I'm on a Mission

So yeah. been a LOOOONG time since i posted ... well buddy, that's going to change because I've just hatched a new scheme. the idea child of two things present in my life currently - 1 = the poetry class with the teacher who told me she decided she was going to write something like 200 haiku's over the course of a year and did, and 2 = the arrival of the last thing i ordered off amazon: "Created by... Inside the Minds of TV's Top Show Creators" by Steven Prigge'. if you haven't guessed it by now i am vowing to create rough outlines for 50 different TV series' over the course of the next year. working out to roughly 1 a week. it no secret My life goal is to create (and have produced) at least one TV series, so now it's time hone the craft. I've penned around 5 well thought out, fully developed sitcoms in my life, but this will be more of an exercise in thinking about shows and practicing development of ideas. I'll be posting what i can here and hopefully all you Hollywood execs wont steal them all. my goal will be to have developed everything in the series up to (and not including) writing the pilot episode. so expect the first one sometime in the next week.

Angry at People

Dear College Humor,
I enjoy checking your site regularly. It provides me with a great way to kill hours between classes, and also keeps me informed of all the latest Internet fads. Your original content is really entertaining too! However, I must express my concern with a certain advertisement that has been appearing on your site recently. Usually I can see how your ad placements reflect the interests of your core demographic, but I am confused on why you would attempt to market that stupid ventriloquist guys lame ass show, Jeff Dumingham or whatever. As far as I can tell college students don’t find him funny unless they are themselves unfunny; or they have drank themselves into a stupor in which they, like 5-year-olds, can only concentrate on puppets. Instead, if you had a site which was called old-guy-who-you-worked-with-at-youre-high-school-job-humor.com I could see how this would be a connection to your audience.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the need for advertising and fully appreciate that sponsors are the reason you can continue to make me laugh. Although, I will unfortunately not be able to check you site for the duration of this ad, as the mere thought of Dumb-ham makes me want to jump out of a window. He is so bad, he almost makes me miss Carlos Mencia. If you could please let me know when the ad for his show will stop running I’d greatly appreciate it.
Sincerely,
Simon Koch
Senior- Bowling Green State University

Now you can see how bored i look while i write things that will bore you later

So i haven't made a blog in a while. i was relying on those Green Screen Vlogs for a while, (mostly to report on stuff that all fell through) but i cant do those now that I'm living with my parents for the summer, and they hardly have enough space to consider a decent working studio. any ways, i figure it'll be just as good to record myself typing this blog... right... that's the same thing. if it helps you can play it and listen to me type as you read it. I'll wave at the point where i get to this sentence. any ways

real news. well... actually i have no real news. I'm a crippled artist. living at home. i could tell you all kinds of fun about my personal life, like how I'm back at the gas station working for the summer, or how i got to read/write a speech for my brothers wedding last week. that was fun. but any who. still working on the feature film script. still working on a spec script for a popular Disney channel cartoon (this is when i burp in the video) and someone showed me a contest where you can submit a pilot and fox will make the winning script. i might go over hobo town and submit that. remember hobo town?, that thing i said i was going to do a while ago. any ways. if you haven't herd my internships in California had to be canceled due to legal issues... that's right the fine state of Ohio just doesn't want me to leave and it's going to sick its lawyers on me until i realize there's no way out.

in case you were wondering I'm playing mc frontalot on those stylish headphones.

well this video is getting long so I'm going to stop. maybe I'll do something worth talking about soon ... then i can talk about it. later.



(wow, just looked that over, took me 7 minutes to write, probably wont take you 7 minutes to read.)

oh yeah i'm on twitter now too, so yeah ... https://twitter.com/simonkoch

Green Screen Blog, April 7th

Green Screen Blog, March 2nd

Ok i promise i'm going to finish the script now that this is posted

Also: I need to post this song. It's got such an amazing keyboard solo.
(note: this is the only version of the song on youtube that isn't live or y phish)

Introducing Sim Sim

let me know if this is working for any of you

And to all...

Merry Christmas... and to all you non Christmas supporters enjoy your December 25th. I've only got a little bit to type before i go to work ... yeah some of us have to work on Christmas day ... and some f us are also getting time and a half. So lets make this quick. grades came in... i got : 2 B's, a C, an INC, couple of S's, some 12's and a two pair queens high. but apparently that's a lot better than i thought it was. I'm not on academic probation. my final project for Moonsik's digital film and technology class is up on you tube. i can use this space to make excuses for all the things i feel are bellow my capabilities. first of all it was severely rushed that's why there is no music in it at all, and also why there is a planet that is literally a circle with its name written on it in front of an ms paint star scape. I'm not going to post it here but i will put the link, because it actually fills the new wide screen youtube boxes also of the page you can click "watch in HD" but for some reason the HD version of the film drops frames and looses 30 seconds of footage by the end, which makes the audio and video not match up at all. any ways:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTEq0hkl-Hs

well any ways i got 2 and a half weeks till school starts again and the things i need to write while home include : bad genetics skit, script fro falcon film festival, new draft of hobo show (still don't know what i want to do with it) and a police report explaining why i snapped working Christmas day at a gas station when some asshole complained that they didn't get their 2 cents off of gas. you'd think people would be nicer this time of year, but they are even more asshole-ish than ever. oh well, i need the money and at least this job doesn't leave my mouth numb. I'm of course talking about when i became a test subject for dentistry students.

What I'm listening to:
Video game commentary, it is the funniest stuff I've ever herd. these people take it so seriously and if your lucky they have funny accents.

Remember when you were young and naive... and you thought the internet would never run out

each and every day more and more people beg me .. "Simon, Simon... for the love of everything cute please update your blog or I'll kill myself" and it only took 3 of them going through with it to actually get me on here. well that's a lie ... I'm only here case i don't want to start working on finals stuff and the internet is empty of fresh content ... i was searching random people i know from school in Google and it turns out a lot of them also keep blogs... blogs which i am to lazy to read and haven't been updated in months, but still. now here is why this upsets me (and I'll get to my professional update in a minute) Friday during my weekly buffet club meeting, I'm one of the founding AND fattest members, my "friends" pointed out to me that i may exhibit a lot of common traits with a conventional social subset known most commonly as "hipsters." i have never thought of myself as a subscriber to the hipster identity nor any other identity (besides hopeless romantics and fat people) and it bothers me that i can be classified as a cliche'. but the more i thought about it, the more i think ... wow almost everybody i associate with has a blog, and hipsters are known for trying not to be hipsters, and according to my once again quotation-marked "friends" i have a messenger bag which is apparently something only hipsters have... seriously ... i though messenger bags were normal. i thought further and realized, I'm a film major, who writes, and is obsessed with going to New York... God damn it ... its very depressing. but any ways ... i cant let this affect how i run my life, cause then I'm trying to not be something which is just as bad or worse than trying to be something, so i figure all i can do is slowly work more polo's into my wardrobe. my blog has also been called to wordy, so i guess I'll try and get to the point.

professionally I'm exactly where I've been for months. head full of ideas, no time to put any of them together because I'm to busy procrastinating things, and dreaming that one day i wont be procrastinating. but supposedly I've got things coming together down the pipeline. Greg and i have briefly talked about when we're filming the hobo show... looks like probably next fall giving me all summer to get the scripts just right which i will need since i keep reformatting them every time i get them together (I'm thinking about going back to 6 episodes). and the bad genetics stuff is finally smoothed out enough that i might actually get a chance to write something. also been putting some recent thought into my self published poem / comic book idea. i guess I'm going to have a sequel to Space Force Five up sometime this week, but really ... don't get excited about it. it was just for a class assignment to show that i can edit split screen and put "lazers" over footage.

started looking for summer internships, so anyone with connections now is the time to pass them along to me. I'm going to be in new york for the summer, one way or another. and i'd like to be getting school credit for it. ones I'm looking at include: writing assistant for the Connan O'Brien show, development for comedy central, and suppream overlord of the east coast. other incredibly delusional suggestions welcome ... (realistic ones will be accepted begrudgingly)

well my attention span for writing these things is really short and I've been at this for over 4 minutes now ... so I'm going to go take a nap and wake up to watch some more TV before i play some online games and maybe eventually get to finals papers.


oh yeah what i'm listening to :
lets go with Tally Hall, they are a semi-successful band out of Anne Arbor Michigan (20 minutes or so down the road from me) but their videos are amazing and they are producing a web show that has a new episode every other Monday on their website www.tallyhall.com

MAC ATTACK

Got my iMac in the mail today and i am making my first post from the non windows world. since i have time while all kinds of programs that i may or may not need are updating and doing whatever it is programs do while no on is around ... drink i assume. any ways, THIS THING IS SO BAD ASS! i wish i could have sex with it... but i didn't buy that upgrade. speaking of for you nerds out there its the 20 inch 2.66 ghz with 2 gb ram and 320 gb hard drive. thats all for now i've got cool person things to do.

I was just told by a psychic that I am going to be alone for the rest of my life.... fuck!

So the show... was looking it over and thought ... "wait a minute, I have done nearly enough re-writes to this" so guess what guys... BACK TO STEP ONE! Two major reasons why I'm going back to the script, both have to do with money/resources... go figure right? The first and easier to explain is that like a dip shit I thought, "well, I’ll just write it how you want it and I won’t take into account the fact that I can't actually build a set and have to write everything for on location shooting". So that resulted in me writing most of it an elaborate set, well, not really elaborate but just expensive enough to not be able to do and just critical enough to not be able to change it. So that has to be different. But that would not in itself constitute an entire re-hauling of the script, however.... as I said before this was going to be a set of six 20-40 minute episodes kind of like a British sitcom (brit-com for those not in the know), only with characters you can understand. but alas, I have decided in my infinite wisdom that that really would be a lot of fucking work... and just shooting a pilot would not do it for me... its not really an episodic thing, despite the fact that I’m writing it in episodes. So what I’m thinking now is to take the main points, keep the funniest characters, re-tool the plot almost entirely and whittle it down to three 10-20 minute episodes. Because a half an hour to an hour of content is a whole hell of a lot more reasonable than two to four hours of it. Sorry guys I am in college remember that....but in a lot of ways I think this will make it better, because before I really only had a solid plot figured out for a few episodes and then directions I wanted to go with for the others... but I sat down this week and basically plotted out the entire thing. So it's a lot more of a solid concept right now. however I’m not entirely sure when I will get the chance to type this thing up, because now that I’m back in classes (even though I’m down to 12 credit hours) I still have butt-loads of things to do... things like watching all six star wars movies at Dustin’s house. (watching the last one tomorrow) and also hiding in my room and getting super excited about the Emmys which are apparently Sunday and I didn't know till I saw Joey Fatone on the TV guide channel pimping his red carpet interviewing skills. So I’d better go to bed so I can wake up and watch things tomorrow ... man is my life exhausting.

Currently listening to: Smash Mouth Astro Lounge

nothing new to report

still waiting on notes for the script, I'm trying to decide between trying to film just the pilot or being a dick to everyone who offered to help and trying to write all 6 episodes and film them all at once. based on the way i wrote that sentence you can guess which way I'm leaning. in other news I've been getting increasingly better at the ancient oriental art of pseudo-quw (sudoku) and I'm likely to get my loan money in a couple of weeks... so yeah nothing but excitment on this end. lots of homework for my classes which i still barely feel like i'm in. alread missed a couple of assignment... wow i need to get back into school mode. my hearts jsut not in it yet ... i'm in fact so apathetic right now that i'm not even gongi to spell check this and make sure that every "i" is an "I" despite how much i like having things that refer to me, Simon Koch, capitalized... what ever i'm done.

listening to: Madness - one step beyond

got to make this quick

So, I know... I fucked up. But I'm going to skip the apology and just get down to business. The script is typed... only 2 weeks after I said it would be. Now that I’ve got it out I can start the long laborious process of revising. Kind of like when you have a child and you know that you're going to raise it to be a decent human being... but unlike my real kids I’m not going to let this script slip into a life of gang warfare. Just kidding ... Harvey isn't in a gang. So I sent it over to the co-producer who unfortunately for you will probably be the only one to see it at this time. Fucking deal with it... unless I need more advise and you are an accredited reviewer of TV show pilot scripts... like me. So that’s about all for the business for now... music thing in the tag but you'll get there eventually.
So now, let me explain a few things that have been restricting my ability to produce things faster. School is a bitch, especially when you don’t have money for books. And for the first time in my career as a student I’m actually in classes that I need to read the books for. Dick move life... dick move. also I’m currently about a week late on my rent without the money to pay it... thank god my roommates are also deadbeats and can't pay their third otherwise I’d feel bad. campus fest was last Friday where I got to bounce between the UFO booth and the Bad Genetics booth... in all I had a good time hanging out with fellow org-ers, but I really have nothing to say to freshman about joining either of the groups... they know their not going to come to all that shit they sign up for... I didn't. And I know that’s not what campus fest is about, and hopefully I won’t be visited by the ghost of campus fest spirit. I’ve had some terrible past campus fests. Any ways, I’ve started my creative writing classes and damn I got a lot of non-script stuff to write (including 2 stories by tomorrow that I haven’t started or thought about yet) so between school, and career problems I’m about as relaxed as....uhhh something that’s not that FUCKING RELAXED, GOT IT!

So for background noise I’ve been going through TV shows in my collection, starting with undergrads, and I just finished up mission hill, so of course clone high is next.... I’ll probably continue in that order for a while. in one of my writing classes I over herd some of the pretentious nerds who studies that crap full time say that they recently re-read a book for the fifth time and I instantly looked down on them... then I realized I’ve seen the entire run of Futurma at least 5 times. So that made me feel shitty, but whatever we're all nerd in some way or another. Except me... and people who act exactly like me I suppose. What ever it's late and I’m being incoherent and I’ve got tons of shit to do still so lets wrap this up

So (just had to throw that in to make it so every paragraph started with so) music I’m listening too: besides some Travis Morrison, Metro Station and Cyndi Lauper, I found this band off the front page of you tube called Noah and the Whale. pretty good but what’s funny and also relates back to the show, this particular song I’m linking you too sounds very VERY similar, in the types of instruments and general feel to what Mr. William Hooper and I had planned for the theme song... but just remember, we are not stealing this sound because we had it figured out before I even heard of this band, so now enjoy ‘5 years time’, and what may possible be the first look for most of you at the tone (musically anyways) that I’m hoping to set in my show… unless the fact that it’s to similar gets to me and I make Hoop dog (sorry, Will) redo it from scratch.

Sorry if you were hoping for something more gritty

Opps

Ok so i meant to say something in the last blog but i forgot... the excellent film "Fortune Cookie" directed by Emily Berens, D.P.ed by that Steve guy i spoke of, and written by me, is up on you tube... so please take a moment to enjoy

What if I, hypothetically, didn't want to think of a creative title?

I bought this camera at a garage sale. It's a 16 mm Keystone B-1. I tried loading in some of the extra 16 mm film I had lying around my room, but it’s apparently more complicated than I thought, or it's broken. Either way, if any of my experienced readers have any knowledge on the Keystone B-1 16 mm film camera, please let me know.

So, Anyways. Script is coming along, revising and all that; also I don't think I've actually done anything with it. But I have been giving what little time I can spare to other show aspects. Aspects that may seem ridiculously premature to even start thinking about at this stage in the process, but aspects none the less. I talk of course about the one thing that either makes or breaks all sitcoms; you got it, the theme music. me and my talented composer, Will Hooper sat down the other day and hammered out what will become the first 30 to 45 seconds of each episode... audibly anyways... unless I put in cold opens... not that I expect you to know what cold opens are... whatever its just semantics. but yeah, the very talented Mr. Hooper worked with me and my terrible backwards hypocritical way of describing what I want to try and figure out just what the tone and melody should sound like, as well as preparing an orchestral slew of sounds that come together to form the beautifully junky representation of my half-houred hobo hilarities... have I told you the show is about hobos. Anyways. Now that the immense pressure of figuring out a theme song is off my mind I am free to more clearly envision my Frankenstein-ish creation. So now let’s move on.
I don't know if any of you have heard of this new thing the world has offered us tech savvy individuals. No it’s not mmorpsg's (massive multiplayer online role playing sex games), it’s Podcasts. Yes, only a half a decade after their widely popularized, do I discover that that techno-babel actually translates to "free videos about things I might actually care about". One in particular I have recently "subscribed to" (in layman’s terms that mean I've signed up to get them on a subscription like basis) is Indy Mogul - DIY Film making. These guys get me; they basically post videos on how to make cheap video equipment and how to trick an audience into thinking their watching something good. Its like having my own downloadable Steven Hildreth. (This joke is exclusively for the 2 people who will both read this and know who Steve Hildreth is... one of which may in fact be Steve Hildreth). The only problem is that for some reason my versions of their podcast files are all botched up and look terribly distorted. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the point of the show didn't frequently rely on showing slight differences between visual footage. Maybe it's fate telling me to get out of film making before I waste more money, or maybe it’s the result of trying to download all 47 back-logged podcasts all at once.
And speaking of money, what's the deal with that... like seriously I've been working full time, you'd figure I'd have some left over. It’s not like I spent hundreds of dollars on useless things that I may never think about after 5 minutes of owning them, and speaking of, I just bought Zoolander on dvd... but only because I couldn't find Night at the Roxbury’s. I'm looking into loans and stuff now, done with work for the summer job, getting ready to move back up to BG next Saturday. And I'll tell you what, I'm jonesing for some king buffet, max facts. (Tell me when "max facts" catches on… it means like seriously.) So I guess this is the last blogtry until I'm in BG. so from Bainbridge this is Goodbye... or to Bainbridge this is ... what ever. Bye.

Also I miss the MySpace blog function of posting what I’m listening to so I’m just going to start telling you afterwards what was happening in my headphones as I typed what is easily $5 worth of comedy. This time it was :

Last Years Model, ok band, but I think it’s an angry beavers reference, so that makes it sound even better.

Blog Entry, I CHOOSE YOU!

So I finished the first draft of my script, it looks really good too. I don't mean that literally because it’s still in my hand writing and that wouldn't even look good to someone who's drunk and dyslexic. But it’s got everything I want in it, action, drama, comedy, even more comedy. Well actually it’s not that action packed, and the drama in it is about at dramatic as an emo tween yelling at his parents. But it’s got comedy. Now I have to begin the process of taking it from hilarious to uproarious. Something I'm confident I can do, if not for ... the distractions. Yes as of late there have been many things distracting me, and taking me even further away from my ideal situation of being locked in a room with a word file for 18 hours a day. These menial actives include but are not limited to getting ready to go back to school, refilling financial aid, applying for loans, paying my first months rent, and I know some of you may disagree with me on this, but work sucks. My cover job as a gas station attendant has been getting worse and worse. I no longer have any third shift nights which were the reward for putting up with all you annoying ass customers in the day. And no, I can't do anything about "those crazy gas prices", and I also don't care if it’s a third of a cent cheaper at some station 20 miles from here. I was considering leaving early to spend an extra week doing nothing, but as much as it pains me I really need that one last check so when I go to college I can put of getting a new job for slightly longer. All and all though I think I'm ready to be done. summers been a hoot, you know bumming rides off people and working full time, but I'm ready to start my 8 course semester that also includes 2 positions on campus groups. Wait... wtf? 8 courses and 2 positions? Am I insane? I guess when I fail out I'm going to have to open a used car store with deals so insane it goes beyond funny and you feel so bad for me you're guilted into buying an SUV. but in all seriousness, I have 3, 3!, 0 credit hour courses this year, 4 if you include all the 046's I need to make up (I guess that’s a joke for Bowling Green film people who know what 046 is). And if I may make one more complaint about school really quick, with 8 courses only 1 of them requires books. 1 class worth of books? woohoo, right? NO! Mother f'ing English 2_0_something has $200 worth of books. $200! FOR ONE CLASS! JESUS TITTY SUCKING CHRIST! If the instructor is that strict about having so many books I can only fear the worst... that he's going to expect me to actually read some of them. I didn't go to college to pay loads of cash on books.... or did I? I guess other than that I'm also starting to look for my internship for next summer. Cause if there’s one thing film school has taught me so far it’s that film school is worthless and all that counts is your internships. well now that I'm good and angry at not having enough money I need to try and sleep so I can wake up and be at work in 5 hours, which isn't going to happen because I woke up at 6 pm today ... don't look down on me I'm still used to working third shift. Later, Bill Hader.

AND NO! I didn’t use any paragraph breaks…. I hope it pissed you off.

Straight up business.... in my pants

So, I'm writing a pilot. Old news, right? Well I'm going to let you all know about the progress, not the content just yet, but believe me it's good. Revolutionary almost. ok, sorry. so I've been filling out a spiral notebook with all the pre-text, you know; character evaluations from 4 different angles, arch conceptions for each of 6 episodes as well as a set of 4-5 interlocking series long stories, production notes from casting choices to ideas for music scores (thanks Will). But that’s nothing I haven't done for my other "pilots"... its in quotes because they never actually got written*. BUT... once I was satisfied with all that fun stuff, I actually started writing out the script. Now keep in mind when I say I wrote it out, I mean like on paper and in pencil. This means that to the untrained eye it looks like somebody ripped 5 legs off an ant and followed its tortured death run onto 50 pages of college rule.
I've got about a half of three fourths to three half fourths and a half of it finished, in laymen terms about 2-3 scenes left. Now it may not be my best writing ever, but by the time I re-write it out on a word file it will be. Honestly, I've cracked up at certain scenes over and over again. And I know that’s not saying much from a man who has stared at himself in the mirror for 2 hours straight. Clearly I admire myself... almost enviously. But this is some legit comedy here.
Now I don't work tomorrow, I could spend this time finishing up the rough draft, or even starting to type it out, but I thought you'd all want to hear form me instead. So it’s your fault if I don't get it done soon. But seriously I'm getting focused on this. A lot of you may know the way that I like to motivate myself best is with fear, specifically of pain. So I'm offering up this guarantee, if by the first day of classes at BG (Aug. 25) I don't have a version of the pilot typed up that I'm willing to show people than you can slap me. Across the face. 3 times. Only on that day, and you have to mention this blog first, otherwise I might have to run up on you with my crew (Hector). But seriously, i'ma get this done.
Moving on to the next step of the process. I need people who want to help me make this. People like co-producers, sound engineers, video editors, someone with a camera, script coverage ... whatever. Now I know you don't want to commit to something you haven't seen and which might be crap. But if you want to be considered for any kind of role you think you can manage, get at me. At the very least leave a comment here. And just remember, I will be famous. and when you come up to me in the future and say "oh Simon, you're so famous and rich, and only you can offer me that opportunity I've been looking for to help accomplish my dreams," this might be the deciding factor between me saying "sheeet, aint no thang" or "help, this homeless person who maybe looks familiar is assaulting me"

thats it for now, maybe next time I'll talk about something you care about. j/k you care about this.

* read all about it in "The Simon Koch: Origins"**
** not real***
***yet