The Dungeon - Way Too Much Lava

Hey everyone!

Episode 5 was a fun build. Zach and I build almost everything together, but in this episode I wanted to build a jumping puzzle for him and I didn't want him to see it until it was done. After he finally saw it (and yelled at me for an hour because he hates jumping puzzles) we practiced it and then recorded it. There's actually a jump at 5:48 in the movie where you have to jump up and away from the wall and then push yourself back to make it. We practiced this jump over 25 time and I made it almost every time but Zach could not make it. He made it once and that was it. So in the movie he bypasses the jump by dumping water and swimming up the water instead. This episode is crucial to the plot of the story, because at this point Telemindred has an artifact that can detect us, and so he ends up finding us while we're trying to get the apples. This is why we need the apples; they prevent Telemindred from detecting us.

Fun Fact: Near the end of the movie I mention something called the "Curse of Telemindred". This may sound a little crazy, but this is a real curse. There's a phrase that Zach and I like to use that goes "I'm good at what I do." Every time we use that phrase on a night that we are recording SOMETHING goes wrong. Every. Single. Time. The night we started recording episode 5 I was showing Ben and Dylan the Dungeon and they said it looked really good. I said "Thanks, I'm good at what I do." And all hell broke loose that night. Technical errors, minecraft glitches, me dying in the game, Herman teleporting magically to us without anyone of us doing anything. There's actually a bloopers video we released that has the scene where Herman kept teleporting to us magically. So now we don't use that phrase when we record, because something is bound to go wrong, and the Curse of Telemindred will get us.

Herman - Farther Down the Rabbit Hole

Hey everyone!

Episode 4 is one of my favorites, even though the pacing is a little slow. In this episode we introduce Herman the Hermit, an eccentric, mysterious, and flat out crazy character. He's also everyone's favorite character (including myself and Zach). At this point in time, there's not a lot known about who Herman is or where he came from, but he seems to know a lot more than he lets on. To be quite honest, I wasn't expecting Herman to be a major character. I figured Herman would be a good minor character that we meet, but everything changed when he spoke for the first time. I guess I'm jumping ahead here; let me start from the beginning.

After filming the first three videos, Zach and I realized that we needed more people to help. We needed to start building a team that could not only help portray characters, but also help us build. So Zach brought two of his friends onto the server for an in-game interview. Ben and Dylan were fairly experienced in building, so I decided to see what their vocal ranges were. I knew what I wanted for Herman, but I'm always open to new ideas, so I started with Ben and asked him to do a few lines using whatever voice he would equate with "a crazy hermit". He did his lines and when he finished I asked Dylan to do the same thing. He opened his mouth and started speaking, and Zach and I laughed for three minutes straight. I honestly don't know how we were able to breathe! The voice was hilarious and he was good at improvising as well. Thus, Herman the Hermit was born.

When we realized the potential of Herman's character, we decided to expand his role and now he is central to the story in ways not completely revealed to the viewers...

Fun Fact: Herman has a chicken that we named Clucky Cluck Cluck the Chicken. What most people don't know is that the chicken is not a regular mob. It is, in fact, Ben in disguise, which is why the chicken seems to have a mind of it's own.

Telemindred - The Beginning of Madness

Hey Everyone!

The third video in the series was a more of a beginning for us than the first video we put up. So far we had a series with a general (maybe even vague) direction we wanted to go. But this is the first time we actually show the main villain of season 1, the Dark Lord Telemindred. Telemindred's skin was designed and played by my younger brother, who still assists us with certain builds. At this point in the series, not a lot is known about Telemindred (Zach and I didn't even have much of a back story at this point), but it was evident (eventually) to our characters that his guy was bad news. After this point, Telemindred actually takes a step back and doesn't normally attack us directly, with the exception of a few episodes.

Also a first for us was the city we find. It was very small and only had a few houses and some other rooms, but this was a milestone for Zach and I because we hadn't actually done this much building before. As I mentioned before, Zach and I were still somewhat new to minecraft, and so much of what we know now was learned in the process of preparing and filming this series. We also began to see what our individual strengths and weaknesses were which allowed us to work on areas of the series that we were better at, and to this day we still work as a great team together, pooling our resources, knowledge, and skills together and making something awesome.

Another first for us was tinkering with texture packs and mods in this video. While we did use a mod for the redstone fire in episode 2, it was nothing compared to our elevator mod which allowed us to click a sign and be transported up or down. We haven't used this mod in a while, but we may be implementing it in later episodes. We also began changing certain things in the texture pack to suit our needs for the episode, and we end up making many changes later on in the series as the story progresses.

Finally, I've promised to add clues and insider information about upcoming episodes in this blog, and so far I have not put any in, so I've decided to give you guys a "spoiler" for season 2. The way I am going to do this is by asking for your help. I have two working titles for Season 2 and I want you guys to tell me which one you like more. Here are the titles:

"The Rise of Telemindred"

"Herman - From Man to Hermit"

For those of you who have speculated that Herman is actually Telemindred, you are wrong. However, there is a connection between the two, and all of those related questions will be answered in Season 2, so there's your first spoiler!

Fun Fact: In the scene where Zach and I fight Telemindred, we weren't actually supposed to die. Our characters were supposed to be "knocked out" and then rescued by Herman, but I couldn't find a better way to produce a "knocked out" without actually being killed. Looking back, I'm sure there were better way to do it that didn't involve people asking me if the series was over because our characters were killed, but the past is the past, and it's actually quite comical in retrospect.