Welcome to ROX

Yes, it's true. We're having a party and you're invited.

It's the official ROX Season One DVD Release Party & 20th Anniversary Celebration.

This momentous event will take place Tuesday July 3rd, 2012, 8pm, at the Comedy Attic in Bloomington, Indiana.

So what are you waiting for? Get your tix now.

— by B | link

For me, this video is classic Christy Paxson. Like all the videos I made, it could have been edited a lot tighter. But it has some great bits of Christy improv. My favorite part is the sequence starting from the fake smashing into the trash can and leading into the dress store where Christy slips into a character performance using the red & white dresses as props.

I also remember that Christy told me that the grimace she has near the end wasn't about the woman walking behind her, as it appears, but was about some kitschy thing they were selling.

We got a lot of flack from the Mall after the fact. They must have had complaints from Pass Pets about our filming there. They told the TV station they didn't want anyone filming in there again without permission. So, when we made a later video at a drug store on Mother's Day, we hid the camera in a shopping basket.

— by Eric White | link

Eric and I wanted to get shots of the poor bunnies trapped in cages at the pet store in the mall for sure, then there was all this “antiquey”' stuff around that was imminently questionable...

Anyway the fallout from the show was unreal. The mall called me and said, “Hey you shouldn't have said that stuff about the mall, while in the mall.” So they created a policy supposedly that bans videotaping in the mall... I argue the old public square kinda thing, and they claim it's private property. Of course private property usually beats a
social sentiment.

They went as far as to call me where I worked at the local paper (HT) and threaten to pull their advertising because of my little shenanigans. All I really remember about the conversations with the mall was me stating, “Well ultimately I guess we have two different definitions of what comedy is.” I mean really they were so mad at me acting like the Mall was actually going to lose business because of my “observations.” It was all like Bloomington meets Mayberry in a dark alley with Abbie Hoffman.

— by Xy | link

Way way back in the days of yore, I used to hang out in my former hovel inputting not only ROX at some length but Video Show and all the other stuff on CATS, oftentimes well into the night.

Granted, I tended to be in a pretty heavily altered state during most of those screenings, but the most notable aspect that hit me upside the head from all that was from switching back to regular television on the other channels afterward, and seeing immediately how obviously phony and manufactured and manipulative nearly all of that was (and remains so to this day).

— by W. Owen | link

The only degree I actually have, though this conflicts with the information on my resume, is in TV and Radio Broadcasting. My interest in this field was in front of the camera. My thought was if I understood behind the camera activity, it would help me with my work as a talent, and empower me to create my own unique opportunities.
I ended up being in and out of the video biz over the years. The professional jobs I was getting behind the lens were not helping me get in front of the lens. ROX was my first real chance to combine the two disciplines. I moved to Chicago and then to Taiwan, post hiatus, to keep the “performance career” rolling. Though I achieved a working actor's success on the island there was as much dissatisfaction as there was financial stability. That's when it finally struck me that my interest in theater and video was to express myself, not to make a career. This completely set my creativity free. It inspired me to write and perform my first one man show in Taiwan and what continues to drive me to write my next one...along with a list of other projects already being blueprinted. This is an element that is missing from Theater and Television programs in schools and universities all over. Creating for creations sake, not that either actually prepared me for gainful employment in the first place...

— by TBlack | link

First published in Emoticon: community notes, circa 1998

by Bart Everson ("Editor B" of ROX)

I've produced TV independently for a most of the '90s. My personal bankruptcy proceedings were finalized this July. It's a tough field to break into.

These days I'm back in school, in the Department of Telecommunications at a Big Ten university. It's kind of strange to get formal training in something I taught myself.

Since my enrollment began, I've had a few wrangles with one of my professors about the nature of electronic media. Specifically, she sees media as a means to "manipulate the audience." You might call my prof cynical, but for the bulk of commercial TV programming, she's right. Manipulation is the business of mainstream TV production.

Consider TV as we know it. A crew of talented people do their darnedest to make an interesting program, so that an audience will stay glued to the set. Commercials are interlarded between scenes encouraging people to buy things. It's an almost Pavlovian manipulation of behavior. For all the sophistication of the copywriters, the whole model is crude and insulting to the intelligence of many viewers. So people flip the channels when a commercial comes on. You know the routine.

There may be no passion, no rancor, no perverse impulse driving the production of a TV show. It's a business proposition, and a big business it is. The more people who are involved and the more money there is to be made, the less chance there is for communication from the heart. Manipulation is the order of the day, just as my prof says. Our increasingly cynical, skeptical, media-savvy citizenry probably agree with her.

This only makes sense. Consider the source: our culture, dominated as it is by big corporations. Logic dictates that a medium of such power serve the interests of the most powerful. But the manipulative nature of TV is inherent in our culture, not in the technology of TV itself! As a TV producer I've come to regard my work as communication as much as anything else. I make TV for entirely different reasons than those discussed above. I've got something to say. I've got some things I need to get off my chest somehow and TV is just one of many ways to accomplish that. I want to use this medium to communicate, not manipulate.

As I said, big media is and must be manipulative in nature. The ONLY way around this problem, if you choose to see it as a problem, is to stay small. On the Web we find the smalltime webcaster making TV available to the world. They are driven not by money (what money?) but by a need to communicate. Many are without talent. But those few who have the drive to communicate and the talent to do it well may find a larger audience through the Web.

My point: television can be a means of communication. Webcast content creators who communicate to their audience (rather than 'merely' entertain them) will surely be the ones who succeed.

— by B | link

(Editor's Note: This is the original 'geek page' written by MBone which went up on our original website. Prob'ly written in April of 1995. It's completely obsolete now, of course. But it is a good snapshot of where we were when we got started on the web.)


Technical Shit
For Geeks Only
by MBONE

For those of you who must know the details of how this page is put together, here it is.

The ROX Quarry is produced on a 33 MHz 486 PC compatible running Linux. The current server machine is a Pentium P-90 machine, also running Linux and NCSA httpd v1.3.

All HTML code is written by hand because I haven't seen any editors that seem worth my while, yet. Most of the images were created by B with a Video Toaster equipped Amiga. Once I get the images on my Linux machine, some further processing is necessary. I use the pbmplus package to convert the frame grabs from the rgb format to ppm format. I then use xv to do some resizing, color quantization, and conversion to gif format. I use giftrans to create transparent areas on the images and giftool to make them interlaced.

The video is digitized on a Macintosh Quadra 840AV where some minor editing is done using Adobe Premiere 4.0. The quicktime files are compressed using the Cinepak format and flattened using MovieShop 2.0. Our original intention was to provide the video in both quicktime and mpeg formats, however, converting to mpeg proved to be a problem. The only conversion program I could find (for free) was for the Macintosh, and it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. If you know how this can be done, preferably on a Unix machine, please contact me.

More time has been spent on trying to solve file transfer problems than actually writing HTML. It seems our video digitizing machines were on a broken network. We couldn't transfer 1 minute of video and we had 30 minutes total. So we had to find a tar program for the Mac to write DAT tapes that we could read on the Linux server. After some trial and error with the block size, we managed to make all the video available on the net.

— by MBone | link