By Seth K.

 I still remember that night so long ago. I can't even remember the date; it was sometime during March of 2004. The Allied Union was primarily concentrating on making sure all of us were getting out of high school that year. Of course, earlier that day, Robert was talking to me about making a movie at the local Shop Rite, entitled "Troy's Day at Work". The movie was an extreme dramatization of our dear friend Troy coping with the stresses of working at that particular Shop Rite. Robert was ecstatic, telling me of all the crazy things that were going to happen, involving throwing a mannequin dressed as Troy down the stairs to simulate one of the many ways he was to be injured. Unfortunately for us, we never got that mannequin, which really would've helped us in the final stages of the movie.

Anyway, it was around 8:30 when Robert came over to my house to pick me up. He drove us to the Shop Rite where Troy and fellow co-worker/cast member Joe were waiting. Once their shift was up, we got permission to use the break room to shoot our movie Using Rob's Hi-8mm camera, we filmed approximately 45 minutes of Troy enduring physical and psychological torture ranging from emotional abuse from random co-workers to being fired to getting hit by a car, finally ending with additional co-work Jay hitting Troy in the face with a shopping cart. Poor, poor Troy...

Once we saw in on the television back at Rob's house, we thought it was the best thing we've seen since cable television. It was hilarious! The members of Allied Union Productions still look back onto "Troy's Day at Work" and still remember how much fun it was making our movie. In addition to the movie, Robert had recently created a comic book verison of "Troy's Day at Work" using Planetwide Games' Comic Book Creator software.

Day of the Mexican

By Seth K.

Seeing that we were still on a roll from "Troy's Day at Work", we wanted to see how invulnerable Troy was from the damage he took from our movies.  This time, he brought Randy, his friend.  At one point during our conversation, we all discovered his true identity of "Randy the Mexican" because of his obvious un-Hispanic heritage.  Because of this, we all decided to make a movie.  There was a fight scene between Troy and Randy (In fact, the whole movie was a fight between Troy and Randy...) involving American Gladiator style bashings with sticks accompanied by a half ass "dubbing" job.  Rob's brother Scott stepped in to assist using unloaded paintball guns to help stir things up, including the unforgettable scene where Randy's nuts are shot at point-blank range with a Tippman 98 Custom.  Of course, it all ended when Troy ran head first into Scott's paintball gun, causing the steel plate in his head to dent.  Oh well.  It was fun while it lasted.  Excellent stuff.

How to Make the Perfect Escape

By Seth K.

During my senior year of high school, one of the assignments I had to complete for my videography class was to make a music video.  Completely unsure of what I wanted to do (and also running out of time), I ended up selecting a song from the Jackass: The Movie soundtrack: "Somebody's Gonna Get Their Head Kicked In" by the Rezillos.  This song was used during the "Golf Cart Debacle" scene of the movie.  I ended up making a ramshackle instruction booklet out of construction paper I found laying around the art wing, taped a whole bunch of scrap paper together, and entitled it "How to Make the Perfect Escape".  I never got around to actually completing the contents of the book, but it was mostly to show the credits and a stupid little disclaimer.  In all truth, with Rob filming the whole movie and Jeremey and I acting it out, there was no actual organization with our movie (as goes with pretty much all of our most recent films).  No script, no screenplay, no plot.  Just a whole lot of ridiculous crap going on.  It was a lot of fun, and thankfully, I ended up passing the project.

Another interesting bit of information was that this particular project to have been edited using Windows Movie Maker.  It really helped out a lot, especially when it actually came to making a final product, as well as having background music, titles and credits.  We really didn't know how to do anything elaborate with the program that much; mostly just run the footage through and add the music.  It was still the first project we actually used Windows Movie Maker with, setting a trend with our future (and past) projects.