Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is just plain.. LEGEN-DARY! (er.. sorry.. wrong show).. Joss Whedon put together this little internet mini-series during the writers strike and its really very good.

It stars Neil Patrick Harris (commonly known as Doogie Howser) as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion (Malcom Reynolds or the wrong private Ryan) as Captain Hammer (“Corporate Tool” hehe), and Felicia Day (Buffy, and The Guild) as Penny, Dr. Horribles love interest. It’s spread out over 3 episodes spanning a grand total of about 40 minutes..

In an attempt to test the waters, joss and crew have decided to release this pony for free over the course of the next couple of days, then to offer it for sale. One week only!! Posted initially on the 15th, they stay free until the 20th then go for sale.. I love this idea.. One week, get the word out.. then see who comes and buys it. I would.. its good!

In fact, I’m stunned at how good it is.. hehe I shouldn’t be, I mean Joss is great — just watch firefly, serenity, buffy..etc.. (Damn you fox!) But this is a good little show.. I wish it were longer.. (Sorta like Firefly.. But I digress..)

I love musicals.. I dunno why.. I know its not manly, I don’t care. I really enjoy them and when they are comical, they are even better. This was a fantastic show with just the right amount of music.. More over they were all really well done!

And while I do like Nathan Fillion, I think Neil Patrick Harris completely stole the show. He was great! He makes me want to be in the Evil League of Evil! I had no idea he could sing! It was fun seeing Simon Helberg show up as “Moist”..heh I’m enjoying him on Big Bang Theory.. (did he do your piano work?)

Nathan’s “Moral dilemma” song (end of act 2) was fantastic and probably my favorite. The end of act 1 song was good too.. Oh and Joss, Loved the chair.. heh I also really loved the whole bad horse stuff.. that was funny as hell..

This whole thing was done on a shoe string budget but you wouldn’t know to look at it. I mean the camera work looked great, the lighting and sound were fine. More over they got excellent talent and whoever wrote the songs was great! Lots of counterpoint which was fun.

Very well done though guys.. kudos! I wish it was longer than 3 episodes — BALLS!

On a side note, I’d love to see numbers as to how much this actually cost. Down to equipment, stars, etc.. maybe show us the original script etc.. Really use this as a lesson to the “fan films” and Amateur films community to show us really how its done. That sort of thing would be of interest to everyone and I think they’d pay to see the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff.. I know I would.

• http://blog.fanfilmsforum.com
• http://blogs.fanfilmsforum.com
• http://blog.amateurfilmsforum.com
• http://blogs.amateurfilmsforum.com
• http://filmsblog.org
• http://filmsblog.net

Only the first one works 100% correctly right now.  My virtual hosts file and dns aren’t quite syncing up correctly — should be fixed eventually.

By that, you should take this as a very serious effort on my part.  I want this to be a success.  The next thing I must do is figure out how to correctly style the MU entry page such that it’s a self explainitory advertisement of what it does, and such that it incorporates content from the various other blogs.

I’m looking at other free blog portals to get some idea of how they do it.

Theme wise I’ll need to come up with something that will work both as a blog portal, a login page for the users blog, and as a forum theme for invision power board — no small task.

Once I get the main page design working, I’ll create a post that allows users to request new themes, and try to explain to them that I’m but one person so it takes a bit of time.

Each theme will need to have a way to tie into the forum and vice versa.  The whole point of this is to tie these two components together.    This will be the part that comes last as it will take the longest — likely coming after release.

The main blog will have many categories that replace the functionality of the former wiki.. Tutorials, instructions, ideas and the like will each live on the new blog.

I hope to make the main blog a virtual classroom on all things film making in order to bring folks in, as such a very thorough tagging system will need to be implemented and used.  (Lucky for me WP has a great tagging system.)

I also hope to make it so that any tag-cloud feature and any search feature will search across all blogs.  I think this shall be easy, and may already be done.. not sure.

Note to self:  wp-signup and home.php will need to be the same design unless I can get the dns virtual host thing to settle down..