filmreroll

Halloween 3 (part 4)

Halloween 3 has to be the most obscure movie we've rerolled, right? By far. Time Bandits and Friday the 13th the Final Chapter are contenders, but I think H3 takes the crown. (And this isn't a full reroll of H3, it's a sort of semi-reroll where H3 is involved but not strictly canon, but at this point we've used enough of the plot of H3 that I count it as a valid reroll of H3. That wasn't necessarily going to happen, I put Danny and Joshua on the path of H3 but they were by no means guaranteed...

Halloween 3 (Part 3)

There's an important lesson I thought I learned in making Halloween into an RPG, but it was the wrong lesson. I'll get to that but first I need to talk about my approach to making these things:

The process of building a new reroll for me usually starts by watching the movie and writing down questions; lots of questions which are suggested and left unanswered by the movie. Most are mundane: Understanding clearly the timelines, mechanics and motivations that turn the gears of the story, b...

Halloween 3 (part 2)

If there's any one "rule" of role playing that I enjoy thumbing my nose at it's "Don't spilt the party." It's actually not a bad rule for players, splitting the party weakens the group and needlessly complicates the process of playing together. But for me it's a relic of a more video-gamey approach to RPG's. In general I prefer stories where characters have complex and individual objectives, and who stay together only for as long as those objectives are served by collective action. Most of th...

Halloween 3

It's really wonderful to be back in this world. Halloween is the closest thing we have to a long-running campaign, and it's wild to me how far afield this has gotten. I really have no idea where these things are going to go and now having run three campaigns in this world, it's amazing to look back and see the strange directions this story has come. 

There's always a lot of backstory and lore that I fill in to give these rerolls a bigger world to play in. And then beneath the lore ...

Aliens (Part 2)

We're back with more Aliens! This is a real fun campaign so far, I think! Hope you're enjoying it. It's a real back-to-basics approach. Lot of action. Lot of characters for us to chew through.

I find there's a real challenge in building a proper RPG version of a film-antagonist which I've learned to tackle in various different ways over the years. Consider the classic movie "monster": The Xenomorph, Michael Myers, Darth Vader, whoever comes to mind for you. There's a classic structure t...

Aliens (Part 1)

It's here. We're doing it. It's happening. Aliens. We're also borrowing from the movies in having a shifting director for every movie, hence Jon taking the reins for this one. As we've previously done for sequels, this is a sequel to our version of Alien, not a direct adaptation of the original sequel, however in this case, Jon was able to take from the film Aliens very heavily as our version of Alien hewed fairly tightly to the original (at least in the ways that matter to the sequel). This ...

The Searchers

100 Episodes! I can’t believe we did it!

spoiler warning this is a clip show/variety show/madcap comedy hour. I don’t like to break our core concept too much, but after 100 episodes I feel like we’d earned it. And honestly it was some of the greatest fun ive had making the show so I hope you enjoy it.

The funniest part of all of this was the juggling I was trying to do to make sure we could actually land this on the 100th without interrupting a movie, which I didn’t want t...

Memento (Part 7)

I did it! I have killed the white whale that is Memento! I'm incredibly proud of the work we all did with this story, but my lord was it a massive effort. There are a lot of reasons this movie proved to be so difficult to realize, but the main one is the degree to which little details matter. 

The exact location of every prop needs to be correct. Normally there is a shared reality, so I don't need to keep track of if the knife was under the table or under the chair. The player put ...

Twister (Part 2)

Ok, predictably there were issues with the last memento episode (23% technical 77% Paulo got a gig he wasn't expecting). We're working on that and will have it up in the next few days. But in the meanwhile here's the rest of Twister! Hope you're enjoying it so far.

I literally have no memory of creating this and it has been wild to listen to an episode I'm in and just be a regular audience member, wondering what those strange people in the voice-box will do next. I haven't finished list...

Twister (Part 1)

We've never done a patreon exclusive episode before. Let us know how you like the experience. And please don't share the secret link provided with this post, as we'd like this episode to be exclusive to all of y'all who have supported the show and made it possible.

Twister was maybe the eight or ninth episode we recorded, something like that. Very early in the show's run. I put off editing it because we had other stuff on the docket that we could release first and then it got lost in a ...

Memento Part 6

We're back! And we have a bunch of stuff coming your way:

Next week: Twister as a patreon exclusive

Two weeks: Memento Finale

Three weeks: Twister part two on patreon

Four weeks: 100th episode spectacular

Six weeks: The next movie!

Very excited to be back at it with this show. I've missed all you beauties! We've got some really fun movies coming down the pipeline! Thanks for sticking with us!

Memento Part 5

Ok, we're back! Thank you so much everyone for your patience. I need to refrain from giving estimates as to when I'll have episodes ready, because my schedule's so unpredictable. But here we are with a new episode! Hopefully back to biweelky soon!

I really like part 5 for sort of standing alone within a single setting. I'll let you guys discover it at your own pace, but it's a slightly different take on the Memento concept in that it has a contained subject, which comes at an opportune ...

Status update and next episode poll

All of you have been very patient with me when life gets in the way of producing the Reroll but anyway I want to offer an apology for our slow release schedule. Too much going on, both good and bad, has caused me to need to take a step back, but now I'm back at it, looking at the next few episodes, and working to get Memento rolling again next week.

Now, when we first set the release schedule, I didn't know Memento would be so long and I didn't know I'd need a hiatus. I'd targeted to fi...

Memento Part 4

Apologies for the long hiatus between episodes. I won't bore you with all the details of my life, but it's been crazy. Hoping to put out the last memento episodes quickly so our Halloween episode doesn't end up sliding into the spring.

The best and most powerful force in these Memento episodes, and really what makes it such an enjoyable storytelling tool for me, is the assumption that the previous player must have put you where you are for a reason. Wherever you happen to be facing when...

E.T. backstory

I don't generally like to give any backstory that didn't come out in the episode. Backstory, when dribbled in to a narrative slowly, through the natural telling of the principal action, can be incredibly powerful. When given as a bland info-dump, is a quick way of robbing your story of its sense of awe and mystery. 

But I think E.T. makes an ok exception to this rule for a couple reasons: It's backstory that was hidden from the characters not because it was mysterious, but because ...

Memento Part 3

Episode is up: http://www.filmreroll.com/?p=389

Ok, so let's talk about the structural challenges presented by telling a story backwards. I had wanted to do Memento for years, and had always intended to hand off Leonard from person to person to simulate his cluelessness to what's going on around him. But when I rewatched the movie to actually start planning it, I started to wonder if it was a good idea:

Memen...

Memento (Part 2)

New ep: http://www.filmreroll.com/?p=386

Not gonna talk about the reverse-order thing yet. Think it'll be more productive to talk about later. Let's talk about the Focus Check system.  Overall I think the system turned out to be a great success. Here are the Focus Check rules as I sent them to all the actors. The rules are in italics, my analysis of how the rule turned out is after.

Every ti...