Juggling Fire Irons

Can you believe it’s almost March? Usually this time of year is slow and boring and seems to go on forever, but that changes when you’re in post-production on your movie. We’re marching along – music is nearly finished, we’re doing a spotting session for foley next week, and we only have two reels of the film left to color-correct.

But enough about “Fugue;” this post is about other filmmaking news. The more I make movies, the more I realize it’s about having a lot of irons in the fire. If we only focused on one thing at a time, we’d finish one or two movies in our lifetime. So instead, the goal is to work on different aspects of several projects all at once.

Right now, for example, I’m pitching a couple new ideas, working on outlines for more movies, finishing a comic book adaptation, and working a full-time job in addition to the “Fugue” post. And all our film friends are doing the same thing.

Barbara, our talented director/producer, gave a great interview a few weeks back to the website “Fatally Yours.” It brings up a lot of intelligent points about low-budget filmmaking and women in horror. Check it out:

http://www.fatally-yours.com/interviews/interview-with-director-barbara-stepansky/

Also, our good friend-of-the-film Christoph Baaden has been working on a feature-length documentary at the same time we were making “Fugue.” He just found out his movie “Hood to Coast” got into the South by Southwest Film Festival! Not that he needs our PR, but go check out his website and support his doc:

http://www.hoodtocoastdocumentary.com

Last but not least, our lead actress Abby recently had her short film “Mercy” screen at the Santa Monica Film Festival. It’s Abby’s directorial debut and very mature, well-acted movie. There’s a great article about it here:

http://www.smdp.com/Articles-c-2009-11-13-65005.113116_Festival_features_films_by_locals_for_local_patrons.html

Congrats to all our friends, and hopefully we’ll have some good “Fugue” news coming our way soon!

Why I Hate Ventriloquists

You ever start reminisce about something with your friends, and none of them knows what you’re talking about? You go over all the little details, confident they were right there with you, and then you realize what you thought was a memory was actually a dream?

I had an experience like that the other day, but in reverse.

Ever since Claire and I rescued Gus from the imploding teleporter, it’s been a bit easier for us to hang out. Our schedules don’t match up a lot, but when we do have breaks at the same time, we usually try to eat together. We’ve had a few meals together at this point, and have gotten pretty comfortable talking to each other.

(And I don’t know if this is some kind of PTSD, “new appreciation for life” thing I’ve gained since the accident, but I haven’t been as focused on trying to take things to the next level with her. Right now, it’s cool just hanging out.

(Okay, that and I’m still not sure if she knows I tried to kiss her. And I’m sure as shinola not about to broach that topic just yet.))

So a couple days ago. Claire and I are sitting in the caff, splitting a just-add-water Jumbo Pak of Thai Garlic Noodles for dinner. (Not bad, BTW – check your local Army/Navy Surplus store.)

“Does this lockdown bother you at all?” She suddenly asked, looking at me over her chopsticks.

“Not really,” I said. “I guess it should, huh? Essentially being trapped a half-mile underground … knowing they might turn off the power any second … your life hanging by a thread.”

“Just like Christmas with the family,” she smirked. “But it’s weird, I feel the same way. Like it doesn’t matter if I HUNGRY HUNGRY SO SO HUNGRY.”

I blinked. That was weird. “Here,” I said, pushing the noodles toward her. “I had a big breakfast.”

“Thanks.” She slurped from the bowl. “It’s not like I don’t care if we all die. I just have this feeling that everything SHINY RING? NO! HUNGRY! BAD FOOD HERE!”

“Okay,” I said. “You want me to make something else?”

She frowned. “Why? You don’t like these?”

“No, you don’t like them.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You just said in a caveman voice you didn’t like them!”

“No, I didn’t.” She frowned. “Caveman voice?”

“You said you were hungry, so I gave you the noodles, then you said –“

“ALL BAD. HIDE NOW. FIND FOOD IN DARK TIME.”

“There!” I shouted. “Right there. You said you had to hide!”

“Joe,” Claire replied carefully. “I didn’t say anything.”

I looked around, confirming we were the only ones in the cafeteria. I didn’t have a walkie on me, my Blackberry was turned off, and the comm system –

“Fucking Phildo,” I cursed, going over to the voice panel that was placed near the door of every room in the BP9 bunker. I clicked off the comm connection, confident he wouldn’t be able to prank me again.

I turned back to Claire. “Let’s see him screw with me n—“

“OW! BAD FEELING! BAD BAD BUTT FEELING!”

I had been staring right at Claire when the voice boomed out. And her mouth had been shut tighter than a drum of toxic waster.

“Um,” I began. “You wouldn’t happen to be a ventriloquist, by any chance?”

While she chewed on that one, the voice boomed again. “BAD BUTT BURNING! LAVA PAIN! ANUS FIRE SPRAYING FROM – OHHHHHHHHHHHH.”

“Joe?” I blinked, realizing Claire was jiggling my shoulder. I didn’t remember her walking across the room. “You totally zoned – BETTER NOW. SLEEP UNTIL DARK TIME.”

“You know what?” I said. “I think I need some sleep. I am feeling a little weird.”

“Good idea,” she said, looking concerned. “And if it persists, we’ll have you see Plankton.”

“Great idea. Top notch. Enjoy the rest of your – YES. SLEEP UNDER SHINY RING. You really didn’t hear that just now?” I asked desperately.

“Hear what?” she replied.

“Nothing. Good night.” And I fled back to my room.

Maybe it is post-traumatic stress from the accident. At least, that’s what I’m trying to tell myself. I’m trying because if that’s not the case, then I have to accept the alternative:

Something must have happened to me during the accident.

All Systems Normal

Okay, so maybe that last entry was a little melodramatic.

Yes, my body was covered in a substance that the scientific community has yet to comprehend. Yes, the bunker has been sealed off from the outside world for the last six or seven days. And yes indeed, everything BP9 was working on was destroyed in the accident.

But honestly, I haven’t been that upset about it. Usually I’m a fairly passionate guy – witness several of the former blog entries – but since the explosion, I’ve been quite the mellow yellow. You know how it is when you’ve been sweating all day, and you get that layer of dried salt all over your body? Then you take a shower, and it feels so good to scrub off the caked-on grime? I feel like that, but with bad vibes instead of sweat.

It’s like my personality’s been dry-cleaned or something. Every time I start to think about the drawbacks of our situation, the fact that we’ll probably die, and even that my current outlook is probably the result of some as-yet-unidentified dark energy tumor, a little thought pops into my head – On the universal scale, this ain’t a big deal.

You guys know I don’t hold too much truck with hippie meditation crap. But this feeling? It’s pretty friggin’ awesome.

Let me step back a bit. After the explosion, Plankton and the other labcoats spent a few days taking various samples from my body and analyzing them down to the particle level. When they were forced to admit that I hadn’t been contaminated in any way they could see, they let me out of quarantine to see what had happened.

The main lab was a wreck. The wormhole entryway had completely vanished in the accident, and the exit door was in pretty bad shape. Claire had been completely shielded from the dark energy by Yours Truly, but Gus had not only taken some to the face, but both of his legs had been severed just below the knee. He’s still in a coma as I write this.

The bunker locked down automatically, and standard Area 51 procedure is that it stays that way for at least 30 days. We have plenty of food, water, and air, and inspecting every square inch of the bunker for contaminants will certainly keep us all busy for the next three weeks. So far, it seems like there are no major toxic situations for us to worry about.

However, I have noticed some weird messes cropping up in the last couple days. Three puddles of goo, to be exact, about six to eight inches in diameter, all in dark, secluded corners.

Now I’ve seen (and cleaned) my share of bizarre crap during the last two plus years at Homey Airport. I’ve come across plasma spills that have eaten through three feet of steel, I’ve vacuumed up fog banks of toxic gas, I’ve even subdued a batch of sentient, ambulatory orange goo.

But the puddles I’ve been seeing are different from all of that. For starters, they don’t smell bad. Usually the first warning sign of something funky comes through the nose, whether it’s dog poo, fridge mold, or Grandma’s il-conceived attempt at Salisbury Steak. This stuff actually attracted me to it with a pleasant (if incongruous) mixture of lavender and baked bread.

It also has the consistency of a medium hold hair gel. Semi-difficult to clean up, but not intolerable. And the more I move it, the more pleasant odor it releases. Color-wise, it appears clear, but as you move it around, you can see that it catches the light and reflects it back in rainbow colors, kind of like the shimmer of an oil slick in water.

The first couple times, I simply mopped it up, enjoying the scent and assuming one of the scientists had spilled their top-secret hair products. But the third time, I noticed something really cool.

I was wiping off the counters toward the back of Research Room #2, trying to get caught up on some cleaning while everyone was asleep. Again, I noticed how pleasureable it was to occupy my hands, and how the work didn’t irritate me like it used to. That lavendery/bread smell reached my nose, and I found another puddle of the shimmery gel substance in the corner.

Instead of immediately going for the hand-vaporator, though, I dipped a latex-covered finger into the substance. I lifted it closer to inspect the stuff, and saw my fingertip had disappeared.

Before the accident, this might have made me freak out. But with my new mellow mantra running through my head, I chose instead to prod my seemingly missing digit. It was indeed still there, covered evenly by the fragrant gel. As I poked the stuff, my finger shimmered underneath, and I realized whatever this was, it was bending the light around it.

Whatever these puddles were made of, they effectively worked an invisibility lotion. Weird, but certainly not outside the bounds of all the other hinky shit I’ve seen down here. So I scooped a little into a sample jar, vacuumed up the rest, and resolved to mention it off-handedly at breakfast the next day.

But when I casually asked if the invisibility project was also going to be set back by the accident, the other labcoats at the table looked at me like I was nuts. Not only is there no invisibility project connected to BP9, but as far as I’ve been able to find, there’s nothing like it anywhere at Dreamland. Which raises one pretty big question:

Where the hell is this stuff coming from?

Human Error

I don’t have a lot of time to post this.

There’s been a bad accident, really bad, and the whole bunker’s been placed on lockdown. There’s no getting in or out, and I may not even be able to send emails soon, so I need to get all this down in case I don’t make it out of here.

Okay. Calming breath. Let me back up and explain.

Like I said last time, we’d proved teleportation could work. After a week of checking Arthur’s remains for abnormalities (there weren’t any), the labcoats sent about 20 more small mammals through the teleportation wormhole, and they all came through fine.

So this morning, they decided it was time to move on to humans. I guess usually they’d usually do a few thousand more tests before making that leap, but the top brass has been threatening to shut down the whole project, so Plankton decided he needed some definitive results.

The soldiers drew straws, and three of them were selected to go through the teleporter: let’s call them Wilbur, Neil, and Gus. They all put on a more streamlined version of spacesuit, complete with air supply, video recorders, and a couple defensive weapons. (In case of what, I don’t know, but it’s the military. They need their guns.)

All three were strapped into the seats, and Plankton started up the teleporter. The wormhole appeared just like it had for the last week, and the army guys were sucked inside the funnel, disappearing.

That’s when everything went to hell. The second wormhole appeared, but when the seats shot out, they were empty. A whole minute passed. Still nothing. General Hard-Ass suggested sending a camera in, but just as he and Plankton started to argue over the merits of this, an explosion ripped out of the second wormhole.

It wasn’t your classic, Hollywood-action fireball, either. It appeared to be made of translucent green plasma, coating the lab equipment. Directly following that, one of the soldiers appeared out of the wormhole: Gus.

His face was streaked with Mountain Dew-colored plasma, and his suit looked like it had been through the Hundred Years’ War. He was pulling himself out of the wormhole by his hands, when his lower end appeared to catch on something. He screamed.

Claire was the first one to react. She ran out of the control room, not even bothering to put on a contamination suit. When I saw she was going to help Gus, I ran down after her.

Gus was scrabbling at the ground, eyes horse-wild behind his slime-covered visor. Claire and I pulled on his arms, but whatever had his other end wasn’t letting go. A hulking shape started to appear in the dim murk of the wormhole.

“Hold on to him!” I yelled, and grabbed a fire axe off the wall. The thing was in the wormhole was getting closer. I still couldn’t see what it was, but I sure as shit didn’t want to find out.

I brought the axe down on the dark energy supply hose.

Time and gravity seemed to suspend for a long moment. As the axe split the hose, a purply-black substance floated into the room, cascading over my chest, causing everything it touched to float lazily into the air. It was actually a pretty peaceful, if you took away the whole “abandoning the laws of physics” terror that latched on to my brain.

I looked around, seeing Claire almost had Gus’ entire body through the wormhole. Only his legs were still inside, just below the knee. I wondered briefly why they had chosen to make the teleporter suits that exact shade of grey, and then the contamination mechanism kicked on.

The dark energy was sucked from the room, everything around me crashed to the ground, and without the power to sustain it, the teleporter folded in on itself, crushed within the first wormhole. The second wormhole closed too, neatly severing Gus’ legs.

There was a second explosion, this one completely silent. A ring of blue energy shot through the room, and as it passed through me, the lab, the people, even the machines seemed to break into their primal components and be spread out along an infinite spectrum. Maybe it was the shock, but for a second I thought I could see everything at once – the individual hairs on Claire’s head, the cloven marrow in Gus’ leg bones, the rivets in the screws of one of the seats.

Then everything snapped back into place, skin upon muscle upon bone, and I locked eyes with Claire. She looked just as shocked as I felt.

“You’re so pretty,” I blurted, then blacked out.

And I woke up here, in the sick bay. No idea how long I’ve been out or even if I’m still alive in the traditional sense. Thankfully, they left my phone in my pocket, so I was able to get all this –

I can hear them at the door. This may be the last thing I write. If it is, make sure my story gets out. Don’t let them cover this up. Tell everyone –

One Small Step For Hamsters

They’ve done it.

It's been a week of nearly round-the-clock tests, failures, and really messy clean-ups by Your Humble Narrator, but Black Project 9 has successfully teleported a hamster named Arthur.

After my near-miss kiss with Doc Hotness -- sorry, Claire – she threw herself back into her work, doing calculations for nearly two days straight. At the end of it, it only took them imploding a dozen or so small mammals before they worked out the kinks.

And at 9:15 PM last night, they teleported Arthur. He’s a cute little guy with tan and white spots, and I was already envisioning sponging his adorable fur into a bucket when this test failed.

Claire placed him gently in a little car seat thingy with a harness, and turned on the teleporter. (I think they’d realized I knew what was going on, so I was allowed to watch.) The teleporter itself is a metal cylinder about 15 feet wide and 20 yards long. It’s wrapped in power cables and ends in a six-foot-thick titanium plate. The labcoats have nicknamed the plate “Splat City,” because when a test doesn’t work, that’s where the subject ends up in a Jackson Pollock-esque puddle of gore.

Again, I’m fuzzy on the details, but the general idea is the cylinder opens a wormhole in the titanium plate, the subject steps through, and comes out the terminus of the wormhole on the opposite side of the room.

That’s if it works. When the calculations are a teensy hair off, the subject is simply sucked into the event horizon, turned inside out, and flattened at a sub-atomic level. It’s a hell of a diet, but you won’t look very good in a bathing suit.

I’m sure all this was going through Claire’s head as she strapped little Arthur to his car seat. But she came back into the control room looking very professional, and ordered the team to power up the machine.

The cylinder started to spin, drawing power from the dark matter reservoirs on the other side of the bunker. Within minutes, it was rotating like a nuclear-powered carnival ride. Arthur’s car seat was suspended in the middle by a gimble, and a monitor showed that he was pretty calm despite the incredible noise.

A black spiral appeared in the center of the titanium plate. The labcoats started to get excited. This had happened a couple times before, but it had never stabilized. This time, however, the spiral grew and grew.

Suddenly, the titanium plate was sucked down an endless funnel. The scientists all held their breath, and Plankton punched a button labeled “Release.”

Arthur’s car seat unhooked, and he rocketed down the metal cylinder, vanishing into the wormhole.

A millisecond went by. Then two. The silence was deafening, especially considering the teleporter was making an awful racket.

Then there was a huge flash of blue light, a deafening crack like thunder, and a second miniature wormhole opened across the testing room. Arthur’s car seat shot out of the funnel, was caught by a sling contraption, and with the reflexes of a much younger man, Professor Plankton killed the power.

The cylinder stopped turning and the wormholes vanished back into nothingness. Still, the labcoats held their breath. Arthur could look like a microwaved can of Spaghetti-O’s for all we knew.

“Claire,” the professor said, and she quickly made her way into the testing room to check the hamster.

“He’s okay!” she shouted, and the scientists erupted into cheers. Champagne corks popped, Fred and Barney kissed like high school kids, and even General Hard-Ass allowed himself a thin approximation of a grin.

Claire came back into the control room, cradling Arthur and beaming at me.

“Simplicity,” she breathed before being surrounded by the other labcoats.

And sure, the little tan-and-white furball’s insides are being dissected and probed as we speak, but he’ll always be remembered as the first living thing to travel 50 yards in two seconds. And I, the lowly janitor, was there to witness it.

Now the real fun begins. Once the tests are done and a couple more hamsters are sent through, BP9’s moving on to the main event:

They’re going to teleport a human.

Q & A

Things have been slow here the past week. And since some of you have been writing in with questions about Area 51, myself, and the general truthfulness of this blog, I thought I’d take a few moments and answer some of them. Here goes:

Do you really work at Area 51?

Yes.

Then how are you posting these things without getting caught?

As I’ve said before, all the names and some of the situations have been changed to maintain anonymity. But as an added protection, I’m not the one who actually posts the entries. The blog is set up and run by a friend of mine, who shall remain confidential in order to avoid a nice vacation to Guantanamo Bay. I send him emails with the postings in code, and he puts them on Blogger. There’s also a time lag of five to eight weeks from when the events actually take place, which keeps the brass from connecting the dots.

Hey d00d! alot of the crap you talk about seems liek bullshit. Explain yourself!

Like it says in the blog title, I’m a janitor, not a scientist. I fully admit that I don’t understand some of these bigger science-y concepts. I try to self-educate via the Internet, but if I get some of my facts/numbers/laws of the universe wrong, oh well. I chose playing “The Legend of Zelda” over doing well in Particle Physics 202.

If you can’t leave the bunker, what do you do for fun?

Well, none of us have that much free time. But when I do, I tend to work out, watch movies, or play games. The bunkers have a great on-demand video service, as well as the latest consoles. It was pretty surreal to play the “Area 51” game while sitting in a shielded bunker a half-mile underneath the real Area 51. Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Wordscraper on Facebook.

How exactly do you write your blog entries?

There’s plenty of computers in the BP9 bunker (fun fact: Area 51 is entirely PC-based), but since all data is downloaded to central servers, I write most of the entries on my Blackberry. It’s still possible for the tech guys to intercept my outgoing emails, but it’s certainly safer than leaving copies lying around on a hard drive. I wrote a simple app for my phone that immediately converts my entries to look like boring regular emails.

Why are you doing this? Don’t you know you could be jailed without trial for like, the rest of your life if the government finds out?

First off, thanks for being concerned about my safety. But since my blog traffic isn’t quite equal yet to say, YouPorn, I think I’m still flying comfortably under the radar. And secondly, to answer the question, I was tired of living in a bubble. Even though I work with all this top-secret stuff, I don’t really get the chance to share it with anybody. I suppose I wanted to feel a bit more like a real person, like I was having an effect on someone, even if it’s only a couple folks in the Midwest.

So thanks for that. As for work, it’s been quiet. Doc Hotness/Claire has been working away at her new equations, and the scuttlebutt is that we may start up testing in a few days. Which hopefully won’t mean more exploding animals for me to clean up.

I’ll keep you posted.

Date-us Interruptus

Sorry about that. I needed a couple days to process the absurdly bad luck train-wreck that is my romantic life. Here’s what went down:

A couple nights ago, I was cleaning an animal transport cubby after another messy teleportation failure. I was finally starting to get the blood to come off, when Doc Hotness burst into the lab, tears in her eyes.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid!” She cursed, clearly not realizing I was in the back corner. “Why are you so dumb, you dumb, dumb-ass … DUMMY?!” She knocked a stack of computations to the floor. She was about to do the same with a rack of test tubes, when I cleared my throat.

“You’re welcome to throw all the paper you want. But glass is more of a pain to clean up.”

“Shit,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone was here. Sorry.” She scooped up the papers clumsily. “I should go. I have to … work.”

But instead, she sank to the floor, tears in her eyes.

“So it’s going good, huh?”

She laughed bitterly. “If our goal was to explode cute, furry creatures, I’d be a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize.”

I made my way to her side. “You know, I think there’s something to be said for working too hard. When was the last time you were up top?” She looked confused. “You know, on the surface? With the stars? Outside?”

“Oh. Two weeks, I guess. Maybe three?”

“Well, if you haven’t seen Orion’s Belt from the wing of a stealth jet, you haven’t really lived.”

That got a real laugh, and she agreed to take a walk around the airstrip with me. I snagged a bottle of wine from the fridge, met her at the elevator, and we went to the surface.

Area 51 is kind of bleak during the day, but at night, it’s downright pretty. There’s no blazing heat melting the skin off your bones, and the visibility of the stars is amazing.

Doc Hotness (whom I suppose we should now call Claire) and I strolled down the line of parked aircraft, looking up at the stars and taking slugs out of the wine bottle. The night sky was so clear, you could see the spiral arm of the Milky Way.

“I just thought I’d be better at this,” Claire told me. “My whole life, I’ve been able to count on my brain to solve things. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll find out. If I don’t understand, I’ll break it down into manageable chunks. But this … it’s just a complete ...”

“Clusterfuck?” I suggested.

“Exactly,” she laughed. “We’re implementing technology without knowing the full extent of what it can do, or even how it works.”

“What does Plankton say?” I asked, passing her the bottle.

“Oh, he’s too busy trying to keep the general from pulling the plug on the whole show. The military never thought this was a very viable plan, and if we don’t show some results soon, the whole project’ll be scrapped.”

“But BP9’s in one of the biggest labs at Dreamland. I thought we were a priority.”

“Yeah, right. They stuck us down there because they thought something was going to go wrong, and they wanted the option of sealing us off in case some idiot like me screwed the pooch.”

We climbed up on the wing of a dusty Blackbird Stealth, leaning back and looking up at the sky.

“My dad used to take me up in his planes,” I told her. “And once we’d get up high enough, all the stuff on the ground would become really simple. You know, a tree would become a green dot. A house would become a black square. And up there, it was easy to see where things were.

“Maybe that’s what you need to do,” I said, looking into her blue-grey eyes. “Step back from the problem a little bit. Simplify.”

We were staring at each other in that way where everything else drops out. The stars wheeled overhead. My heart pounded on my ribs like a landlord screaming for the rent. And I must’ve had a severe oxygen depletion in my brain, because I leaned in to kiss her.

Claire leapt to her feet. I toppled over, nearly breaking my nose on the wing of the plane.

“Simplicity!” she shouted, jumping up and down.

The metal wing underneath us creaked ominously. “You know, these might not be entirely up to code,” I informed her.

“Joe, you nailed it!” she yelled, whacking me on the shoulder. “I’ve been looking at the particle stabilization all wrong, trying to compensate for everything little thing. I just need to think globally!”

She hopped to the ground, tossing aside the bottle of wine and running back toward the BP9 hangar.

“It’s two in the morning!” I shouted after her.

“I know!” she crowed back. “Thanks!”

Then she was out of earshot, leaving me alone on the wing of the plane. Even though it was dark, anyone looking would have seen my face burning a bright shade of embarrassment red.

God, I hope she doesn’t realize I tried to kiss her.