After months and months of not being able to show you all our new pilot Team A.P.O.C.A.L.Y.P.S.E., we can finally offer you a chance to see it.  Several of the festivals we entered it into required that it not have been viewable on the web before submission, but now we can finally have a screening and put it on the web.  The screening is at the iOWest Theater in Hollywood on Friday, December 11th at 10 p.m. Most of the cast will be there and some of the crew, so if you do come and have never said hello to us in person, please do so.  Below there is some info on the show, and we hope to see you in a week!

Team A.P.O.C.A.L.Y.P.S.E. is a half-hour comedy series set in post-apocalyptic America. Ghostbusters meets Children of Men. Four “men” are forced to search the barren wasteland for women to help save mankind. No one on Team A.P.O.C.A.L.Y.P.S.E. (American Planetary Objectives Committee Avoiding Life’s Yesterday and Preventing Society’s Extinction.) wants to be there, but since the only alternative is death…they’re giving it a shot. They have limited supplies and even more limited brain capacity.

Written and Directed by: Nick Armstrong

View Trailer

Starring: Nick Armstrong, Kevin Ford, Ryan Gaul, Adam Jefferis, Jeff Kriese, Amanda Ohly, Douglas Sarine

Ryan Reeb is working on an animated short film called “Lillith & Thatch”, and he needs your help to complete it.  They’ve run up against a wall and they need some funding to push through and find the talented artists required to finish the project.  They made a Kickstarter page for the project so you can find out more about it and donate a little or a lot and make this dream a reality.  Please pass this info along and get the word spread far and wide, we’re trying to get Ryan out of his VFX artist’s chair and into a Director chair where he belongs!

We finally found out who won the NexTV festival this past week. Unfortunately, Psycho Bob did not win, but the competition was stiff and the winners are all fantastic, so it was an honor just to compete against them. Here are all the winners in each category:

Grand Prize Winner:
Michael Swingler, Midlife

FIRST RUNNER-UP
Tony McNeal, Born That Way

BEST-IN-CATEGORY WINNERS:

SCRIPTED DRAMA

Omer Zigdon, Banisko

UNSCRIPTED DRAMA

Zeus Quijano Jr., Point Of Entry

SCRIPTED COMEDY

Tara MacDonald, Everything Burns

UNSCRIPTED COMEDY
Brigham Cottam, Wrestling With The Unknown

We’re looking forward to the next festivals, and are working on all kinds of new projects right now, so hopefully this is just the very beginning for us!  Also, side note, the still frame above is from the winning project, Midlife.

Last week, Nick Armstrong was awarded a fantastic honor at the New York Television Festival; Team A.P.O.C.A.L.Y.P.S.E. won him “Best Director”! Huge thanks go out to everyone who worked on the show, as well as the audience, fans, friends, and family that supported the project as it wound through production.  The trailer and commentary for the pilot have now been uploaded to the site (previously they had to be kept offline as part of the festival’s requirements).  The full pilot is slated to be on MSN soon, and I am sure we will be able to post a version here on the AV Club site soon as well.  If you saw the show, thank you, if you want to see the show, you will soon be able to.  We will keep everyone posted as the show continues to make the rounds, hopefully there will be some great news to announce soon.

A while back, I wrote a little bit about a project we had just shot, a short film to help pitch a TV show idea brought to the table by Gene. It was the first RED shoot for any of us, and it went extremely well- certainly a learning experience on many fronts. This piece has been edited for a while, and we are working on getting the project moved along to the next stages, but we decided that in the meantime there was no harm in releasing the video onto the web for everyone to enjoy.

This is a tone piece, or sizzle reel, or whatever you feel like calling it; it is designed to give you a taste for the show’s look and feel but not necessarily structure. I hope you all like it, we worked very hard to get it to this stage, and are working even harder to get it to the next ones.

Today we are very proud to announce that the AV Club’s pilot “Team A.P.O.C.A.L.Y.P.S.E.” has been accepted as an official selection into the New York TV Festival.  The fest runs Sept. 21-27 in New York city, you can read all about it here and here and watch the trailers for all of the official selections right here.  We are extremely proud to now have all three of our recent shows- “Team A.P.O.C.A.L.Y.P.S.E.”, “Striker and Swat” and “Psycho Bob“, recognized as official selections of independent television festivals.  We will continue to make new shows and episodes, and bring you news as it is announced.  Thank you to everyone who has supported these projects, and to anyone who is just finding them for the first time!

Hey!  “Psycho Bob” and “Striker and Swat” have been selected to screen in the 2009 Independent Film Festival!  Psycho Bob is an Official Selection screening on Mon Aug 3 and Tues Aug 4 , and Striker and Swat is screening as part of the MobiFest on Wed Aug 5th.  If you are in LA, come say hello to us at one of the screenings or the multitude of mixers all week- we’d love to have your support and to meet as many of you as possible.  This is the first festival for either show, so obviously it’s a pretty exciting turn of events for us.  And if you didn’t already know, we are filming new episodes currently, hoping to have a slate of them to release soon(ish).  What we have already shot is great, what we have scripted and still to shoot is even better, so stay tuned…

If you missed the first time we threw a BeerPONG event, well, here’s your chance to fix your mistake.  On Thursday June 18th, we are bringing it back for you.  BeerPONG is a custom version of the classic arcade game PONG, built as a competitive drinking game.  The first tournament last November was incredibly fun, with a nailbiting 9-9 final round that was more exciting than you can imagine.  If you want to play, register your 2 man team here.  If you want to come watch, just get the address and other info from here.  If you want to see what you can expect, check out the pics from the first tournament here.  If you want to practice, you can play the full game here.  If you missed it in November, shame on you.  If you miss it in June, shame on you also!

Brian Rothe wrote a nice quick review of the new AV Club series “Striker and Swat” over on Eguiders:

Striker and Swat is a new series from The AV Club about two roommates who struggle to get along with their neighbors and try to find meaning in the world. With very clever writing and fun story lines, I’m predicting a bright future for this show. Do I smell a Streamy in 2010?

Well, a Streamy would certainly be an honor, but honestly it is more important to us that everyone is enjoying the series as much as we are enjoying making it, so thank you to everyone who has helped us spread the word about the show! Stay tuned for episode three next Tuesday, and please, pass the vids along to everyone you know.

In just a little over one week I will hopefully be wrapped on doing VFX for Terminator: Salvation. When I do finish, I will be quitting. Not just quitting my job at the company I work for, I’m quitting VFX entirely. I have spent the past 7 years of working long days (and often long nights) doing CG for films and commercials, and then spending my ‘free time’ at night and on weekends making short films and videos for this site and others. It is almost impossible to write, plan, film, edit, and distribute something while sitting in an office for 8 to 16 hours per day, 5 to 7 days per week. I’ve done it over and over, and every single time it was hell on wheels. I have finally reached the point where I must stop one or the other, at least for a little while- or else I will go insane!

I listen to NPR on the drive to and from work every single day. I read the news. I know how incredibly unsound a decision it is to quit a well-paid, stable job in the face of the worst economic collapse in decades (if not ever). But I have been saving money for years, and have recently decided to use that money to support my dream instead of putting it as a down payment on a house as I had always planned. I came to Los Angeles in 1998 to go to film school. I went to film school to make movies. I graduated and have been working on other people’s movies ever since, with my own projects crammed into the spare hours left over. So now, despite the economy, I have decided to make a run at this ‘Directing’ thing full time, while I still can. The plan is to take at least 6 months (if not several years) off from working a day job to focus on doing what I came here to do.

Everyone whom I have talked to about this has been surprisingly supportive- not a single person has tried to caution me or otherwise convince me to change my mind. In fact, this decision has almost been more nerve-wracking given how little opposition I’ve heard. I am mildly terrified, but also more excited about it than anything I’ve done in a long time. My VFX skills are not going to disappear, and I have an open door at my current company to return, should I burn through all my savings and need to come crawling back for more.

What does this mean for The AV Club? First up is the completion of Team Apocalypse, a new pilot we have been working on for quite a while now. And then more Psycho Bob episodes. And after that, more web series, music videos, short films, spec commercials… anything that seems worth making! So stay tuned to this site- there will be plenty of new content, news and updates as this exciting chapter begins!

-Andy Cochrane