A couple of weeks ago we shot two different episodes for Super Knocked Up. And if you’re just joining our super-cool blog, Super Knocked Up is our upcoming web series and graphic novel about a female super-villain who gets knocked up by a superhero :) Pretty sweet, right? Anyway, like any shoot, no matter how much you plan, shit always happens threatening to derail the production. And we had plenty of challenges to deal with on this particular weekend.
Monthly Archives: February 2011
Who Comes Up With These Ideas, Anyway?
Last weekend we shot another episode of Super Knocked Up (well, technically it was out second time shooting an episode we already shot once, but never mind that). It was a great (although technically punishing) shoot, and I learned something all up and coming actors should always remember: if you have an idea about your character or a scene, don’t be a pansy – let your director know what that idea is!
So here’s the rundown on how I came to realize actors play an important role in how a scene, and ultimately the finished product plays out.
How the hell do you get tickets to Comic-Con?
Hey all! After taking a week off from the blog to get ready for our two shoots this past weekend, we’re back with a vengeance! Or at least we’re back :) The shoots went great, and we have plenty of stories to share with you about them in the next couple of weeks.
But for today’s blog, I’m going to write about San Diego Comic Con, the mother of all comic conventions. And one we will not be going to because tickets (they’re actually called badges, but I’m going to call them tickets cause that’s how I roll) sold out this past Saturday when they went on sale.
Here’s the deal. Mark (who plays Captain Amazing in the web series) and I were going to go out to Comic-Con in July. Mark went last year and had a blast. I’ve never been so figured it’d be a great time. More importantly I thought it’d be the perfect place to spread the word about Super Knocked Up and hand out some of our super-cool postcards :)
A couple of months ago, Comic-Con had tickets on sale through their website. So I got up super-early in the morning. I’m like a vampire (like a cool vampire from Forever Knight – anyone remember that show?). I stay up all night and sleep during the mornings. So this wasn’t my idea of a good time, but I figured for Comic-Con, it was worth it. Only problem is every other person on the planet who wanted to go to the con was trying to buy tickets at the same time. And the website crashed and no one was able to get tickets. Blah!
A couple of weeks later, they tried again. And hey guess what? The system crashed again. Everyone got up super-early twice to get tickets and both times we were denied. Woohoo! What fun this was proving to be. Then they did some kind of lottery thing where they let a small number of people buy tickets testing out the system. And finally this past Saturday, they put all tickets on sale.
The problem for us is that we were shooting an episode of Super Knocked Up on Saturday. There was no way we could go online to get tickets as we were working our asses off trying to make a totally kick-ass episode :) We finished the shoot on Saturday, but then I had to get ready for Sunday’s shoot, which was going to be one of our trickiest shoots of the whole series: the big opening fight scene. I wound up being up 38 hours straight (well, okay, I got to sleep for a whopping 45 minutes during that 38 hours) and definitely was not thinking about comic con tickets. Mark (who wasn’t on Sunday’s shoot) tried to get them Sunday morning for both of us. But by that time every single ticket was sold out. Not just the four-day passes, which are super-popular. But every single one-day pass was also sold out. I was like, “You gotta be fucking kidding me.” In one day, actually probably in a matter of a couple of hours or less, every single ticket was sold. What the fuck?
This isn’t the way it was last year. Mark told me tickets went on sale in November then and they were still available in February when he bought his. But the Comic-Con people made such a big deal about everything selling out they created a frenzied panic among all of us so we all had to try to get them on the day they went on sale. The really frustrating thing is that we were working hard making a superhero web series that I think will totally appeal to the people who go to comic-con. But because of that, we got shut out of going ourselves. It seems like the only way to get tickets to comic-con is to attend it and buy tickets for the following year while you’re at the current year’s con. But if you can’t ever get tickets to even get to one comic-con, it becomes this vicious circle you can never escape. Arrgh! (that’s arrgh as in frustration, not my pirate impersonation, though pirates are awesome).
So needless to say I’m bummed. But Mark made a great point. That it’s probably better for us to hit up the smaller conventions like we’ve been doing. And he’s totally right. At the smaller or medium-sized cons, we can really get to know people and make more of a connection with them. And, hopefully, build a really cool fan base. At something gigantic like Comic-Con, we’d probably just get lost in the shuffle. So, we’re looking forward to attending other conventions and meeting some really cool people. We’re already booked Albany Comic Con and Boston Comic Con with more to come!
And those of you who did get tickets to Comic-Con, I genuinely hope you have a great time! Maybe one of these days, I’ll get to see it for myself :)