Ender, Devers and Stewart at the Command Post

Well it’s been awhile since I gave any updates on the progress of the show, (albeit some delaying messages on facebook) so I felt an update was in order now before Christmas.

As I previously mentioned on facebook, Sven is tied up with a production under James Newton Howard and so the music may be slightly delayed on Chapter 12, and for those of us who saw the original beta version, we’re all aware how intense the music is for this particular chapter – being a battle scene. However, the worst thing would be to rush it and have it sound not so hot, so I’m happy for Sven to take his time and let’s just hope he gets a moment between now and the 31st to get the music done.

I’m currently working through the shots of Chapter 15, and it’s quite nice with my new knowledge of Maya that I learnt this year just gone, to be able to put out some better looking models and scenes. I must admit I’m very keen to move to 3D characters, but of course it would be a bit odd to do that mid-movie so it can wait until Frontier – Dark Nemesis.

Wexler

But rest assured in the knowledge that each and everyday work is being done on Frontier, and we only have two more Chapters to go until the new stuff starts appearing on your screens!

So I hope everyone has an awesome Merry Christmas and a really Happy New Year! Lets hope the Mayans weren’t right about 2012 or else I’m not gonna be able to finish this three season webseries!

Lew

Chapter 11 is now up, this puts us another step closer to the very long awaited Chapter 14!

At the moment Sven is hard at work on the very demanding score that will accompany Chapter 12, as those of you who saw the original beta episodes, you will be aware that Chapter 12 contains a massive complex score, and so this will be alot of work!!

As a thanks for the 300 subscribers on youtube, I released that Dark Nemesis teaser. What is Dark Nemesis a few of you asked me, well Frontier – Dark Nemesis will be the second movie (or season) that will follow on from Prelude to Darkness. Like PTD, Dark Nemesis will contain roughly 24-26 Chapters, and like the title suggests, the story is gonna be pretty…well…dark.

Another little thing I’ve begun doing is releasing a few outtakes, these are pretty much the raw audio files of some of our voice actors attempting to get their lines right, or just trying to find a line that works for them, the results can be quite humorous.

Frontier has now found a place at both Unleashed Video which is a division of Spidvid, headed by the very awesome Jeremy Campbell, and also at Mingle Media TV, and a big thanks to Stephanie Piche for being so helpful there!

I have also begun setting up a Frontier page on blipTV, as we all know, the more circulation the better!

And a massive thanks to those of you who donated to our cause, Frontier made it into the submissions for the IAWTV Awards! So hopefully we get nominated! Fingers crossed.

And a big congratulations to Travis Gordon, as Spellfury has now got a combined view count of over 4 Million!! Well done indeed!

Also in regard to Chapter 15, I have completed Scene 32 which is sort of a quarter of the chapter.

So until next time folks!

Lew

Hi Everyone! Well hope you all enjoyed Chapter 10! I imagine you’ll notice the beautiful music there by Sven Faulconer!

I was extremely excited to see our Subscriptions move over 300 on youtube! And I have been planning the behind the scenes video for you all and liaising with some other cast and crew to try and get you something that’s a little polished and little nifty and will a one shot small little teaser for Frontier 2!

Frontier was acknowledged by the International Academy of Web Television last week through the interview I did with Travis Gordon, they posted a tweet about it and mentioned that perhaps Frontier should get entered into their upcoming Awards!

With Gen Con (and I haven’t forgotten those of you that helped out with that one, I have characters and ships with your names on them coming up in the future Chapters!) which was a very exciting and successful event for Frontier raising the profile of the series and getting us a little prestige too (note the cool emblem on the top of the website!). So thanks once more to those who helped us out!

Hazen Dunfee

Rachael Rigda

and

Christopher Reid

You’ll also be going into the ending credits under the Special Thanks section!

So (takes deep breath) like last time I’m putting out my poor student hand and seeing if we can raise money to get Frontier into the IAWTV Awards! The amount to be raised is $90USD for an annual membership in the IAWTV and a further $45USD to submit the show! (So $135USD total). Entries close on October 31st.

To donate, click here or at the top of the site on the donate box!

Like last time those who help us raise the fee will get either a ship, character or planet named after them in the series (their choice), and a spot on the special thanks list!

So stay tuned for the behind the scenes vid which should be coming over the next few weeks, possibly alongside Chapter 11 which is due out on November  7th!

Lew

Science fiction crossover projects can be very hit or miss.  For every series or film that gets it right (see “Firefly”) there is another series or film that makes you want to poke your own eyeballs out (see “Tank Girl”).  Genre crossovers seem to work pretty well on paper, with excellent novels such as “Perdido Street Station”, “American Gods”, and “The Outback Stars” to name a few recent publications, handily making the case that genre crossovers can be vital and interesting.  However, this success does not always translate to film and television.  Whether it is an adaptation of a graphic novel or book, or an original series, sci-fi crossover programs have had a very unstable history.  Even when the right tone was found, the necessary audience was not always around to appreciate it.

To understand why the sci-fi crossover has had such a spotty existence, it helps to look at a few productions that got it right, but failed anyway.  Three such productions are “Nightmare Café”, “Brisco County, Jr.”, and the aforementioned “Firefly”.  Each series used science fiction tropes, in combination with another recognizable genre, to create something different and new.  Unfortunately, each series also met with an early demise.

Nightmare Cafe

“Nightmare Café” premiered in 1992, sharing a night with “The X-Files”.  A very dark show with comic overtones created and produced by Wes Craven, it was marketed as “horror-light” for fans of Craven’s film work.  A master of the horror film, Wes Craven is known for such projects as “The Last House on the Left”, “The Hills Have Eyes”, “Swamp Thing”, and “The Nightmare on Elm Street” franchise.  “Nightmare Café” combined elements of science fiction, horror, theology, mystery, and romance.  The series revolved around two seemingly ordinary people who find themselves at a diner.  Frank Nolan and Fay Peronivic have both recently been involved in incidents that brought them close to death.  They soon discover that there is no leaving the café, and it is, in fact, a sort of purgatory and they are both dead.  Both of them are destined for Hell, unless they can rectify a wrong that they each committed while they were still living.  If they can accomplish that, they will be allowed to remain in the café, as waiter and waitress.  As they both try to repair the damage they left behind in their old lives, a parade of characters makes their way through the café, and Frank and Fay help them solve their own issues so that they can move on from Purgatory.

The show ran the gamut from funny, to creepy, to heartbreaking, depending upon the issue that needed to be addressed in order for the guest character’s soul to continue its journey.  The characters were from every walk of life, and Frank and Fay did their best to help each soul move on.  It was a rather beautiful conceit, but unfortunately, it proved to be too high a concept for most people, and the show was canceled after six episodes.  This is an example of one of the primary reasons that sci-fi crossover series do not last.  The majority of them require more analytical thought, and a greater willingness to suspend disbelief, than their single genre counterparts.  Since most people turn on the television so that they do not have to think, a show that is intellectually challenging can have a tough time pulling in an audience.

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and Firefly

This same phenomenon occurred with the short-lived series, “The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.”.  Meant as a vehicle for the criminally underrated actor, Bruce Campbell, “The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.” was part-action comedy, part-Western, part-Steampunk, and part-science fiction.  The show premiered in 1993 and ran for 27 episodes before being canceled.  It was one of the first projects created by successful writer/producer Carlton Cuse, who went on to produce and/or write for such series as “Martial Law”, “Nash Bridges”, and “Lost”.  Again, the premise was high concept.  The show revolved around a Harvard Law School graduate, played by Bruce Campbell, who traveled around the Old West looking for the gang that had killed his famous sheriff father.  However, the people in this version of the Wild, Wild West carried futuristic guns, and Brisco kept finding and collecting golden balls that were imbued with strange properties.  The show was less confusing and random than it sounds, and earned a cult following that has remained vocal and active to this day.  It also required a certain level of commitment and concentration to pick up all of the puns, allusions, and important plot points contained in the often dense, but very funny script.  After the first season sadly, it became apparent that audiences just couldn’t be bothered to work that hard.

Perhaps the most famous of the sci-fi genre crossovers is Joss Whedon’s “Firefly”.  The series premiered in 2002, and ran for 11 episodes, which were not actually aired in the correct order.  However, DVD sales of the one season were so incredible that a feature film was “greenlit” in order to tie up some loose ends.  The show revolved around a group of mercenaries traveling in a spaceship in a version of our world a few centuries in the future.  There’s been an economic collapse, both English and Chinese is spoken by everyone, and the frontier spirit has become more prevalent as humans move farther and farther out in to the galaxy, colonizing planets as they go.  Peopled with the kind of rich characters for which Joss Whedon has become known, the show made stars out of all of the cast members, and has remained popular to this day.  Interestingly, “Firefly” was canceled for slightly different reasons than the other two projects.  In the case of “Firefly” it was not the audience who found the show confusing.  Instead, it was the executives who did not know what to make of it.  With its cast running around in western gear, shooting old fashioned guns, spouting Chinese, and flying in a spaceship, executives simply threw up their hands, unsure of how to market the series and to whom.  The end result was that it was canceled.

There are certainly many, many more shows and movies that have attempted to combine science fiction with another genre. They are, of course, of varying quality, but the projects that are good, are like gold.  Challenging, intelligent, scary, or gut-wrenchingly sad, projects that take the best elements from multiple genres and throw them into the creative blender together, need time to find an audience.  Hopefully, executives will come to realize this.  I, for one, am very tired of sitting down on one of my recliner sectionals, turning on the television, and being disappointed when I discover that my favorite show has been unceremoniously cut from the schedule.

By Isabella Woods

Caine's feeling right at home

Hey there folks, well lets get straight into it, Chapter 10 is completed with an absolute magical score done by Sven Faulconer! Koldcast will be releasing it on Thursday, October 13th! So make sure you check it out folks!

And guess what!? We’re nearing 300 subscribers on youtube!! So if you know of any friends that like sci-fi, please for the love of God get them to sub and put us over the 300 mark, I think we only need 6 more or something? If we get over the 300 subs mark, as I said on the facebook page, I will make another thank you vid with some more behind the scenes footage!

So you may notice that the updates are rather few and far between nowadays, well let me tell you that I’ve never been busier with Frontier! And if you’re wanting to know whats going on, I always post updates on the facebook page! (sometimes twitter). So make sure you are liked to that to stay in the up to date loop.

Frontier  was lucky enough to get a radio advert playing on some internet radio stations, thanks to the efforts of Rich Mbariket at Web Series Network and Sal Amato at 1Club FM at addictedtoradio.com who are both MASSIVELY supportive of webseries so major kudos to them!

Aren't you guys dead?

The radio advert is playing on 1Club FM stations: G93, Q97, ChannelOne, Garage Punk, Hair Voltage and Love Bites, so check them out!

You can hear the radio advert right here too!

Frontier – The Radio Commercial

In other Frontier news, something ultimately very cool happened, Frontier came second place in the quarterly views competition held by StaytunedTV.net, we managed over 70,000 contest views but at the moment appear to be sitting at over 84,000 views in total – that is just magic!

Also you may have noticed that recently I did an interview with Spellfury‘s Travis Gordon on his online show ‘This Week in Webseries’, it was alot of fun to do and we talked alot about Frontier and the web-series community, see it below!

Chapter 14 is finally finished, all the shots are locked off and the lines are mostly done, and the temp music track has been put down, so thats more good news that the production is keeping ahead of the release by at least four episodes, hopefully I can keep it up.

Chapter 15 is now in the works, I have finished about 3 minutes worth so far of the Chapter and lots of work is going into it, you can see some pics from it in this post.

So that’s it for now, remember to watch out on Thursday, for Chapter 10 release!

Lew

Hey everyone, well great news, Chapter 9 is out with new music by Sven Faulconer, it’s very awesome! Check out his website at Falconscore.

A big thanks to Ryan Roye from Tanadrine Studios which produce the webseries, Delura, (he plays Corporal Ross) for putting up with me hitting him up at the 11th hour for some audio lines I had forgotten to send out – what a trooper!

Also a big thanks to Gianni Matanagro who’s just finished voice work for Wing Commander Saga, for providing a very trailer-esque voice for us on the 30 second grabber at the start of Chapter 9.

At the moment on youtube my good friends Travis Gordon (from Spellfury) and Chris Greenaway (from Venus Spa) have begun making a weekly talk vid called This Week in Webseries, at the moment they are up to their third episode, it’s very informative and entertaining, it was good to make up a coffee and sit down in front of the comp to have a watch, the episodes usually run for roughly an hour in length, however the third episode is about thirty minutes, AND also they give a very generous shout out to Frontier too!

Also I’m sure with the 10th anniversary of the Sep 11 2001 World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks all our thoughts are with the families and friends of those who were lost.

So in terms of the production right now, Sven currently is working on Chapter 10 and we are expecting the release of each episode to now run every four weeks, first on Koldcast and then onto youtube and staytuned TV.net. In the meantime I have been obviously working on new models and producing the fly-by videos as I’m sure you have all seen on youtube over the last month, but now I’m going to get back into finishing up Chapter 14 (WHAT STILL ON CHAPTER 14?! I hear you screaming) yeah apologies all round and a slap on the hand for me!

So stay tuned, the expected release for Chapter 10 will be 7th October (NZ Time – so 6th for the rest of the world).

Lew

Hey everyone again apologies at the absolute mess these updates have fallen into, I had a word given to me by my best friend who also is voicing Petty Officer Skillen in the upcoming Chapters. I was told to get my ass into gear and get these updates rolling again for those who want to read them.

So the tri-weekly roundup will continue as promised, but in the meantime here’s some “in-between” news.

A big welcome to Sven Faulconer who is our new composer, Sven currently works under the legendary James Newton Howard, responsible for scores from ‘Sixth Sense, I am Legend, Green Hornet’, and many more.

Sven has written music for ‘Green Hornet’ as well and has scored a number of his own projects, you can see his IMDB profile here, it’s impressive!

You can also hear some of his stuff at his website here.

Also on StaytunedTV.net Frontier is doing VERY well, at number 2 on the most popular list! With almost 70,000 views! So that’s absolutely fantastic!

Was awesome to see we passed the 250 Subs mark on youtube, as promised the minute we reach 300 I’ll do another behind the scenes vid to say thanks to y’all, I’ll try to make it a bit more in-depth this time too.

We’re expecting Chapter 9 to be coming out around September 3rd, in tandem with its release will be a tri-weekly roundup, and all other chapters are aimed to be every three weeks after that release.

In the meantime as some of you may have noticed I’ve been busy remaking all the models of the ships and releasing fly-by videos to let you see them as they come out, as it stands the remaining fly-by vids will be:

• B-147 Boxcar Mk II Medium Bomber (rendering now)
• UC-82 Raven MkII
• F-214A Blood Falcon Interceptor
• Dakota Space Superiority Fighter Mk II
• Dakota Torpedo Bomber Mk II
• F-219 Accipiter Swiftback Space Superiority Fighter (next-gen fighter that will eventually replace the aging Firehawks)

So that’s the list of models coming out.

So that’s it for now folks,

Until Chapter 9!

Lew