1. How did you come up with the name "Naked Castle Films"?
2. Why do some of your early films have "Thumbs Up For Peace Productions" on them?
3. What's up with the "dancing" at the end of each film and where did the music come from?
4. What inspires your films?
5. Where are you located?
6. How did you guys meet?
7. Where do you get your funding?
8. Have any of you taken film or acting classes?
9. What equipment do you use to film with?
10. What software do you use to edit and capture with?
11. Overall, what's the longest you've spent actively working on a film?
12. WHEN WILL THE NEXT FILM BE RELEASED? I'VE BEEN REFRESHING YOUR PAGE FOR THE LAST WEEK AND STILL NOTHING!

Answers

1. How did you come up with the name "Naked Castle Films"?
In Zorn's Junior year of high school he had an art class. In this art class he and Rizzotti were drawing pretty pictures. One of them was a "stupid stick figure comic" as Zorn puts it. One stick said to the other, "Check out my new rocket powered house! Guess where we're going!", to which the second replied, "NAKED CASTLE?!" with a pretty drawing of a castle on clouds inside his thought-bubble as drawn by Rizzotti. They were the only two in that art class that found it funny.

2. Why do some of your early films have "Thumbs Up For Peace Productions" on them?
The name Thumbs Up For Peace Inc. is an ancient dark secret that only Mike and Travis truly understand. When Mike and Travis said "hey, we could totally make our own short films!" after seeing the films of onetrick.net, they quickly decided to adapt Thumbs Up for use as the name of the production "company". However, about a month later everyone else in the group came to the conclusion that a new name was needed for the following reasons: A) TUFPP was a shitty acronym and thumbsup.com and .net were both taken B) TUFPP was a really shitty acronym and finally C) TUFPP WAS A SHITTACULAR PIECE OF SHIT ACRONYM! So after a week or two of brainstorming, Zorn and Rizzotti came up with Naked Castle Films and we never looked back. For shits and giggles, here's a list of some other ideas we had: Fort Awesome Productions (fap.com), Slock Spit Functionary (s2f.com, slockspit.com), Communist Vacation, Preteen Productions, Cue-Combersome Films (c2films.com), and Massive Adaptations (mafilms.com, massadapt.com). Feel free to steal them (since we can't stop you anyway). As for the origin of Thumbs Up For Peace Inc. itself, it started as a comic based on a fictitious company by that name. The company was all about promoting peace, yet they were secretly "Profiting off of chaos, DAILY!". No one is quite sure how they made money off of chaos while making money off of peace, but the CEO, Thumbs Up For Peace Dude was certainly well-off and a chauvinistic bastard. The whole comic (even though it was more a set of random doodles) was spawned during Mike and Travis' biology class in their Junior year of high school.

3. What's up with the "dancing" at the end of each film and where did the music come from?
In late July 2003 Robby was hosting a small almost-two-week-long LAN party in the living room of his parent's house. There were about 8 people present one day including Travis, Mike, Sean, and various others. This guy, Tim, was burning Starcraft CDs for everyone and when a CD finished, the software, Roxio Easy CD Creator, would play the little jingle you hear at the end of our films. After about the 3rd burn, we started randomly breaking out dancing for the 3 second duration of the jingle. From there we decided to use it in our films in place of actual credits (the formation of Naked Castle, incidentally, had been thought up by Travis and Mike earlier that same day).

4. What inspires your films?
Most of our films are inspired by something someone said, an event one of us witnessed, perhaps a cool prop we found by chance, anything that pisses us off, and occasionally brainstorming random ideas.

5. Where are you located?
The Knights of the Naked Castle and Court Jesters take refuge in California, USA. We span four cities: Clayton, Concord, Hercules, and Walnut Creek, all in the Bay Area. Currently we all still live with our parents :\

6. How did you guys meet?
More or less, all of the Knights met each other, and became friends, in the ClaytonArts Academy, a specialized "performing" arts school inside Clayton Valley High School. However, Sean dropped out of the Academy after his Sophomore year and Rizzotti didn't join the Academy until his Senior year. But that's ok, because we all knew Rizzotti outside of the Academy, and Sean, well Sean is a slacker.

7. Where do you get your funding?
WHAT'S A FUNDING?!

8. Have any of you taken film or acting classes?
Travis had three years of Video Production classes in the ClaytonArts Academy (but didn't learn much from them); Mike, Rizzotti, and Zorn all had Art classes; Peter had one year of Photo and one year of Video Production. None of us have taken any acting classes (unless you count elementary or middle school).

9. What equipment do you use to film with?
So far we've used the following: Sharp VL-A10U Viewcam 8mm, Sharp VL-AD260U Viewcam Hi-8mm, Sony DCR-TRV730 Digital8. We hope to split the cost of a miniDV cam in the near future.

10. What software do you use to edit and capture with?
Capturing from the 8mm cams done with VirtualDub 1.5.4 for video and Sound Forge 6.0 for audio. Premiere 6.5 used to capture Digital8 audio/video. For editing, Adobe Premiere 6.5 for basic editing and After Effects 5.5 for text and other goodies. Finally, TMPGEnc 2.5 is used to compress the edited 1gig+ output .avi's to a 15mb or so .mpg file.

11. Overall, what's the longest you've spent actively working on a film?
Actively is such a hard word to define. I'd say maybe five days at the most. Almost all of our films have been recorded in one day, but the editing process generally takes 2 days to two weeks. Of course, most of that time is spent not working on it. The hardest part of the editing process is finding music to fit the mood of the video.

12. WHEN WILL THE NEXT FILM BE RELEASED? I'VE BEEN REFRESHING YOUR PAGE FOR THE LAST WEEK AND STILL NOTHING!
Hey, we have day jobs, you know! It was easy to pump films out pretty quickly when we first started making movies because it was summer and none of us had anything better to do. But now that everyone has other commitments, it takes time to get enough of us together to film and edit. Not to mention how long the script writing process can be :o So the simple cop-out answer is: eventually.

Do you still have any questions about our films, who we are, or maybe you'd like to give us lots and lots of money? Email Travis Ferguson and he'll respond to your email within the same day (usually).