Eric Ingrum's Project Blog

I've been on a long beak from everything. I haven't touched anything even bordering on artistic (besides Double Feature?) since I started a mad dash to pay off my student loan. Yesterday I wrote my lender a huge check, and long boring story short - I'm finally free of student debt. The repercussions of my worthless bachelors degree are now behind me. From here, it's on to better planned and more lucrative decisions. Let's see if I can't get back to doing something interesting.



As if Mass Effect 2 wasn't going to be enough of a distraction from that, the final season of Lost begins tonight.

I haven't posted anything in a while. Long story short, I was in the ER a few weeks again and I've been recovering the last month or so. Whatever I had was probably stress induced, so I've been trying not to do anything that could cause even the smallest amount of stress. That basically means my life has become a 24 marathon mixed with occasional Double Feature work.

I'm almost fully recovered, so I don't really have an excuse to lay around the rest of the winter and get nothing done. We've got a Killapalooza thing coming up, I have to edit this book thing I've been keeping secret, and then there's some other more interesting little projects coming up. Just know that I'm still alive, I suppose.

Episode 37: Top Ten Horror Movies of 2009

Butcher and special guest Eric Ingrum, from the Double Feature podcast, team up to discuss this years Best and Worst Horror Films of 2009. Other discussions include Hatchet 2 news, the upcoming DVD release of Cabin Fever 2 : Spring Fever and James Cameron's Avatar. Hosts also give site announcements and dig through mail casket. It's all hear and it's only one click away!

I often talk on Double Feature about how we don't do a review show. We're strive to make our show less about us and more about the films we're talking about. We've trained ourselves to suppress our opinions when they aren't directly relevant to the notability of a film. Even after each show, I painstakingly edit out the terrible review jargon like that snuck it's way into our conversation. Reviews just aren't the niche we're going for.

This week some friends of ours over at KillerReviews needed a last second co-host, so I have to admit that I was actually really excited to indulge. It was great to have a really opinionated conversation in that kind of forum. It's a much different kind of show, it's all about the personality of the hosts. They're listens love to know what they think, and that works really well in the context of their overall site. After years of bottling up all these review-type-feels I dove head first into the most icon form of review - the top ten list.

I just found the coolest thing ever: A Christmas Carol ready by Tim Curry. Unabridged, none the less.


Tim Curry (of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame) lended his voice to the 1997 animated version of A Christmas Carol. Now there's a new audiobook of the Charles Dickens novel ready by none other than Mr. Curry himself. Rather than dragging your kids to that Jim Carey Robert Zemeksis nightmare, you should probably just download this audiobook.

We just started promoting Audible on Double Feature. Today I was poking aroung their website, and I noticed this is actually FREE. If you don't have any audible account, you can get one here:

Try Audible Now and Get 2 Free Audiobook Downloads with a 14 Day Trial. Choose from over 60,000 Titles.

The recording just came out a few days ago. I guess it's something Audible actually put together themselves, which is pretty cool. The idea that an audiobook store is also publishing their own audiobooks reminds me of how Blockbuster was ultimately responsible for releasing The Attic Expeditions. Cut out the middle man; it's such a crazy awesome idea.

Lately I've been obsessed with monetizing Double Feature. The podcast has always been a way for me to experiment with marketing and some other music-industry things without a lot of risk so I'll kind of know what I'm doing when I finish the ZEP. How do you promote an album these days? How do you distribute? How do you finance it? It's even been way for me to practice production stuff like mastering, micing for voices, etc.

Now that the podcast has a a few listeners I'm starting to wonder how you squeeze some money out of it. I don't think anyone makes any real money podcasting, but it would be nice if it was at least self subtenant. Podcasts cost about a hundred dollars a year to run. Ours is a little more expensive for a few stupid reasons, but if you're going to pay for your own hosting and have you're own site those are the hard numbers.

For the past two years we've been ignoring that fee, but now we're running into some equipment purchases that have to be made and it's starting to add up. The idea was that Double Feature's audio would get better and better as we did the show. If we're going to maintain the quality we're at now (and even improve, hopefully) we're going to need to buy some new gear. Even just padding the studio would go a really long way.

So that leads to the newfound obsession of making money with Double Feature. I've been reading a bunch of stuff (including this great article How to Make Money Podcasting, which ironically used a picture of our show). The problem isn't so much a last of ideas, but that there's so many different ways and I don't really know what's best suited for the show. I don't want to go the advertising route...I fell like it's pretty annoying and not really effective...another popular one is donations, but that feels really tacky. Lots to think about.

Click for a larger view. Photo taken on an iPhone 3GS. Silly filters in Aperture & Photoshop. High resolution versions of the original and the black and white on Flickr.

The ZEP is alive and well! With the AwesomeStart feature complete and the majority of Double Feature production out of the way, I finally have time to get back to finishing the album.

The second draft of the lyrics/script/whatever is done. A few people were kind enough to record read-throughs with me, so I have some audio to cut up and play around with.

Upon reading it became evident that the words need one more good round of revisions. There's a few things that still come off as a bit obvious. There's another problem that I never saw coming: there's just so damn much of it.

The read-throughs came out to about thirty minutes every time, and I felt like they were even a little fast. There's large sections that monologue a bit to much and I also noticed big passages where there aren't any female characters. It's going to be impossible to get four paragraphs of a single character's speach into a song. I think I'm just going to have to cut some things.

I guess I always knew putting the words to music would require alteration. When I actually get to it, it's goig to be a problem of still conveying the same message in fewer words.

If you ever listen to Double Feature you know that I tend to over-explain things. I don't consider that a problem necessarily. I think of it more as a style. Some people are poets like that. They can convey complex ideas in a very minimalistic way. Simple, powerful ideas.

One of the things I like so much about Ayn Rand (besides objectivism, atheism, and the roots of modern libertarian philosophy) is her tendancy to over-explain. Atlas Shrugged is a perfect example. She takes what only needs to be a page and a half worth of ideas and writes a thousand page novel.

That kind of long-winded approach makes sure you aren't misunderstood. There's no room for interpretation...you're covering every detail of your opinion in such a variety of ways that everyone pretty much has to be on the same page with you. You outline what you want to say, you state how that view might react to opposition, and - best of all - you walk through thought experiments. The ZEP is like a big thought experiment. What would it be like if this actually happened? How would idea X be affected by the extreme Y?

I just hope I can finish this up before the actual political climate of this country beats me to what I thought it was just a cartoonish for-the-sake-of-argument extreme.