Episode 175 – “Sign Off” News
We’ve been called every name in the book over this episode. Liars is the one that keeps coming back. I can assure you we are in no way lying when it comes to our final episode of Starkville’s House of El. It is a very personal thing for me and I have been its #1 supporter since the cameras stopped rolling in May.
We always knew it was going to be ambitious but we really wanted to try and do everything for this episode. Get the band back together. Do a huge round-table retrospective of the past 10 years of the show, season by season, as well as the last 5 years of SHoE. There was even a time we were talking about getting all the hosts together in one room, and I mean ALL the hosts (Tucker, Will, Graham, Houston, Steve, Joe, Damian, Robin) and just having this huge SHoE nostalgic fest on camera. SHoECon, if you will. But that all kind of fell through and we salvaged what we could by Steve and myself making a promise that we would be there together for the end and that the cameras would be rolling through the weekend. With that in mind, we commissioned Damian, Joe, and Robin to be in on this as well and make this a big blowout. It was ambitious, and not to oversell it (because I don’t want it to come out and people say “that’s what we waited for?!”) but I think we did the end of SHoE justice with the 10+ hours of footage that was shot that weekend, not to mention other footage from the past 5 years.
We essentially wanted a two-hour movie of a journey from Smallville and SHoE. This was all mapped out on a cocktail napkin before it was announced that the Smallville DVD series set would have a 90 minute documentary about the show from season to season with almost every cast member. As great as that documentary is (and trust me, I’m on my fourth viewing; it is amazing) we really wanted the everyman’s point of view and since that’s what we’ve done from week to week for the last five years, we were going to compile everything into one and, to borrow a phrase from Steve, pull the curtain back completely.
With all that in mind, you might be able to somehow empathize the undertaking that Graham was facing when I gave him everything back in June. It’s basically a film. And with that in mind, it became a tax on us to get it done in an appropriate amount of time for Smallville and SHoE’s ending. We wanted to take our time, because we wanted it to be perfect so we could use every bit of host interviews, as well as listener submitted videos. There just wasn’t time in the day. Graham has done about 40% of the footwork on it but is just buried under real life, as we all are. I can’t blame him for that when he was doing this for free in what should a several thousand dollar paid project. I don’t have the equipment or time to devote to this myself. It’s been little by little. Enter Jason Spencer. Jason has been a long time listener of SHoE and one of the first people I can remember talking to early in the show’s birth. He’s always been a good friend and is devoting his free time to getting the project done once and for all within the next 3-4 weeks. Jason is an amazing freelance videographer and editor and the project is in good hands with him.
So, that’s basically it in a nutshell. We aren’t holding out. We aren’t trying to coincide with the season 10 or series set DVD/Blu-Ray releases. It’s just been an uphill battle trying to get this just right with a project that was shot one everything from expensive high-end cameras, to iPhones, to Flip Recorders. It’s a journey, much like the film itself. In fact, every day we get closer, I call it more and more of a film. A very personal film because it took 5 years to get here and it’s taken a few more months to get it just right. So, it’s coming. And I hope you all love it.
