NEWS 10-19-07

World Premier and Birthday Party is On!!!

It's official!!! The world premier of "Zeppo: Sinners From Beyond the Moon!" will take place 11:59PM, Saturday, November 3rd at The Kentucky Theater in downtown Lexington Kentucky! Plus, Debbie Rochon WILL be there, live and in person, and celebrating her Birthday!!! There's going to be games and prizes starting around 11:30PM when Debbie begins signing autographs and taking pictures! There will also be tables for other local filmmakers to sell and promote their films as well as a Zeppo table selling T-shirts! All this is only $5 to get in and they sell drinks there, which is perfect for Zeppo! Seating is limited so get your tickets early! The Kentucky Theater is located at 214 East Main Street, Lexington, KY 40507! Click here for The Kentucky Theater MySpace page! We'll see you all there, and bring Debbie presents!!!

Will Zeppo Be Finished In Time?

There's only 2 weeks left until the world premier and Zeppo is not finished!! Not to worry, it will be! Here's what's left... 1) There's 4 pieces of Score that need to be redone or added to and the score needs to be mixed! That's about a day or two of work. 2) There's a handful of people left to loop with. This is about 4 or 5 days of work. 3) The sound FX! We'd like to have more time than we do for this, but we'll get all the important stuff in there in 1 to 2 days. Who needs to hear footsteps anyway? 4) The Final Mix! Eric's been mixing for near 2 decades, so this will only take a day or two! So, yes, there's still a lot to do, but it will get done!! After 3 years, it will be strange to not have to do it anymore for Zeppo! Onto the next one!

9-22-07

B-Shirts!!!

That's right! The first Official Zeppo: Sinners From Beyond the Moon! T-shirts are coming! These are high quality black shirts with white silk-screening and will be available as of Oct. 1 2007. The shirts feature Debbie Rochon as Empress Molly and Lloyd Kaufman as President Lloyd Kaufman and allow you to show your allegiance to either Planet Earth or Planet Zeppo. A small quantity has been ordered at first, approximately 75 of each design, but will be reordered as we sell them out! The prices aren't bad either, one for $15 or 2 for $25 plus shipping! More designs will be coming soon! Click here to see mock ups of the art work!

The World Premier!

Here's an update on the World premier of Zeppo: Sinners From Beyond the Moon!! Debbie Rochon will still attended! We do have a date, but locking down a theater has proven a bit more difficult than expected, particularly it being the weekend it's is on! I don't want to announce the date until we have a place as well! We are in the middle of getting a theater locked and should know more by Monday. Check back for updates!

9-8-07

Zeppo's Got Rythm

Eric Butts (Producer) and Jerry Williams (Director) have just given final Approval to the soundtrack of Zeppo! There are currently 17 original songs that were written, performed and recorded by Eric Butts. "I was going for a kind of punk rock version of the Ventures!" comments Eric. According to early reactions, that's exactly what he achieved! The next step is to fit as much of the music into the movie as possible, which is already being done. After that, the final track and dialogue clip order will be finalized and then the soundtrack is ready for pressing and sale! In the meantime, a song or two will be available for free download from this site soon!

Guess Who's Coming To Zeppo!

The plans for the world premier of Zeppo: Sinners From Beyond the Moon! are in motion!! A date has already been locked into place and will be announced at the end of this week! The place, though 90% certain, is still being finalized! What we can reveal is this... Debbie Rochon is defiantly going to be there!! So you can come and meet the amazing host of Fangoria Radio and get pictures and autographs! This is going to be a big party, with games and prizes as well as many more surprises to be announced soon! You're not going to want to miss this once in a lifetime event!

The BIGGEST Zeppo Fan there is?

"Mark from the UK" You may have heard this name mentioned many, many times if you listen to Fangoria Radio (Sirius channel 102, Fridays at 10pm est.), He's obviously a huge fan of Debbie Rochon's and they have a good friendship, which is why he got interested in Zeppo in the first place!

From the beginning, Mark has been very supportive of Zeppo, He loves horror movies, Troma, space exploration (he's met many of the men that have been to space!) and of coarse anything having to do with Debbie, which explains his interest in Zeppo! "At first I was excited just to have a friend/fan in the United Kingdom..." says Eric Butts (Producer of Zeppo) "I began to enjoy back and forth e-mails right off the bat and now I'm very much looking forward to meeting him in person!"

Mark supportive ways include posting our banners everywhere he can, reposting our MySpace announcements, telling everyone he can and the best part ... he made his own Zeppo T-shirt and wore it around Fangoria conventions! First at the Burbank convention and then the recent New Jersey con! He met many celebrities and promoted Zeppo to everyone! Things like this have earned Mark an important place with Zeppo "and he will be rewarded!" says Eric.

You too could be this cool, but you've got a lot of catching up to do!

Disaster for Zeppo?

The disaster has been averted! It started when Eric was finalizing the finished version of the movie, not the audio, when our most important hard drive crashed! Eric flew into action trying to regain all the elements he lost, but for a while it didn't look good! Shortly after Eric had resigned himself to having to redo 220 of the 370 visual FX, it hit him. They had a high quality version of the Finished FX that had been used to review them, from this they were able to recover all the last work with little effort and only about 2 weeks time lost!

The hard drive was replace by 2 drives, so everything at this point is being saved on both drives until they're ready to be backed up.

INCOMING!!!

I'm sorry it's been so long since the last update, but we've been through alot!! I'll tell you all about it in a couple days! I've been working on a massive re-structer of this whole web site and should have it up in a day or two! Thanks!

NO SMOKING IN VEGAS!?

"Vegas is starting to suck!" exclaims Eric Butts (Producer and Editor of Zeppo) after returning from Las Vegas, Nevada Friday night. After a 4 hour flight from Atlanta to Vegas, the first thing Eric usually does is go to a smoking lounge and have a cigarette, however, he was surprised to learn a ban smoking had been passed since he was last there. "You used to be able to smoke anywhere you wanted, hallways, elevators, restaurants, etc., but now the only place you can smoke is in the gaming areas!" Luckily, this is where he spends 99% of his time!

"The strip was ugly this time too.." he says, referring to the large amount of construction currently filling the famous strip of Las Vegas. "I barely slept, since I was right next to a new casino going up! The construction usually started about the time I went to bed!"

Since coming home yesterday, Eric's already been spending his winnings. So far he's purchased some audio software needed for future stages of Zeppo's post production, 3 more "Me First & the Gimme Gimme's" CD's, as well as the new "Transformers" movie toys!

"I'll be doing some light work and scheduling on Zeppo this week as I try and catch up on some sleep!" Eric says finally, after that, He and Jerry Williams (Writer and Director of Zeppo) will kick into High gear on the Audio portion of post production.

5-7-07

VISUAL FX ARE COMPLETE!

After 4 months of intense work from Eric Butts (Producer and Editor of Zeppo), Jerry Williams (Writer and Director of Zeppo) and Pat Bowling (Co-producer of Zeppo) the visual fx have been finished. "They aren't as perfect as I would have liked," said Eric "But they're as good as they're going to be without another year of work!" The visual fx we're primarily handled by Eric Butts, doing all the compositing, 2d animation, keying, roto-scoping and laser fx, Pat Bowling, doing all the 3d modeling and 3d animation, and Jerry Williams, supervising and directing. "There were 369 visual fx shots to do and for 3 people to do them in 4 months and get them as good as they are is pretty awesome!" comments Jerry Williams. To accomplish these fx, which entailed shot such as lasers shooting, spaceships flying and scenes with completely CG environments, the filmmakers used AfterFX 6 pro and a free animation program downloaded from the Internet "the results are pretty interesting and I've not seen anything quite like them before..." Eric says "...I'm pretty proud of them!"

The next step is finishing the ADR (automated dialogue replacement). The filmmakers have 4 of 16 different actors completed and are planning for an intense 2 to 3 weeks of looping in two weeks.

A RELEASE DATE FOR ZEPPO?

The filmmakers of Zeppo have finally begun planning for the world premier of Zeppo in Lexington Kentucky. "We're looking at late September" says Eric Butts (Producer and Editor of Zeppo). After many failed attempts at predicting a release date for Zeppo, which is clearly evident in the advance teaser trailer and the advance trailer in the coming soon part, The filmmakers had decided to not even attempt to guess when the film would be done. However, at this point, they seam to have a handle on their timetable.

The reason for September is two fold. One, Lexington is a college campus town and college kids are a big part of our target audience, so we want to make sure they're in town. Two, It gives plenty of time to finish Zeppo. At the current pace, Zeppo will actual be finished around the end of July, which leaves a month or so to concentrate 100% on promotion.

"We want to make the premier a huge event, not just a screening" Eric said. The basic plan is more like a convention, with prizes, games, contests, celebrities, autograph sessions, vendor tables and plenty more. The filmmakers urge you not to get to excited, nothing is set, they've just started the plan. More details should emerge in about a month.

WHAT'S NEW?

Welcome to the newly designed zeppothemovie.com! This time the site has much more to offer, such as a cast list, a page of banners and their codes and frame grabs directly from the movie. Some pages aren't even up yet, like the timeline of Zeppo and the History of Zeppo, but they're coming within 2 weeks! The best improvement isn't one you can actually see however, it's been designed in a fashion to make frequent updates a breeze. So future updates may not be this large as often, but there will be many more updates!

What's happening?

VACATION?

Eric Butts (Producer and Editor of Zeppo) is heading to Las Vegas! He leaves early Tuesday morning and will spend 3 days in Vegas until coming home on Friday.

"Just in time for Fangoria Radio" says Eric, who tends to go to Vegas 3 to 4 times a year. This time it's been more than a year since his last visit "so I'm really looking forward to it this time!"

THE SICK JERRY WILLIAMS!

Jerry Williams (Writer and Director of Zeppo) is getting over a cold. He's had this cold for the last 4 days and may finally be getting back to normal. This comes a few days after Eric Butts (Producer and Editor of Zeppo) got past a cold of his own. "This is good news, after I get back from Vegas, Jerry and I both will be ready to start cracking down on finishing Zeppo!" says Eric Butts.

Rumors and Theories

ZEPPO AND SPIDERMAN 3, CONNECTED?

This is about 5th hand information at this point, but did come from very reliable people. Casey Miracle (Co-producer of Zeppo) was working on a different project, when he ran into a guy who had been a production assistant on Spiderman 3. Casey told the guy who stared in Zeppo and they guy asked if he was talking about Zeppo. Casey was surprised he'd heard of it when the guy informed him, he had been talking about Zeppo on the set of Spiderman 3. This doesn't mean much, other than the fact the word is spreading, but is kind of cool!

HELLO NORWAY!

The word of Zeppo: Sinners from Beyond the Moon is spreading in Norway! A few weeks ago, zeppothe movie.com had it's first visitor from Norway. This visitor arrived via a free advertising site used to promote this site. Over the past couple weeks, this site's been receiving multiple different hits from Norway, all arriving via a zeppothe movie.com link or by typing it into their browser. This tend to indicate the first Visitor liked what he saw and told people about it, who in turn, are telling others. We hope all our visitors will help do the same.