Sweaty Robot

‘Happy Birthday Harris Malden’ played twice at the CineVegas 2008 Film Festival. Read some of the reactions to the film, and interviews done with Sweaty Robot.


Reviews

Don Lewis from FilmThreat.com writes…

“…the film is really funny as long as you realize there’s a kind of straight-faced silliness to the whole affair much like the films of the Zellner Brothers or even Charlie Kaufman. If you enjoy that kind of off-the-wall humor, “Happy Birthday, Harris Malden” can’t miss.” [Read Full FilmThreat review here]



Eric D. Snider from Cinematical…

But most of the jokes do work. As you might expect given the film’s premise, the Sweaty Robot guys are fond of absurd, surreal humor, though they’re careful not to let the movie become too bizarre. [Read the full Cinematical review here]



Cal Kemp at Collider…

Somehow, “Harris Malden” is both down to earth and over the top. It’s sweet, funny and real in a way that only fiction can be. [Read the full Collider review here]



David Cornelius with eFilmCritic…

I admire the way the filmmakers manage to have so much going on at once, with natural, overlapping dialogue filling each scene with an Altman-esque collage of story and character. [Read the full eFilmCritic review here]



Even the bloggers got into the fray…

LOVED this movie!! LOVED IT! this is the 2nd film that really made me happy to be at CineVegas. [Read full review here]



Interviews
[Collider Interview]
[ReelzChannel Interview]
[Fox Las Vegas Video Interview]
[eFilmCritic Interview]

That was awesome.
Photos, reviews, and more to come…

We did an interview for the CineVegas Blog. Here’s a little taste…

What is a real Sweaty Robot? So many pictures come to mind.
Picture the group in our underwear after an All-You-Can-Eat Seafood Bonanza, each sitting on their own tiny, tiny mechanical horse on a hot summer day in the middle of the parking lot of a Pay-None convenience store. Is that what you were imagining?



You know you want to read the rest.

Andrea Bushee, correspondent for the Nashua Telegraph, wrote an article about Sweaty Robot and “Happy Birthday Harris Malden” with a focus on Eric, due to his New Hampshire-osity. Extra, extra, read all about it.

The article showed up as the front page of the Lifestyle section, with a big picture of the guys looming over the words beneath.

World renowned film critic, Michael Lau had this to say:

He saw the film and says he was entertained the whole way through.
“I loved it. I thought it was a great movie,” Lau said…
Lau thinks the movie will go over well in Las Vegas.
“I think they told the story in a unique way,” he said. “It wasn’t the typical storytelling platform.”

Mike Plante of the CineVegas Film Festival had some good things to say about Sweaty Robot in his interview with BACKSTAGE.

A few selections will be of particular interest to actors. Happy Birthday, Harris Malden, which screens in the fest’s Jackpot Premieres section, was made by a five-man group that goes by the name of SweatyRobot. “It’s five guys working together, and they’re all credited as the directors, and they wrote it together, and four of them act in it, and one of them actually did the cinematography,” says Plante. “It feels like a full story, and there are really rounded characters; it’s not just like a five-minute skit that’s stretched out. And since they worked on all aspects of the film, it’s low-budget, but it doesn’t feel like it’s trapped or limited; it feels like there’s a lot of work put into it.”

Thanks Mike, that means a lot to us.

To those attending the “Happy Birthday Harris Malden” screenings at CineVegas, our screening times have changed.

World Premiere: Saturday, 6/14 at 6 p.m.
Second Screening: Monday, 6/16 at 7 p.m.

Our IMDb page is online. For those of you looking for your credit, IMDb is slow to update. It’ll be there soon.

This is a picture of what “Happy Birthday Harris Malden” looks like inside of our Apple Macintosh Computing Device, running their Final Cut Pro software package. We hired ten thousand monkeys taking turns on the edit, and they came up with this.

Dear Steve Jobs, please give us money for this advertisement.
Thank you,
Sweaty Robot

We are proud to announce that Sweaty Robot’s feature film, “Happy Birthday Harris Malden” will world premiere Friday, June 13 as a Jackpot Premiere at the Cinevegas 2008 Film Festival.

Follow this link to the HBHM website. There you’ll see a trailer, some behind-the-scenes footage, news, and production stills.

What’s this?! It’s the poster for Sweaty Robot’s feature length film, “Happy Birthday, Harris Malden!” Looking to have someone photograph you for a movie poster or otherwise? Talk to Jeff Stockbridge. We did.

Watch out Sweaty Robot watchers, because the “Happy Birthday, Harris Malden” website is about to drop. Once there you can watch the trailer, some behind the scenes action, scope out the movie poster, and more!

Can you feel the excitement, bubbling in your tummies? Turns out it’s just some bad seafood you ate.

For those of you who still use Internet Explorer, you may have noticed that our website was broken since the last mini-redesign. Well, I fixed it. In the process, I probably broke it for some other browser on some other operating system.

It was a problem with the CSS that Firefox had no problem ignoring.
Are you an IE user? Maybe you should switch to Firefox. It’s better.

For those of you who can’t help reminding us about a certain Orange Popsicle, in our movie, “Happy Birthday, Harris Malden,” I’m proud to say that I have finally reached a major breakthrough in fixing the scene.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, let me fill you in. Last summer, while shooting the movie, we came across a scene where my character, Paul, nurses his wounds in an overstuffed recliner, sulking and sucking on a popsicle. We had a box of red, orange, and purple ones all ready to go. The scene took a while to light and shoot, and it was hotter than Satan’s Anus in the house, so members of Sweaty Robot, the cast, and the crew went to town on the popsicles. Well, when it came time to switch to another purple pop for continuity’s sake, there weren’t any left. Instead of getting more, we decided to go with an orange popsicle. I think we said we’d “fix it in post.” Well, that was a terrible idea. The recliner is orange, my skin has red-tones, and the camera was shooting warm. That makes it nearly impossible to isolate the orange color.

I’ve taken many cracks at fixing this scene, with a few different software packages, and many techniques. I won’t bore you with the nerdy details, but I finally got it. One more night of burying myself in the computer, and this thing will be done–

Until Matt Sanchez notices a tiny detail awry, and I have to re-render it. Just kidding, buddy, I hate you. Love you. Whatever.

Enjoy these stills from the photoshoot we had with Jeff Stockbridge for the ‘Harris Malden’ poster.

Tee shirts rule. Harris Malden rules. Tee shirts featuring Harris Malden iconography… well, you get the idea. These are not the official movie tees so don’t get all panicked. These tees are a limited run featuring my first design done for Happy Birthday, Harris Malden. They are two color, hand screened prints done by Stuart Brent. Unfortunately due to the lack of my personal funds this first run is limited to only 20 t-shirts. The shirts are being sold at cost, $10. Below are the colors and style. They come in only one size, medium… so hit that treadmill. I am taking orders as the first 20 on this page. So leave a comment with the color you want.

Intrepid reporter Kaelin O’Connell paid a visit to SR Headquarters not too long ago, and wrote an article about us for The South Jersey News.

The home of Sweaty Robot falls somewhere between a bachelor pad and an editing studio. A mix of couches crowd around a TV in one room, fancy editing equipment sits in another, and random paraphernalia covers the walls in between — anything from funny photos to a 12-month horse calendar, all (presumably) hung in sarcasm.

[Link to the Whole Article]

In the off-time between now and then, I’m going to see how long I can keep a little blogging/podcasting/video/photo thing going. Check it out:

[EricMBloggie]

Here is a little treat for all you little nuggets out there. Hero Worship feature film action figure prototypes. Just some costume design ideas I was kicking around. Tu-Cans of Justice’s costume pays homage to BatlleofthePlanets/GForce or Voltron force. All flash with no functionality. While the Speckled Pigeons costume is much more practical. Eric always complains about the overly ornate masked crime fighter costumes and he thinks capes aren’t practical. So I hooked up Specks with a short cape and all the modern luxuries of a 50 cent music video (bullet proof vest; kevlar). Hope you enjoy. A Cosmic Avenger, Bizzaro Cosmic Avenger, and Manchez variant action figure design will be on the way next.
-Nick

We wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year! We’ll keep everyone posted on what’s going on with the movie in ‘08, but I will say we are going to have some really exciting news.

Thanks to everyone who came out to the “Happy Birthday, Harris Malden” screening in NH. I appreciate the support, both morla and monetary.

It was great to share something we’ve spent so much of ourselves on with all of you.

Guess who got into Sundance?!
Two hundred films that ARE NOT “Happy Birthday, Harris Malden,” that’s who!

Unfortunately, HBHM was amongst the over 8500 films rejected from The Big Dance.

We’ll travel the Sundance-less road of “Swingers” before us, and make our way into one of the other great festivals out there.

Well folks, just wanted to let everyone know what I spent my Saturday doing. This started out as a joke, but 7 hours later I had developed a Horror movie trilogy. And yes, girls still seem to be attracted to me.

Well, we traveled to sunny southern california…Los Angeles to be specific. We had some meetings and a pretty good time. As far as the movie goes, we are working on the opening credits/animation and shooting a couple more scenes. I’d like to thank everyone who’s given us feedback on the film, we have taken it all into consideration as we finish it up.

While in LA, we were on our friends video podcast: Geekscape Episode 47 (the link will subscribe you to the podcast in i-Tunes), which is always a good time. We’ll keep you posted on Happy Birthday Harris Malden, we’ll be doing a NYC screening as soon as we finish these tweaks and additions.

The dust has settled from the Pregnant Agent incident. I called back and spoke to another assistant (evidently there is a lot of assisting going on in that office) to whom I couldn’t help but relay the Pregnant story.

By that time, she had already Googled us, and was on the website (so that’s what they’re doing when you’re on the phone with them…) and saw the previous blog post.

So it all came together, full circle.

To everyone in that office, Sweaty Robot sends a big Hello, and this disembodied Teddy Bear’s head.