Season One Summary

2020-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Summary

These are the ideas I remember.

Choose Your Heist

An eight part streaming series where Episodes 3, 4, 5, 6 are split into an A track and a B track. Episodes 1 and 2 setup the heist and introduce the crew. Episode 2 ends with some really weird shit happening. You, the viewer receive a prompt to decide if (A) weird shit is real or (B) it’s all a trick, he’s high or dreaming. Either way once you’ve chosen, your account is locked into track A or B. We film separate episodes for 3 through 6. If you’re A track, you see the A story. B track, B story.

The key idea is that important parts of story A are embedded in the B track and vice versa. You can’t get the whole story from watching alone. You have to read online reviews and listen to podcasts and talk to people from the other track to tease out the important information for your track. The series uses pop-culture online discussion as a fundamental part of the story telling experience.

Raccoon Eye

A film in the style of Wes Anderson. The movie opens with a ground level camera in the parking lot of a luxuriously wooded park. An arboretum. A big ass raccoon chills in the bushes at the edge of the parking lot eating garbage. The sun is just coming up, the world is beautiful. A car pulls into the shot, only the wheels and the base of the frame is visible.

A man comes around, muttering to himself. He opens the passenger door, unbuckles a drunken giggling passenger, and pulls him roughly from the car dumping him onto the ground directly in front of the camera, filling the shot with our hero’s sloppy drunken mug.

The car pulls away, aggressively. Our hero rolls onto his back. Cut to an overhead shot with a view of the entire empty parking lot. We watch the raccoon slowly wander his way over to the hero and make sweet, sweet love to his face.

Open credits

It’s Monday morning. Our hero is at work, in a meeting. He has the saddest eye patch in the world, a bit of gauze and athletic tape wrapped twice around his head. Taped right over the hair. He has a Kleenex and dabs repeatedly at the liquid seeping out the corner of the gauze. The audio, originally muted and distorted, comes into focus. It’s the type of meeting where our hero loses his job.

He’s home early. Meets a strapping young personal trainer leaving his house on his way in. It’s exactly what you think. He knows it. She doesn’t even really try to hide it. Neither care enough to make an effort to fight or address it. He goes upstairs and passes out.

This is a movie about a man that has achieved a balance in life. He’s mediocre. Everything he does is just barely good enough, and sometimes not. Shitty friends that he treats poorly. Shitty job he loses. Shitty marriage. But at night. He’s BATMAN.

No, he’s not fucking Batman. But he does something. Maybe he’s a Twitch streamer. Maybe he has a podcast. This thing he does at night, he’s amazing at it. Everything else sucks. Everything else get’s minimum effort. Because at night our hero is a HERO. His whole life is a balance, a trade he’s willing to make. Until a raccoon jizzes in his eye.

This will not stand. This must be addressed. He becomes obsessed with revenge on the raccoon. His poorly constructed life comes apart in a series of disasterous events. Rock bottom. Recovery and a new slightly healthier stasis. End credits with our hero signing autographs at a comic con wearing a coonskin hat.

Mystery Van. You’ll be home by midnight. Probably.

This is an entertainment service. Dinner theatre. For $350 dollars a person, we craft a night of adventure. Ten people are picked up in a van and are taken on a mystery date. Dinner with a top chef on the 50 yard line of Century Link field. However, everything is not quite as it seems. Some of our diners are actors playing a part. The night comes apart spectacularly before we put it back together again and drop you off at home. By midnight. Probably.

I See Bad Things

Another streaming series. A late middle aged man, a traffic cop, is reminded of a childhood experience. He was shoplifting candy when he had a vision of a car jacking in the parking lot. As he walks out of the store, he sees his vision starting to play out in front of him and is able to interrupt it by yelling a question at the carjacker.

He has a similar experience as an adult. He does a bad thing and has a vision of a worse thing. This is his superpower.

The Cat Ladies and the Husk

Golden girls + Catwoman. A group of crime fighting ladies aren’t as young as they used to be. At the funeral of one of their members, they notice the grand-daughter has cat like reflexes as well. New blood.

Their enemy is an alien menace, The Husk. A sentient worm that crawls inside a human and takes them over. He turns them into a husk. He’s outraged that he is called the Husk. “I’m not the husk. I’m the husker. I make the husks.”. Inevitably, his plans are foiled right as he’s ranting about how they should call him the Husker.

The cat ladies are responsible for some of the most notorious assassinations as they stop the Husk from successfully taking over powerful figures.

Robbing the Go Store

This is maybe a short. A group of criminals are assembled via a dark web chatroom to rob a store. They carefully execute a break-in with precision and expertise. As they successfully overcome all the obstacles, they realize it’s a Go Store. There is no money. There is no cash registers. They can take as many groceries as they want, but it’s all RedBull and candy bars. They didn’t come here for snacks.

There’s no one here, no money here. The crew begins to argue amongst themselves. In disgust, one of the crew pulls off his mask. A light from the ceiling spotlights him. Alexa’s voice plays on the store speakers, “Robert Williams, 36. Likes snowboarding and camping. Is DTF”. What the fuck. Alexa has used facial recognition and the fact that the Go Store is wired with hundreds of cameras to identify Robert. It’s clear that this crew has some cleaning up to do. Robert pleads, “Danny, come on. You’ve known me forever. Don’t do this.”.

“Sorry, bud,” Danny says softly as he pulls the trigger, shooting Robert in the face.

“Danny Shannon. 342 Elm. danshan@hotmail.com. Two-Oh-Six-“ Alexa is interrupted by gunfire.

Danny crumples to the ground, shot in the side by Gary Snead.

One by one, Alexa reveals information on the crew, turning them against each other. One of them is married to a sister, but is cheating. One is a cop. A cop that does crimes as a hobby, but still a cop. Eventually all of the crew is dead, ending in a double shooting.

The focus fades from the store as police and emergency personal arrive to take in the scene. A voice says, “..weirdest thing, this is the third time this year.” Transition to a shot of a computer. A post is being made in a darkweb chatroom. Alexa is putting together a new crew.

Mediocre Heroes

People with weird super powers.

Immortal Monster

A middle aged woman, 30 or so, is actually an immortal monster that has lived since the beginning of man. She has to kill once a year. Instead of having one true love across the ages and maybe a new love now, she views lovers the way we view pets. We love them with all our heart, but they die too soon and we get another.

Moleface

Seriously no idea.

Babywigs

Wigs, but for babies?

Bad Idea Rodeo

2020-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

What

Bad Idea Rodeo is a drinking club that generates ideas. Not all ideas end up bad, but most start out bad and absurd and gradually nudge themselves into some semblance of ‘that could work.’ The ideas we generate belong to the club, unless we decide as a group that we either don’t care or perhaps, care very deeply about not being associated with an idea. Ask Brian about Flavor Fingers… it’s all him. Just him. Unless Bob got cut into some side action, but we’re pretty sure Bob’s smarter than that.

TricksterViz, LLC provides all the legal and infrastructure needs for the club. All copyrights and trademarks and infrastructure costs belong to TricksterViz, LLC until we decide to give it a new structure. The current default terms for taking one of the ideas and turning it into a real project is a $100 + 1% royalty on gross revenue. For example, if we claimed ownership of Flavor Fingers, which we do not, but if we did god help us, and Brian wanted to push forward with it, this is how it would work.

Brian would just start doing it. Making up prototypes and stuff. Eventually he’d get to the point that this is real and either put real money into it or convince some investor to put real money into it. We’d write a simple contract that for $100 and one percent gross revenue, he has a license for whatever IP he needs to control for Flavor Fingers. He can go off and make a million dollars. Lol. And at the end of each quarter, year, whatever the contract states, he’d pay the club one percent of one million dollars. The $10k and $100 paid to the club would be distributed equally amongst the founding members with a little bit, not yet determined, paid out to the junior members and hangers on. But good news. Flavor Fingers is all Brian and he can go make his million dollars on his own.

Why

Have you ever been to a Game Industry meetup? They all feel the same. Thirty devs trying to talk the other twenty nine devs into working on their idea. Ideas are cheap, especially when stuck in the land of me and mine. Bad Idea Rodeo is an attempt to turn me into we by creating the minimum structure necessary to turn individual ideas into group ideas.

Also, I was moving from working on games to working on enterprise VR tools and was worried about keeping some fun and creativity in my life. At one of our long-lunches, I pitched the idea of getting together maybe once a month or so for drinks and bullshitting about ideas for comics, or games, or movies, or tv shows, or whatever. Here we are.

When

I think it was probably January 2017. We’re still doing it here in May of 2020, at least every once in a while.

Where

Seattle and the East Side. Our original get togethers were at the Tiki Bar in the Anderson School in Bothell. Other nights, we met up at the Oaxacan Restaurant in Capitol Hill. Brian lured us to Kirkland a few times as well.

Who

Founding Members

The core team that started the rodeo is: Jeremiah Habets, Bob Gregory, Brian Patenaude, and Tony Ravo.

Other Stuff

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