Fate Accompli review

Last year, we did post-production sound on a short film, Fate Accompli, which was written and directed by our friend Eric Neal. Steve did some fantastic foley work, and I handled the dialog edit, effects and mix. Music was composed by Andrew Edwards. Reviews of the short are starting to show up, and here’s a good one that came out this week.

Here’s the film’s Facebook page. Also, check out the SHOrT in Chicago Film Fiesta where the film will be shown on Jan 24!

May Projects update

Lots going on in Toxic Bag Land lately! We’ve completely revamped toxicbag.com, making it easier to find the sounds you need for your game. Individual track downloads will be enabled soon.

Reviewer Megan R, on DrivethruRPG.com, gave the “Ghost in the Graveyard” soundtrack 5 out of 5 stars! The review is posted on the page for the Lobby Card Set (which can be purchased separately):

A delightful conceit… after carefully creating a completely fictitious movie soundtrack so that you can generate the right background and moon for your horror game without distracting players who have seen whatever horror movie whose soundtrack you might otherwise be using…

They give you some movie posters and adverts for the fictitious movie that the soundtrack was purportedly written for!

Even before I’ve finished listening to the soundtrack – and I tend to use music as background and inspiration when WRITING rather than playing games – this has spawned a plot.

Thanks Megan!

In theater sound-design news, I just wrapped up a production of “Richard III” and am now working on a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Lotta Shakespeare this year!

We’ve also been working on audio post-production for our friend Eric Neal’s short film, “Fate Accompli.” We did a day of foley work last week and a temp mix for a Friday night screening of the film in Chicago.

We’re also a few days away from the “Specimen” photo shoot, which will provide many of the images for the game. Costumes and props are all looking spectacular, and we’re very excited about it. We’ll be posting some of those shots early next week, and hopefully have some other news as well (I can say no more).

Stay tuned!

Ghost in the Graveyard soundtrack

We love those old horror movies from the late 1970s and early 1980s; the slasher films, the monster-from-outer-space films, the zombie films. What we especially love are the soundtracks. The really low-budget, simple scores that eschewed live orchestras in favor of banks of analog synthesizers and were often composed and performed by the director himself. And we love to use those soundtracks in our games. But invariably, we’ll cue up a track from one of these films to underscore a dramatic moment and realize that the players were thinking less about the game – and more about the movie the music came from.

So we decided to create our own awesome 80s horror movie music. As fate would have it, we do have a few vintage analog synths in our studio (including an old Moog Rogue and a Roland Juno 106), so we fired them up and started playing.

The result is the “Ghost in the Graveyard” soundtrack album: nine dark, moody music pieces performed on classic analog synths in the style of those fantastic 80s horror flicks.

There’s no movie, of course, just a bunch of cool music. But we kinda didn’t let that stop us. Just for kicks, as we were mastering the album, we also rounded up a couple of local actors and shot fake trailers and opening credits for the movie that doesn’t exist.

Ghost In The Graveyard Trailer #1 from Toxic Bag on Vimeo.

And we didn’t stop with the trailers! Downloads of the soundtrack from DrivethruRPG or Toxic Bag also include a special set of souvenir lobby cards, 2 movie posters and a reproduction of a 1983 newspaper ad with showtimes for “Ghost in the Graveyard.”

Clearly, we had a lot of fun working on this project. We hope you enjoy it as well.

You can see the trailers at our YouTube and Vimeo pages, and buy the soundtrack at Toxic Bag dot com or DrivethruRPG.

Special thanks to Stephanie Lewis, Alan Vuchichevich and Ele Matelan for their great work on the trailers!

Mr. Blood’s new show: Sweetest Swing in Baseball

Yes, we’ve been releasing soundpacks for RPGs like crazy lately, but there’s also a whole lotta theatre happening in Toxic Bag Land. I’ve just wrapped up a production of After Ashley at Moraine Valley Community College, and I’m now in pre-production for Richard III at Oakton Community College, but this weekend I’m taking some time to help the other half of Toxic Bag, Steve Baldwin, record some music for his new sound design gig, Step Up Productions‘ The Sweetest Swing in Baseball. The music is being composed by our good pal Mike Przygoda. It’s a simple jazz trio, and we’ll be recording themes for the show as well as some preshow music down in our studio.

The Sweetest Swing In Baseball opens March 23, 2012.

4 out of 5 gamers surveyed…

Years ago, we took an afternoon off and shot some tongue-in-cheek commercials for our Game Masters and Battles products, as well as the DVD for the Bag Witch Project. We put ’em on a DVD and played them at the convention booths, and then kinda forgot about them.

Going through the office this week in search of something that might sound like an ejector seat, we stumbled on the master tape of those spots. Shameless goofs that we are, we put them up on our YouTube channel. No one’s seen these since GenCon 2001…enjoy!

More embarrassing old Toxic Bag vids at our YouTube channel.

Space Monster Press Release

Toxic Bag Announces New Sci-fi/horror Board Game

CHICAGO, IL (August 15, 2011) –Toxic Bag Productions announces its entry into the board game industry with its first product, titled SPACE MONSTER. SPACE MONSTER is a two-player card-driven board game that pits a group of human astronauts against a predatory extraterrestrial life form.

At the beginning of play, the SPACE MONSTER boards the ship in an embryonic stage and evolves throughout the game, becoming more difficult to kill as the turns progress. In addition to attempting to kill the crew, the monster can also destroy sections of the ship, forcing the human players to divide their efforts between defense and structural repair. The monster can win the game by either killing all seven members of the crew or damaging enough sections of the ship that it breaks apart. Adding the destruction of the ship as an alternate victory condition allows for varied strategies on the part of both players. The human player can use tools to effect repairs, construct weapons and trackers to hunt down the monster…or ultimately blow up the ship if all seems lost.

The SPACE MONSTER player constructs his/her monster from a selection of over 20 different attributes (offensive, defensive, or special abilities), providing new and different threats to the human player each game. This constantly changing monster, combined with 80 event cards driving game play, allows for infinite replayability. No two games should ever be the same.

Game designer Steve Baldwin said, “This game is something I’ve always wanted to play and couldn’t find anywhere in the industry – so we decided to make it.”

Production of the game will be funded in part with P500-style pre-orders. SPACE MONSTER is currently in the playtesting stage.

Toxic Bag plans to start taking pre-orders in September, 2011. For more information, visit http://toxicbag.com/spacemonster11.htm.

SPACE MONSTER will ship with:
7 Crew Character Cards
40 Crew Event Cards
40 Monster Event cards
21 Space Monster Attribute Cards
22″ x 34″ Game Board
Space Monster Screen

Images are not final artwork, and are subject to change.

Game designer: Steve Baldwin
Product code: TBPBG001

ABOUT TOXIC BAG
Toxic Bag Productions, Inc. is a Chicago-based company known primarily for its groundbreaking line of sound effects for pen-and-paper role playing games. The company’s critically acclaimed “Game Masters Collection” of sound effects is available on CD, as mp3 downloads, and packaged in an app for Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

Announcing Space Monster!

Over on his blog, Steve (Mr. Blood) has announced our forthcoming product, a card-driven board game called Space Monster. He’ll be posting a series of blog entries about the evolution of the game and the ongoing results of playtesting, artwork development and release dates. The first post describes the setup of the game.

Read the announcement here.

Visit the Space Monster page on toxicbag.com.

GMC iPhone/iPad app v2.0

We’re proud to announce that we’ve released version 2.0 of our Game Masters Collection app for the iPhone and iPad. Here’s what’s new:

• A sound slider (or scrubber) is now included. This displays the elapsed duration of the playing sound and also allows re-positioning of the currently playing sound.

• Sounds can be set to loop (repeat) indefinitely – great for sounds that are background/ambience such as the peaceful village, the eerie haunted house, or onboard the dirigible!

• The Favorites list has been replaced with Soundlists. As with Favorites, Soundlists are collections of sounds you could gather for particular occasions, settings, or adventures. Now you can have any number of Soundlists, with distinctive names for each of your games.

We want to hear from you! Are you using the Game Masters app? Are you using the Game Masters CDs? What new sounds do you want to hear from us?

Thanks!

Joe and Steve

The Sad Cafè award nominations

Jiang Hu Productions’ film “The Sad Café,” for which we did the sound mix this past April, has been nominated for Best Drama Feature, Best Editing (Feature) and Best Score (Feature) at the Action On Film Festival. Congratulations and best of luck to director Bennie Woodell and everyone at Jiang Hu Productions!

The Sad Cafè

We recently finished mixing Bennie Woodell’s film “The Sad Café.” The film had its world premiere at the Portage Theater in Chicago earlier this week. Congratulations to Bennie, the cast and crew, and everyone at Jiang Hu Productions!