Tag Archives: Erika Adams

8-Leafer Studios Is Back!

Hey everybody! It’s Cloverman Joe Carlson again, with an announcement of a new video project from 8-Leafer Studios. If you don’t know us, to be honest our group is mainly just some friends helping me art like I gotta art. I just love doing these videos and I love how happy it makes my friends to star in these projects. I have a film degree and very little art related work available in my area, and certain family related reasons keep me where I am, so these videos keep me in the craft I love.

Now that we have the self-promotion out of the way, I’m excited to tell you about our new project. We will be introducing 3 new characters, Nixie the sprite, a yet unnamed character referred to as “wisp” who will be played by Christina Lindquist, and the space-troll Jonathan Crumbonion, who will be played by our very own Eric Blair. Nixie will be played by our first special guest star, noteworthy writer and radio-show host Erika Adams (https://www.elatales.com/). This will be her acting debut and we are so happy to have her helping out with this project. We attempted to bring her character to life before, in a project called “Character Pilot,” but a filming oversight made it our first project to fail. Despite the ups and downs for the character, we can finally introduce her to you in this new project.

In this new short, we will also be expanding on our established universe even further. You won’t recognize this reference without having seen our other videos, but our story will begin in the “Triton Territories.” We haven’t named our universe yet, but our science consultant and actor Jack Schmidt calls it “the Gummiverse” and that’s acceptable for now. These videos always have an experimental element to them, so we will be attempting some stop-animation for the first time, as well as our first “action sequence,” if you consider chases action. I had a lot of fun sculpting the scenes and making the music, but the true joy is when I actually get to sit there with my friends all done up in their goofy costumes. All scenes and backgrounds have been shot successfully, and now there is just a lot of editing ahead of us, but when I say “us” I mean me from this point forward lol so it might be some time until it releases.

This new video is not our endgame, not by a longshot. We hope to assemble our videos into an anthology series we can pitch. The overall premise is still up in the air, but we will keep you posted. Check out this playlist (https://youtu.be/BEnVFwu2Vs0?si=KZ-D5vYq-i26BPC5) like and subscribe, and if you really wanna help out, try donating to our patreon when it gets up and running!

And here it is, the 25 second trailer for our biggest project yet! We hope to see you Halloween when the full video releases!

8-Leafer Studios Lands Childrens Book Trailer For Local Talent, Erika Adams *UPDATE BELOW

Good evening, and welcome back to the 8-Leafer Studios Blog!  I’m Cloverman Joe Carlson, and a lot has happened in the past weeks concerning my team and I.  As you may know, our last film project had a digital disaster and we had to cancel it until we all had the time.  One of our new team members, Erika Adams, would have been playing the role of a space-farer named Nixie.  Although she is still scheduled to appear in another project, she’s been so on board I consider her a part of 8-Leafer Studios already.  She is a local radio talent here in Duluth, and recently she had her 50th episode of her show as champion to the art of storytelling, and recently wrote a wonderful children’s book, called “New Moon’s Family.”  She came to me with some wonderful illustrations by Eric Soderstrom, and asked me to animate them into a trailer and whip up a music track to accompany them.  I felt really connected to this project, I have some scheduled to reach the moon next year on the Moon Arts Ark, so you can imagine how I like the recurring theme here.  You will find the final trailer below. It went through a last second re-rendering because I wasn’t available to fix something properly but I don’t think it lost enough resolution to matter. It was a really fun project and I hope she writes many more books!  Find copies on Amazon, barnesandnoble.com, and Itasca, and check out her site at elatales.com!

SEE UPDATE BELOW!

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSQ1ehxH_lg&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0Y_1Q1il9XJW5fuWGczHDEDsnJv4SVWR9fq-NozblurekPLxwTWMNNpGI

*** UPDATE ***

The “New Moon’s Family” Book Trailer has been moved!   

Here’s it’s new location: https://www.elatales.com/new-moons-family.html

 

8-Leafer Studios to Begin Filming Another Sci-Fi Comedy Piece This Spring *UPDATE AT BOTTOM

Hi potential fans, we’ve missed you!  It’s a cold winter here at 8-Leafer Studios, and it’s been a while since we last brought you into the world of Captain Tombstone, the depth of Cloverman, and longer since we first heard the golden writings of Eric Blair.  Well, life is complicated, but a few months ago, we got the ball rolling to bring you an all-star installment wrapping this whole world together.  We bought some new equipment, stepped up our costumes, got a local guest star, and are even aiming for a longer product.  Let’s get the sum of things:

First, I want to go ahead and announce our joy to be working with Duluth local radio personality, Erika Adams, who agreed to star as our first female character, “Nixie.”  Erika is a local author and radio host here in Duluth, Minnesota. Erika’s radio show on 99.5 KTWH, titled “The Tale Collector,” acts as a shining tribute to storytelling in all of it’s wonderful and unexpected forms, and we’re honored that she steps out of the mic booth and front of our camera to help us tell a tall tale about goofballs in space.  You can find her youtube channel here.

Our next project will be our biggest yet, with the biggest sets, longest scripts, biggest cast, and most complicated shots and effects yet.  You could say that the only real difference that matters is the bigger budget.  Eric, Jack and I all went in on a 16×20 ft. Bluescreen (I love those guys), and since this is all pretty much my baby I went and bought some more accessories for our familiar characters, so you have those aesthetic upgrades to look forward to, but my greatest and most unique challenge for this project (also most expensive) was designing and costuming a space pixie (designing and costuming are different lol).  Erika and I worked together to come up with a great character and we’re all excited to have Erika bring it life when we try again.

Yes, again.  We actually started filming in Deceber 2017, at an almost astronomical alignment of our schedules, and we got most of it filmed until somebody slept through a critical shoot (Jack lol), and on top of that, we had some formatting errors that we blame on 2 years of inactivity (all me), but the kinks are ironed out and come spring we hope for smooth sailing.  We’ve never had to start over before, and it was humbling, so we can at least promise no repeat mistakes, as long as everybody shows up, knock on wood.

In our next video, we will be bringing out some old characters from the 8-Leafer Universe, like Captain Tombstone, Cloverman, and Dane Kirschnott, cramming them together into one of the most unlikely places.  What possible circumstances could bring these minds together in one video?  And what role could Erika Adams’ Nixie play in the 8-Leafer Universe?   We hope to show you later this year, in “Pilot Away!”

https://josephcarlson77.wordpress.com/

 

*UPDATE:  This project became our first cancellation due to a catastrophic data failure.  A reshoot is probable, but it would need significant changes to be an entry at the Catalyst Content Festival next year, but that is the plan, for now.