filmreroll

The Rock part 2

Wow guys, the world's gone pretty wild in the last few weeks. We hope you're all doing ok! It can feel crass at times to be doing comedy at a time like this, but sometimes comedy is what we need. I, for one, am very glad to be making this particular dumb show at this particular dumb moment. And from what we've heard from listeners, this type of entertainment is exactly what people locked in their homes are craving. I was really moved to get a lot of messages about how the show is helping peop...

The Rock part 1

To say it's been a crazy week is a bit of an understatement. With most of the world shut down for coronavirus, pretty much everyone's life is affected in some way. I just hope all of you are safe and healthy. 

For artists, things are pretty upside down, as most projects are put on hold. The play that I've been in performances of is on indefinite hiatus. It's really nice though, that one of my projects is the reroll, which has no need to stop. Getting into some rerolling has given u...

Princess Bride part 2

Sorry this one is so late. I am the lead in two different major theatrical projects at the moment. One having completed a grueling tech process and now performing every night. And the other one just ramping up. Plus regular obligations to ongoing projects, and shooting a couple commercials. It's been a crazy few weeks for me. I am bone achingly tired. But it actually feels quite nice to cozy up to my laptop and write a few paragraphs to my favorite bunch of people, which is all of you lovely ...

Princess Bride Part 1

Love how this one went. It is goofy as hell and magically silly. It was a joy to have Lane on the show. Good friend of mine and incredible comedian. We'd been talking about working together for forever, but schedules never lined up. With the makeup of this cast being heavily skewed towards comedy people, I was prepared to embrace a more wacky and improvy tone, but I was not ready for how silly this would get (in a good way). I was laughing so hard at the antics at the table. I hope you all en...

Time Bandits 3

Time Bandits is a tricky movie to run because the main characters don't have a clear motivation. They have a very general set of base desires centered around wealth, but the movie does not build from these desires: it gives no rubric for success or failure, and fulfills the characters' greed almost immediately, as they wander around time, picking up priceless treasures with little resistance. This is actually a very unusual structural choice from Terry Gilliam. In general stories are driven b...

Butch and Sundance part 2

Sorry about the screwed up release schedule lately. It still takes me several hours to listen through the episode and do the upload process, and I've been absolutely swamped with acting projects lately. I'm trying my best to keep the upload schedule consistent.

Anyway, the end of Butch and Sundance. I found this episode authentically very exciting. Action heavy episodes are tough in a radio-rpg setting. Action should be quick and energetic, but in practice RPG's divide time into micro-i...

Patreon Bonus Video: How do I make the reroll?

Ok, few bonus videos coming for you fine people. The first few will me be pulling back the curtain a bit and explaining the process of how I make the reroll.

Butch and Sundance part 1

First of all, Andy and Scott is a great combination. And second of all they could not be better suited to their roles than they are in this one. Left to their own devices, they're both players who like to stay in the story, so this ends up being a pretty focused episode. We had so much fun that I didn't notice at the time we were recording that we had over three hours of episode. It was only when I was checking it for release that I realized we'd run so long that I  needed to cut it in h...

Blade Runner Part 3

Blade Runner is in the can. This one is a real fun mix of moments of pure goofiness and some moments we took deadly serious. Interesting format in that our characters were almost never in the same room together in this whole adventure. It's a format I mostly avoid, but Joz wanted to try it and it can work just fine if the DM is bold and keeps the action tight. In the room it was a lot of fun. That was a fun group and I hope we can get that bunch together again some time.

Meanwhile, behi...

Blade Runner part 2

I don't know if it's made clear in the recordings, but Blade Runner and Practical Magic were entirely recorded in a single weekend. Friday evening was part 1 of Blade Runner, Saturday was parts 2 and 3 of Blade Runner and Sunday was both halves of Practical Magic. It rarely works out that we end up with every movie we wanted to run entirely finished in the time we'd alotted it (of course both Saturday and Sunday ran long, we never really plan to do two episodes in a single sitting, it usually...

Blade Runner

Boy we were in a goofy mood when we recorded this. I remember this session being somewhat serious and focused, but I realize now that I was thinking about parts 2 and 3, because listening back to part 1 tonight, it is utter goofballery. Fun episode. Hope you guys enjoy it.

Courtney was a nice addition to the cast. She's an excellent actor, and has been branching into writing and producing as well. My original vision for the show had a rotating guest chair, but it didn't really work out ...

The next campaign coming up is . . .

Blade Runner. A movie which canonically takes place in November 2019. Pretty nifty. Joz DM'd this one and she did a damn good job.

Adventure Time

My table fell apart as I was getting it into place for recording. One of the legs fell off (it's now sitting in my backyard as I type this, realizing that I need to figure out how to dispose of it.) So consequently we were sitting on the floor, using what we could as surfaces to play on. Jon was rolling on a large portrait of Iron Man that I found abandoned in the lobby of my building. I think this informal, firesideish set-up contributed to the loose tone of this episode, which I think does ...

Oh, I forgot to tell you the next movie . . .

Is not actually a movie. It's our first non-film (well, depending on how you count Winnie the Pooh). We're doing Adventure Time! Specifically the "Elements" miniseries. 

It's not really going to become a habit to do TV. We're still called the Film Reroll. But it was a sponsored episode request and I thought it would be a fun and unique challenge. My general feeling is that our focus should remain movies, but very occasional forays into TV, Books, Theater, and Comics are allowed as ...

Practical Magic Part 2

Ooof, this one was beautiful and difficult. Kudos to Joz for letting this get as emotional as it did, while still generally being lighthearted and fun. It's not an easy balance to hit, and in my opinion she walks that line perfectly.

I also love the way she did the magic system that feels faithful to the movie's, but grounds it in enough internal logic that it feels consistent, without losing the sense of mystery. The magic of this movie has an aspect of nature and earth that she defini...

Practical Magic

Our Halloween movie for the year is Practical Magic! Joz did an awesome job DMing this one. I'll let you guys judge for yourselves once you've heard part 2, but this ended up being one of my favorite episodes. Joz was bold enough to run a movie she truly loves, not just a movie she likes, which I've done many of, but a movie that is actually important to her. That's something that I've shied away from doing, because I felt that I would be too attached to the plot of the original to be free wi...

More Character Sheets!

Someone recently was asking about the Character Sheets from the Mummy scene, which Andy ran. Andy does his character sheets freehand, so after Andy and I went back and forth, it was determined that they were probably still with me. Well, today I went through my papers trying to find them, and while they are still unfound, I did find all the other freehand character sheets that were in my paper. And figured out how to work my scanner so you can all finally get your hands on all those sweet-swe...

Pirates part 3

Ok, this one's in the books. Probably the silliest episode we've done. The mix of that specific group, plus the fact that the episodes were recorded so far apart led to a rare brew of slapstic comedy and general nonsense. Personally I love the silly episodes, but I try to keep a healthy mix of sillier ones to more story focused ones. Not that we're ever all that serious, but I know that there's a lot of different tastes in what listeners like in the show, so giving variety is key...

Pirates part 2

New episode today. Episode 69! As I was explaining last time we never really know how many episodes a movie will go, so it's kind of impossible to plan to hit specific episode numbers, but I hope this one is appropriately raunchy.

In other news that'll end up getting talked about in future episodes, acting has taken Joz out to the west coast. You might know this already if you follow her on the social medias, but I just wanted to clarify that she'll still be on the show most of the time...

Pirates of the Caribbean

The main thing to talk about with this is that we recorded it literally over a year ago, and then didn't record parts 2 and 3 until about three weeks ago. This is the last of our long-delayed episodes (thought it may happen again in the future).

People are always curious why our schedule is so wacky some times, and why we put movies on the shelf for so long. The answer is really just that the logistics of making this show are more difficult than most podcasts:  We need the same cas...

Time Bandits Part 2

Another day another episode. This one was a lot of fun, it also has the slight stress that we had a very short amount of time to record due to a hard out of one of the cast, so we didn't have time to take many breaks. Normally we take a few breaks to pee and unwind and that kind of thing, but this episode was recorded pretty much continuously, and I feel like it comes across in the energy in the room.

Time Bandits is quickly spiraling into its entirely own story, not really bearing much...

Winnie the Pooh

Boy was this episode haunted. First we lost the episode. Like, we recorded it, it was fine. I double checked after recording and sent it off to the editor. I got word from the editor that files were missing and I was out of town so I couldn't double check, but I wasn't worried at the time, I just assumed I'd forgotten something. Nope, the files were gone. Turns out it's a rare but documented known bug Adobe Audition on Mac. I went to some crazy lengths to try and recover the file...

Time Bandits

When a movie is that weird and that big a mess (and I love the movie, but it is) it certainly indulges us to get as wacky and dumb as we want, and boy do we get dumb on this one.

This movie sits on a silly tier all it's own, above even Weekend at Bernie's. Terry Gilliam has incredible, grand, creative ideas, but he likes to elide over internal logic, in a way that works really well for his movies, they have a dream-like quality to them. But when running it as a game, I have to actually ...

Character Sheets: Friday the 13th

Ah, Summerspell. This episode still has a special place in my heart. What a joy it was to do. And you guys only had the final result. I had two months of slow deception. I had to go to a lot of lengths to even get my players to 50% believe that Summerspell was a real movie. They're naturally suspicious people.

Take a look at the pdfs called "Objectives" and you'll see where the real meat of this session was. I wrote those, extrapolated from the characters in the actual movie, but really...

Character Sheets: From Dusk til Dawn

I have gotten so good at spinning up detailed character sheets in like 4 minutes. Our games have to stay so flexible, I never know when the story is going to abandon a PC, or some minor character is going to be promoted in importance. Any time a player is assigned to a character from the movie who isn't in the very first scene, there's the danger that the story will have already taken a turn away from that character by the time we get to them.

Now, I always like to take some time gettin...

Character Sheets: Jurassic Park

Sorry it's been a while. Back with some more character sheets. It's Jurassic Park time! The fun part with Jurassic Park is that we just had a map and it was totally up to the players the way they wanted to go, and there were totally different challenges around the island. I didn't actually make the map, (Tim found it online) but we treated it as canon. The desalinization plant was just a little note on that map but I hadn't really put any thought into it, because I didn't think they'd have an...

Pokemon part 2

Welp. Definitely did not see this one coming. Though I love the ending we found for this one. Everything that happens in this episode was a fun surprise. I won't spoil it here. Do people read these before listening to the episode? Better question: do people read these?

This was a sponsored episode so I really want to thank Jeremy first and foremost. And as always big thanks to everyone on this patreon that makes the show possible. Really, I never could have imagined three years ago that...

Pokemon The First Movie, Part 1

It's funny how little I know of where the story is going. Pokemon: The First Movie is essentially the story of an emotionally fragile lonely god, toying with strangers. Our protagonists would seem to have very little agency in it. Even though in the movie they end up having an effect on Mewtwo, it's almost by accident that they convince him of the value of humanity. Aiming to capture that in a mechanic, or having hope of knowing how to make a story work out of that as a central struggle seems...

Aladdin part 4

New Aladdin episode is out! Always fun to be running with the original crew. Jon as always did an amazing job with this campaign. Joz's creativity and wacky sensibility was perfect for the genie. I love the mechanic of offloading some partial DM power to a player. Need to find a movie to let me play with a similar mechanic. 

While it may not be fun in your own games, I find it really amusing when you have PC's playing fairly powerless characters, like Pitr playing Abu/Raja in this ...

Aladdin part 3

In terms of mechanics I've really grown to love, the Aladdin wish mechanic is way up there. The player words the wish as they choose; the genie rolls on a very high skill level (but degree of success matters) and then Joz interprets the effects of the spell and Jon executes it into the game. It ends up being a three person process and works highly unpredictably. It's also fun to parse people's language literally with massive effects on the story.

I highly encourage highly unpredictable ...