay as on Sunday, July 24th BACON officially enters production and I have a feeling that I'm going to have a lot more people to be thanking once that happens. HOLD ON BREAKING NEWS THAT HAPPENED LITERALLY AS I WAS WRITING THIS: WE ARE ONCE AGAIN THE OFFICIAL OWNERS OF DARKTRIFORCEFILMS.COM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! OH MY GOD I AM FREAKING OUT! This was a very unexpected update, so for some quick backstory for those that don't know - our website was originally a .weebly.com website, and I believe in 2020, we traded it for an official DarkTriforceFilms.com domain name. Now, originally I had just set it for a 1 year renewing subscription, but unfortunately between when we bought it and when it would be renewed, my card was compromised and cancelled and I may have forgotten to update the card on the website leading to us losing the .com domain. Now, my first thought was "oh I'll just buy it again, who would want a domain named DarkTriforceFilms.com?" but it turns out somebody did! And boy did they want my money! After looking into contacting the owner once we found out it was basically impossible to access our website during this, I was told they were asking for almost 3000 dollars for it! So of course we didn't go for that, and instead found a way to revert our website back to a .weebly domain before finally deciding on the .pizza one that we have been using for the past year - and out of the blue just now I decided to check on DarkTriforceFilms.com and it turns out that whoever had it finally let it go! And so for much much much much much less money than 3000$, I bought .com and now own it for at least the next 10 years! This truly is The Year of DarkTriforceFilms! Ok, phew - now that we've gotten through the breaking news we can actually wrap this up now. I'm working on a new homepage for the website, so hopefully you should see that soon, possibly at the same time as this is posted, perhaps you've already seen it! But anyway, that is truly all for today. What an ending, you got to see my reaction in real time to getting our original domain back! I wish you all the same luck with your domains as we have gotten today, and until then, this is Logan signing off! 
This week in DarkTriforceFilms, we had to make a lot of changes on the fly. Continuing our streak of being productive, this week consisted of continuing to film for videos that we started last week like The New Logan, new videos including one named The Intervention which I will touch on in a little bit, and an *attempt* at filming Dead Man's Hill. Speaking of that, I have to issue an apology. I lied to you last week and said that we'd be filming the new Dead Man's Hill this week, and while I can't say that we didn't film it, it's not any footage that will be seen!
On Sunday, we met up with the props and equipment we needed to finally get Dead Man's Hill done, but were very quickly met with all the obstacles that seemed to be planted to stop us from getting this video done. Since we no longer live in the neighborhood we originally filmed Dead Man's Hill in, we had to do some location scouting for a new hill to use - and we ended up deciding on one in Woody's neighborhood. We had a choice between 2, and we went with the one we thought looked better on camera. Setting up shop next to some big vehicle they had left parked after paving the road, we started to film, and this is where we came across our first issue - due to the schedule of the ol' day job, we could only start filming around 5, and this left the spot we were in with some pretty harsh shadows - you can see a little bit on John's face in the screenshots. But whenever we'd do a wide shot where we're both across from each other - John would basically be glowing and overexposed, while I was in a shadow, almost impossible to see, and this had like no way to fix. We shrugged it off and decided to go with it, since most the video took place somewhere else anyway. And it was the least of our problems we'd soon come to find out.
We usually film inside, directly outside one of our houses, or in a secluded area of a park - and because of that we don't often have to move for any random people coming through. This time, we were filming right in the middle of a neighborhood road, so multiple times we'd just get a shot set up and someone would yell "Car!", and we'd have to move the camera and everything, stalling us from getting the video done. Then we started to notice that the cars just kept coming - like there was A LOT of cars that were going to and fro on this street. It wasn't a main street or anything, so it seemed kind of random. Then we noticed they all seemed to be trying to park in front of one specific house.. and then realized that house seemed to be throwing a party.. and they had A LOT of guests!! Between every take another car would pull up and look for a new spot to park in on the street, save for the one spot we were all standing in and keeping our stuff at. By the time we ultimately scrapped this filming session, the street went from basically empty, to almost the entire length filled up with cars parked just for this one house. And so, we had to delay Dead Man's Hill once again, tired from the heat and constant back and forth of cars. While we do still plan to film it eventually, with John's schedule we can really only do Sunday's - and Bacon's production will be taking up a lot of those for the next few weeks, so it'll be a bit until we get a chance. This Sunday, we planned on filming just the beginning part of it since Carlota (who plays the villain in this video) is in Canada - but we decided to film a different shorter video so we could hopefully have a fully finished video instead. I'll update you on that next week! As for a video we did finish - let's talk about The Intervention! Much like with Dead Man's Hill, we had to make a lot of decisions on the fly for The Intervention. If not obvious from these screenshots, this video is about the infamous Woody Hamilton mustache. I started writing this video around the time Woody originally grew his mustache, which I believe was like late 2021? But at the time I couldn't think of a way to finish it. Woody eventually shaved that mustache when we went to Disney in early 2022 - but after that began to bring it back under the promise that he "would not shave until we filmed The Intervention." And so, the video was written and the days of mustached Woody were officially limited.
Close to the day we were scheduled to film, the cast of the video was changed around and now included Alexis and Kip! However, the original script had Alexis as more of a cameo, and Woody had a different idea for an ending - so the day before filming, I wrote an entirely new ending to the video and we were ready! But on our first day of filming, we met knowing we could only film half of this video that night - the final cast member in the video was a Mr. Charles Hufferd - who couldn't make it on that Tuesday afternoon. But we planned ahead! And after finishing on Tuesday, we planned to meet up again on Friday morning before Cameron headed to his day job to finish up the second half of the video and anything else we may have missed. There were a few more complications however - Kip couldn't make it Friday morning due to some issues regarding his becoming a Train Conductor (long story), and in Kip's words "Alexis was a sleepyhead", so that left just myself, Cameron, Charles, and Woody to figure out what to do with the rest of the video. And so, the ending to this video was rewritten on the fly, making it the 3rd ending that was made for it - we'll see how it comes out once it's on deck for editing. And so, this video now has 3 endings and also 3 separate endcard scenes as well! Maybe one day we'll film the alternate endings and post them here on the website or something, who knows! But these videos weren't all we did this week, we also continued working on the videos we started last week! (I know, aren't we good at our jobs?) While not an incredible amount of work was done on The New Logan this week in comparison to last week or even the other videos from this week, we did finish one more scene out at one of our local parks. I unintentionally wore all black for it - since we were doing it after the second day of The Intervention and I had to wear the same thing as the first day filming. And much like every other video we did this week, we had to make some changes and improv some stuff on the fly for this small little scene too. Due to us not having everything the script required when we shot this, we had to make due with what we had - for instance, instead of me playing a guitar on a bench, it became me playing the broken keyboard in the trunk of my car on a picnic table.
Included here with the stills from the video, are some HD ones from what we filmed last week to make up for the fact all the photos in the last report were just taken off the camera screen since I didn't have time to import and screenshot everything before I had to write the report. And now you can see a bit more of our office! We have like 1 more scene to film for this video, and like 1 last shot to do at the office for it, so hopefully this will soon join the list of videos that are ready to edit. On the subject of editing though, let's quickly touch on Narrator once again! Narrator has officially entered editing, and will hopefully be done by the time the next edition of The DarkTriforceReport comes out! So if all goes to plan, the next report should be the last time you have to hear about this video - or maybe every new edition I'll talk about the analytics of it or something. It feels like a tradition at this point, you know? All but one of these have talked about it! I wish it was a bigger video to deserve all this pomp and circumstance!
And just like everything else, even editing this video required some figuring things out on the fly. While nothing to the level of something we'd have to do for the other videos this week, it's just a lot of cutting clips back and forth in order to line up the way I need it to since a lot of this video is dependent on a voice over that we didn't have when we were filming. But overall, the editing is going swell! It's a short video so it's no big task or anything, just a few more clips to put in and then color correcting and audio mixing left! 
To conclude, I want to thank everyone who's been helping with the productions during this apparent "DarkTriforceFilms Crunch Time", from those who have been staring in multiple like Woody, Charles, and Kip or have cameoed in just one or two like Alexis, Cayley, John, or Ashley, and of course anyone who's just come to help us out like Kristina and Carlota! And to give some more exclusive insider information on BACON (the Buddy Cops spin off webseries coming soon to a DarkTriforceFilms near you), we also held auditions for a couple of the new characters this week - which was a very weird but cool experience! As a small channel that's only ever grabbed our friends for videos, having people willingly apply and read scenes that we wrote was kind of surreal! But the people we met and who have applied were all super nice and great! Maybe we'll have casting announcements soon on here, I dunno! I guess the moral of this report is to not be afraid to change things up and be ready to change things on the fly when making videos? That seems to be the common thread between everything I talked about today. Except the auditions, huh. Had to make up questions to ask them on the fly, does that count? Ah well whatever. Thanks for joining me for another one of these little newsletters that I write that nobody reads! Until next time, this is Logan signing off! 
This week in DarkTriforceFilms, we finally got off our tushies and started getting busy. After weeks of various writers meetings and sitting on top of multiple scripts, schedules finally lined up and we've begun filming and working on multiple videos! But before that, let me apologize for the gap in Report updates, but not a lot happened other than work on a top secret project (which we'll soon announce... but for now just get ready for some.. breakfast..) and so I decided to not post until we had some actual cogs moving in the DarkTriforceMachine.
On the subject of what was happening between the gap, most recently on our channel the full set from the first official show for Charles' and I's band Tales From Summer Camp was just uploaded, featuring 7 original songs! The band has been another little project we've been working on for a little over a year now, and it's been tons of fun. Super proud of our set, and it was nice to have some representation for the band on our channel since other than our own personal social medias, it hasn't been talked about much. I will say though, editing that video was a nightmare! Having not edited in a little it was a bit of a warm up for me, but premiere just wanted to give me issue after issue, the most reoccurring of which being exporting with random sections of audio missing. After 5 exports and multiple hours, I got it up however - and I'm sitting with my fingers crossed hoping that doesn't happen when exporting our future sketches. And now to cover what's been going on the last few days, we've begun filming and working on 2 new videos (with one more on the way that we'll be working on tomorrow!) - with a variety of the DarkTriforceCrew between each of them. The one most likely to come out first is Narrator, which I've talked about a few times in the other installments of the DarkTriforceReport. For those just joining us, this is the second time we've filmed Narrator, originally this video was supposed to be made in 2019, when the script was written, but it fell to the wayside up until last year in 2021 when we first had brought it back up and talked about filming it, but with 2021 being a bit of sabbatical year for us, it got pushed back even further to April of 2022 - when we finally got together and filmed it for the first time. To paraphrase, we ended up changing the setting of the video in that version, shooting at an airport parking garage in the cold weather, which ended up making us rush through shooting and change a lot of how the video was framed. Along with us forgetting or not having a tripod or a specific lens, the video that came out ended up being one I wasn't happy with and I decided to shelve it once more until we got some better weather.
Finally this weekend we got that weather and went out to our town park for some beautiful scenery and dragged this video out of development hell. It's a short one, so it didn't take too long to film - and it was nice to get out with the skeleton crew that was just myself, Kip, and Woody. I'm much happier with this version of the video already, having not even sat down to edit it yet, the shots look so much better and I'm so excited to have the final version done! Kip was super excited and down to help with this video even despite the fact we had already done it once before, as well as Woody who deserves many props for making the shots in this video look as pretty as they do! Many thanks to both of them! But that's not the only video that we've been working on this week, in fact we have a normal length DarkTriforceFilms video on the way that was written mostly by a Mr. Charles Hufferd and Woody Hamilton named The New Logan! As with most DarkTriforceFilms videos, the concept for this video was made a while ago, although this is a relatively quick turnaround in comparison to Narrator (and the video we'll be filming on Sunday) - back in March of this year I took a trip to Spain to visit my girlfriend Kristina who was studying abroad. In light of the news, Charles and Woody had the idea to write and film an entire video about replacing me while I was gone, but due to the various schedules of our crew members, the video only ended up happening well after my trip. After going through script edits at the office, we finally began filming!
The video has been a lot of fun to make so far, featuring some new faces in the form of Ashley, who's joined the crew to help out in both this video and future ones hopefully, as well as picking from other parts of the expansive DarkTriforceFilms roster. Considering the subject matter of the video, unlike most of our other videos, I'm barely in this one! And that's been a nice change of pace, getting to stay behind the camera more or less and focus more on how I want the shots to look and finally getting a chance to **attempt** to truly learn how our camera works beyond focusing and hitting record. This will also be the first official video to be partially filmed at the new DarkTriforceStudio, a large part of it takes place in the conference room and it's super cool to have the space to film in! Woody and I had talked earlier this year about how we wanted more diverse locations for our videos to take place in and the office itself offers a lot of different backdrops for that, and between this video, Narrator, and the multiple locations that The Year Without DarkTriforceFilms took place in, we seem to be meeting that want. We still have a few more scenes and straggling shots to get done for The New Logan, so this is still a bit further down the pipeline than Narrator is - we're getting used to shooting around the chaotic nature of our entire crew's schedules with everyone's various jobs outside of DarkTriforceFilms (I know, I know - why would we need anything other than this?), and so getting used to having to film videos over multiple days more akin to something like Buddy Cops 3 instead of cramming it all into one day which was how most of our older videos were made. And a big thank you and shoutout to everyone who's been involved with this one! Charles and Woody did a great job with the script and general planning for the video, and with our other cameos from Cayley and possibly even the world famous Ty "Tymoso" Morris, and of course Ashley who has been very accepting and cooperative with the "relaxed" style that we shoot our videos in. Hope to show you all more soon! 
Ok, now to wrap up this extra long edition of the DarkTriforceReport, which I guess is deserved after the few weeks gone from it - I'll leave you with updates on what's to come after this week! Obviously you'll be seeing Narrator and The New Logan up on the channel soon - but tomorrow we'll be filming another video that was stuck in production hell for a long time, and even longer when you consider that it's a remake of a video that originally came out in 2014! That's right, we're remaking the lost DarkTriforceFilms classic Dead Man's Hill! The video got taken down from YouTube after a weird and annoying battle with the copyright police considering the songs used in the video, and now lives here on the website in the Classic DarkTriforceFilms Section. After finding this out, I sat down and rewrote the entire video to be more like a modern one of our videos, however this was back in 2020! And due to the little craze sweeping the world at the time, it got pushed and pushed up until now. I'll have more to say about it next week! And finally, to shed a little more light on the little tease from the top of this report, consider this an official announcement - The Buddy Cops franchise is getting an official spinoff webseries! We've had our heads down working on this for a while now, and are gearing up to enter production! We're nailing down some final loose ends like scheduling and casting, but I'll leave you with the title of the spin off: BACON. With that, we've reached the end of the DarkTriforceReport and stuffed it back into the box from which it came. Lots of exciting stuff coming soon, and I'm super happy to be back in the swing of things! I gotta get going and remember to charge the camera batteries now, so until next time - this is Logan signing off! |
what's newThe DarkTriforceReport is a weekly blog where we inform you of everything going on this week in DarkTriforceFilms! Archives
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