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 necess...

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...

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, an...

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...

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...

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 o...

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...

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, s...

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 audienc...

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 editin...

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 pipe...

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 di...

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 sche...

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...

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 rea...

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 rewat...

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. Th...

Memento

Memento. It's up. Part 1. I did it. 

The last week and a half has been me stitching the whole thing together and looking at it backwards and forwards, trying to figure out if the thing I made over the course of two or three months with the collaboration of a score of amazing artists and performers, actually works as intended. A ton of work went into this story, and from the beginning...

New Character Sheet dump

In the process of editing Memento, and it is taking me forever. It is by far the most work intensive edit I've had to do: Chapters with different guests, pulling files from all different places, trying to lay them all out and make sure the story flows logically. Like the movie, I'm trying to lay out the chapters all backwards, but if I think the thing doesn't hold together, I will release it fo...

Toy Story (Part 2)

Toy Story was a perfect delight to play. Some interesting differences in plot came out of the fact that Woody and I approached the problem of Buzz in different ways. Somewhere along the way in part 1 I had a self-control roll that I succeeded and presumably Woody failed in the movie, which allowed me to be a bit more pragmatic and political rather than openly hostile. Most of the principal diff...

Toy Story Part 1

Ah, it's such a joy to have someone else DM. I enjoy playing and it takes so much off my plate when someone else runs the game. Plus all my other DM's are always knocking it out of the park, so it's good all way round.

There's a certain freedom and joy in having characters who are pretty useless at everything. For instance, the Wizard of Oz characters, and to a slightly lesser ...

Oceans 11 Part 5

It's done! Oceans 11 is complete! I'm super proud of these episodes, but it was probably the most exhausting campaign to turn into finished entertainment. I discussed the narrative problems of trying to present a version to the audience that is coherent, but that doesn't spoil the ending during the planning stages. The other big problem is that in these kinds of detail-oriented campaigns, you h...

Oceans 11 Part 4

Oceans 11 races on. Part 5 will be the last one. I don’t know why, but it feels wrong to me that a reroll should ever be longer than five parts, although I would make an exception if it was something truly epic, like a Lord of the Rings. Anyway, Oceans 11 won’t be the first to break the 5 parts limit.

I guess the main thing I should talk about is the elephant in the...

Oceans 11 Part 3

At the time I was stressed about the logistics of the Oceans 11 episodes (logistics on many levels: the complex machinations within the story and how to make them entertaining, the mechanics of how to mic seven people in my little space and get half-decent audio, and the impossible tetris of everyone's busy calendars to try to get everyone together in the same room to finish recording Oceans 11...

Oceans 11 (Part 2)

I touched on this on my last write-up, but while I think that Oceans 11 will make for great finished episodes, they are a loooot of work to edit. What gets missed is how much logistics and planning goes into pulling off these episodes. Frankly I couldn't have done it without someone who would get as obsessive as I knew Jon would. But in the room, it was constantly needing to look a...

Oceans 11: Danny and Rusty's Contact lists

Thought you guys might enjoy the full lists of contacts that Jon and Joz got to make their plan based off of. Below is what I sent each of them.

What I sent Jon:

Below is a list of your contacts. Rusty will also have a list with significant overlap to yours. His list is a bit bigger and more up to date, since you’ve been in prison for two years. He wi...

Oceans 11 Part 1

This could have been such an easy story to record if I had just said that we're planning the same heist from the movie. But that's not what we do on the Film Reroll. Of course, I had the team create a completely new heist from scratch, and they threw themselves into it, particularly Jon, who is a Moriarity-type character at heart. I gave them a list of over 50 criminal contacts between Danny an...

The next movie is . . .

Ok, back to regular non-April-fools episodes. We'll be back next week with part one of our exciting next movie which is . . . 

. . . 

. . . 

Oceans 11

A Quiet Place

The extra bonus episode is up! We thought John Krasinski's subtle masterpiece A Quiet Place would make an amazing reroll and boy were we right. This one really stands on its own. We nailed it. I don't want to say too much because I'll end up spoiling it. I'll let just this one stand on its own.

(Note: We did not charge the Patreon for this episode for reasons that will become obvious on l...

The Rock 3

We're back on a quick turn around with more The Rock! This is a fun episode, and then the ending . . . Well, I won't talk about the ending here. Spoilers!

Really enjoyed the chemistry on this team. Really enjoyed the contained nature of the story, and the clarity of the mission goals. We have fun with movies that don't naturally lend themselves to games, but it's nice to return from time ...