Well you should cause he’s awesome. Joel is a multi-talented young man I met on YouTube who is under-loved in my personal opinion. A man with an incredible voice and sharp wit, Joel has helped me out on a few projects of my own. He wrote and sang the new Receptionist theme I now use, and he also wrote and sang the montage/theme song to my 2008 YouTube horror movie Collaboration movie, The Bloody Door. See below for some examples of his work, then check out his site and channel. Enjoy!

Here is the video shots he did for The Bloody Door song. I needed a song written about this villain on the Internet. If you watched his video your brain caught fire. I asked Joel if he’d write this song that would go over a montage of people dying…he took to task and wrote this in 1 day.

He also does humorous videos and other strange things that fall out of his head. I enjoy this one.

Now here’s Joel doing some live songs he wrote all by himself. This one is pretty damn cool.

OK, consider your whistle wet. Now check out his website and channel. Subscribe to him!

Joel’s website

Joel’s YouTube Channel

Much love

Travis

Discussion: Read 1 Comment »

My independent web series, The Receptionist, seems to be the only artistic thing I do which occasionally puts a little scratch in my wallet. Mostly, I believe, this is because I do it alone and my budgets never reach any higher than $0.00. With no one to pay back I am the sole beneficiary of all the George Washington’s that come my way due to my construction paper world. Oh, how lovely it is to pay my phone bill every so often!

My first paid gig as The Receptionist was nearly 3 years ago when I had just started my channel on YouTube. Back then there weren’t as many personalities and people clawing tooth and nail to be popular. It was much easier to build an audience and a small group of devoted people had found me. An advertising representative recognized my tiny audience and paper-laced madness and contacted me and a few others to create online promo’s for their new movie, Let’s Go to Prison. We were to basically do a video in our own style with the idea of presenting tips on surviving prison life. I was paid a small fee which gassed up my car and got me a few nights of Taco Bell. Here is that video:

 

After that, my channel continued to grow. It was never a subscriber behemoth or anything, but people were discovering my shorts every day and I was developing a bigger audience. So I kept on making um! Suddenly, I am contacted by Comedy Central. They love The Receptionist and are looking to buy content for their web division (which later became atom.com). The CC bought 5 of my old episodes and commissioned me to create 5 new ones as well. This was a very exciting opportunity as I was making these shorts just like I was before, only now I was being paid. The money was nice and allowed me to pay some bills and move out of my 1 room apartment and into a place with dividing walls and rooms with names like, bedroom and kitchen. Here’s an episode I made specifically for Comedy Central:

The Receptionist: Frog Sucks

When I finished the new 5 for CC, they did not hire me to make any more. They played on T.V. a few times but eventually (like most web content) they were forgotten. I went back to YouTube and brushed the cobwebs off the channel. I never started making these for money, and money wasn’t going to stop me from continuing to make them. Thus began, what I call, The Receptionist: Season 2. I was back in production and the episodes were larger in scope, using more of my world and sprinkling in more music than before. Sure I was now a YouTube partner, but anyone who is a partner can tell you (aside from a few choice and lucky individuals) that the money barely exists. If you’re a partner for the money then you are in big trouble. So, recently YouTube contacted me (and a few other’s) to create a promotional piece for HP. They were holding a contest and needed example videos. They would pay me to make a 1 minute video about anything I wanted. I just had to be creative and not show my face. I was going to be making a new video anyway, so why not get a little greenback for it? I created this video for YouTube and HP:

3 years running, and The Receptionist is still the champ for money brought in from artistic endeavour. Perhaps someday I will be paid to make feature films, but until that black magical day arrives, I will be enjoying the process of the construction paper short…and if it happens to pay a bill here and there….so be it.

Much love

Travis

Discussion: Read 6 Comments »

Here’s what I didn’t need in my insanely busy and productive life right now; FlickChart! I spent (no fucking joke) 8 straight hours on this thing the other day. The creators of this site are genius. The idea is simple enough. They present you with two movies, for example, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Reservoir Dogs . Your job is to decide which is better. There is no SKIP button. You are forced to make  the call before they present you with two new options. The site then begins to chart the films, putting them in order. Every vote alters the order of your films, creating an amazing way to keep a BEST OF list. 

That’s the site in a nutshell, but allow me to expand on why I really think this site is brilliant for cinephiles. As I was playing around on it, a few of my co-workers began looking over my shoulder. Before long they were just as involved as I was, blurting out who they would vote for. I realized that this was a fun game for all. Yes, good clean fun. And then it happened. The site decided to play an insanely cruel trick on us and flipped over Jaws vs Alien . Our jaws (I swear the pun was not intended) hit the ground so hard that it rattled our skulls and forced our eyeballs to hang off our faces at nose level. Jaws vs Alien? How does one even begin to place one on a higher pedestal. Both are near-perfect (if not perfect) movies and both mean the world to me. We sat around for over 25 minutes discussing both movies in detail, and that’s when it hit me. This amazing site actually encourages and inspires conversations about film. It forces you to re-examine movies and what actually made them great. The opposing movies will inspire new insight to each other and get you thinking about themes, dialog, characters and story. Suddenly it was no longer a good way to waste time, but a educational way to deconstruct films. 

Here’s some of the harder battles I have had to pick so far:

Raiders of the Lost Ark vs Back to the Future

A Nightmare on Elm Street  vs Gremlins

The Shining vs Brazil

Raging Bull vs Network

The site has not officially launched and it is still in BETA testing form. To sign up and play go HERE. They will send you an invitation to join. Don’t get discouraged though. It took over a week before I got my invitation after I signed up. It’s well worth the wait.

Much love

Travis

Discussion: Read 3 Comments »

What’s that you say? There’s a website in which I can get my daily dose of…what now? Werewolf news? Do werewolves make news?

I found this great site because this great site found me. Werewolf-news.com. It was linked as a comment and I grew very curious. Clicked on it to find that they had featured my Receptionist werewolf musical, Harry Palms. I could not have been more delighted. I played around on the site and found it very interesting. For anyone who loves this cursed bunch of monsters, this is a great site to find movie news, werewolf art, werewolf fiction and much more. 

Check it out HERE.

Much love

Travis

Discussion: Read 1 Comment »

I consider myself very fortunate to be surrounded by talented friends. They are often great sources of inspiration and allow me the pleasure to promote them. I met Riki Lindhome about seven years ago when she came to a party we threw out our house (the very same party in which some drunk asshole peed in my guitar). She was brand spanking new to Los Angeles and had come out here to be an actress. We got to talking and discovered she lived across the street from us. We quickly became friends and I even ended up casting her in my very first short film…a film that no one will ever see due to its mind-numbing badness (no fault of hers, all fault of mine…yikes!).

Riki went on to play some pretty great roles in some pretty great flicks. She was Hillary Swank’s sister in Million Dollar Baby, The evil nurse in Changeling and bad girl, Sadie in The Last House on the Left .  She’s done plenty more of the whole acting thing, but I’m actually here to promote her band/musical duo. Cause they rock. And are hilarious.

Garfunkel & Oats is best described by me as two girls armed with guitars, keyboards, ukuleles, keytars, and flutes, sing funny songs that can be  heartfelt, topical or of-the-wall. Playing Oates, to Riki’s Garfunkel is Kate Micucci who you might best recognize for her role on Scrubs. Together they have been charming live audience all around the Los Angeles area as well as maintaining a growing YouTube channel where they post songs and music videos. I highly recommend checking out their website for music and show dates: Garfunkel & Oats, as well as their youtube page for videos: rikilind. The video I have posted here is one of my favorite songs from them. Enjoy!

Much love 

Travis

Discussion: Read 3 Comments »

I’ve always oddly been fascinated by the legend of the vagina dentata…or to put it poetically, a pussy with teeth. When I was a young boy-like creature I remember watching the gore classic, Blood Diner , were two crazy brothers hold a ritual to raise a Goddess from the dead. When they actually succeed, she has this amazingly enormous vagina dentata and bites off a dudes head! From that moment on I was changed.

Just last year, another indie film made a few waves  about this topic. Teeth
was a coming of age story in which a young girl has to face more than the typical horrors of high school. She also has one of those pesky dentatas. Recently, my girlfriend (who shares a love of the dark and bizarre with me) decided that the world needed a website devoted to the glorious beast that is the fur burger chomper. Hence, DENTATA.net was born. WARNING: images on dentata.net could disturb and horrify a large percentage of the population, causing eye bleedage and (for the fellas) penis inverting. Click at your own risk.

My lady, Shannon Hourigan, used a collage of her own photographs as well as others and blended them together to create a variety of women whom all suffer (or are blessed, depeneding on how you look at it I guess) from a case of vag-teeth. It’s a surreal world she has created in which the monster is accepted and on the loose!

When she showed me the site I got excited. It was so sick and twisted that I simply had to put my own thumb print on it. “Let me write a vagina dentata comic strip for this site!” I said with a exclamation mark. She agreed and I soon gave birth to my VERY short lived comic, Polly and Virginia. It followed the “adventures” of a young woman named Polly and her sass talking, dick chomping vagina, Virginia. The strip went for four episodes before I abandon it, but I still think it could be a pretty funny strip if I ever had the time and maybe someone else to illustrate it.

 

To clarify, this is not a site devoting to male hating or bashing. It is, in fact, a very humorous and artistic look at one of mythologies most horrible creatures. Check out the site. It’s a lot of fun and TOTALLY suitable for work (cough cough).

Dentata.net

Much love

Travis

Discussion: Read 4 Comments »