Only a few days left to go in our KICKSTARTER!!  Give a little (or a lot), if you can…

Here’s a little taste of the footage we’ve been working with on the effects side of things.  Some of these shots are gonna have six or seven different pieces to them, as you can see.  But when it’s all together, it’s gonna slay…

Here’s what we came up with for Jor-El’s shirt logo in the ptero-verse where all this action is taking place.

We learned the hard way that you’ve got to weigh down the edges of yer stencil if you want it to look nice ‘n sharp.  I guess that’s why the US Treasury still makes pennies?

Here’s some behind-the-scenes footage of Matt (Director) and Chris (DP) shooting our miniature of Planet Krypton.  Thanks to Kayrock Screenprinting for giving us permission to use this light table for something other than exposing screens (wear sunglasses!!), and thanks to K-Holes for letting us borrow that fog machine!!  Thanks to Lizzy Beeby for her amazing help with the miniatures and thanks to Zach for just being an all-around badass dude (with the coolest half-smile-half-sneer around).

This is gonna be awesome.

It took us a little while to get it all balanced, but we were finally able to successfully test our life-size hoops at Todd and Aya’s apartment in Bushwick.  For this particular setup we eventually noticed an unfortunate wobble up at around 25V, so we’ll likely keep it nice ‘n easy at 22V or so.  But who knows, in a different room with a taller ceiling, the resonant spin rate is likely to be slightly different… we’ll just have to figure it out again when the time comes!!

The 99-cent store only had two green fleece blankets, and we forgot to bring our tripod, but this test was still basically a success! Just multiply that one head by 10 or so friends, and arrange them in a circle, looking inward, and we’ve got ourselves a panel of Kryptonian judges!

You  might recognize that space in the wide shot as the basement of Monster Island.  The building known as Monster Island, which houses Secret Project Robot, Kayrock Screenprinting, the Ocropolis, Mollusk Surf Shop, and a few other spectacular institutions, will be empty by October 1st. The building is going to be demolished, but most all of the folks inside will be moving to other locations to continue their magic. We’ve chosen to set our planet Krypton here, giving our video some extra parallel to the original plot (spoiler alert!!).

Here’s to the final weeks of Monster Island!!!

With Friends Like These Who Needs Hose Clamps?

Sometimes the most effective way to figure out how to work your way through a problem is just set it up with whatever you have around and see if you get lucky.  Unfortunately, sometimes you don’t happen to stumble upon success immediately.

But then you go see an old friend who happens to own a box of low-rpm geared motors and you realize how lucky you’d always been, having friends like these… Thanks, TM Bailey, for the motor, thanks Brooklyn Friends for the power supply, and thanks McMaster-Carr for the shaft coupling!

Welcome to the Pterrordome!

So we got it into our heads that we’d remake the beginning of the first Superman movie as a video for the first song on our new record, called School Glue.  The exciting thing about preparing for this video is that there are so many little pieces to get right: props, set pieces, costumes… We’ll try to use this ptumblr to show evidence of the things we get right (and wrong!) as the project develops- like this retracting dome for our planet Krypton miniature- hell yeah!!

Pterodactyl: Spills Out is comin’ out on November 15th, 2011 on Brah Records.

Somehow, our old Blogspot Pt-Log got deleted by Google (eff those clowns!) so it looks like we’ve got a ptumblr now!

This absolutely beautiful record cover was designed by our friend Otecki, an artist in Wroclaw, Poland who designed the cover for our 2010 EP Arnold’s Park.  This capture happens to look strangely neon, but we kinda like it!