Updates! Plans! (from a month ago lol) new Scanline! and then a lot of other/upcoming stuff!

As mentioned, if you were wondering what I was up to in August it was a new Scanline video with Hbomberguy along with (as I've been doing in September as well!) more convention appearances. Here is a video recording of a panel we did at CreepyCon on low-budget horror filmmaking that Joel Ruiz shot and I edited. I've also been actively appearing on Struggle Session as film correspondent, sometimes on their public feed and sometimes on patron-only eps of theirs (here's a clip from the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood episode with Will Menaker), along with all my stuff for Critical Bits (we did a livestream Q&A recently) and other tabletop shows.

We just had Mark Meer on Critical Bits as part of our guest run and he (of course!) did a fantastic job and I think the episode (ep 23, Sheriff Duke) works great as an out of context/standalone episode if you're interested in CB but don't want to listen to 30 hours of it or whatever to check it out. It has spoilers for the show but other than that is pretty self-contained and fun.

As far as secret or semi-secret stuff I'm working on, I'm making another short comedy/horror film with Devon and Graham (I guess a weird dark comedy about a cult? hard to describe!) to premiere at Ladie's Night later this week and Joel and I are in the very early stages of making an in-depth video essay on I Think You Should Leave. It'll be a video for my channel and I'll write/edit on it of course but I'm interested in trying more collaborative work for StrucciMovies and Joel is a huge (obsessive) ITYSL fan and I'm really excited to work on that with him. And of course there's more Scanline in the future with Hbomb!!

At Monsterama this weekend I paneled about haunted house attractions and now I know the entire history of haunted house rides/attractions/etc so I might make a video essay about that for October because it's a neat history and I want to talk about how capitalism impacts them, especially now, but also from the beginning (they sort of started during The Great Depression to try to keep Great Depression-era teens from vandalizing on Halloween!).

I am very grateful for all of your support! Sorry for not posting or uploading much. I am trying to figure out exactly what I should do for the channel. Of course I love making video essays and will continue to make them, but like I talked about at the end of Fake Friends 2, I can't do feature-length doc work at my current income. So lately I've been trying to balance things differently and branch out more, basically to find more supplementary income (my spot on Struggle Session is paid and I've been taking on more freelance work) so that I can afford to put the time in bigger, more in-depth video essays. This has slowed down my work on the channel but it's helping me a lot to get out of debt and take care of myself and also to do stuff that is directly beneficial for the channel, like pay for captions finally(!!!!!). All of the original Film Nerd episodes are captioned now! And I'm going forward captioning my backlog and actually paying someone to do it. It feels very good to finally be able to work towards accessibility! The Critical Bits patreon already makes more than I did on mine when I made Fake Friends 2, lol (people love podcasts!!), and we're working on transcription for that as well paid for by that money.

I also like the idea of taking time to collaborate more on essays because I enjoy doing it so much with Hbomb. So I am going to try to facilitate that more in the future.

Thanks!

Shannon