Episode Thirteen of RFC

Radio Free Charleston's 13th episode, "World Without Fear Shirt" was sort of unlucky. It had great music and animation in it, but the episode was lost in a hard drive crash and couldn't be recovered from back-up discs. In 2010, I discovered a file that contained all the elements of the show and was able to reconstruct it with a new introduction.

The main reason for the new intro was to explain what had happened, but also to correct the horrible mispronounciation of Martyranny's Collective Pulse, which I butchered throughout the original episode. "Marty-Ranny" remains to this day the worst botched intro in the history of Radio Free Charleston.

Below the video you will find the original production notes from The Popcult Blog, followed by the notes for the 2010 reconstruction. As always, treat the links as some sort of game where only a few of them still work.

Production Notes: Radio Free Charleston

January 18, 2007 by rudy panucci

The first Radio Free Charleston of 2007is online now.  In this episode we have great music from Martyranny’s Collective Pulse and The Concept, plus animation and a puppet show from me brudder, Frank.   We shot the host segments in downtown Charleston on a cold, dreary morning…..and it shows!

Martyranny’s Collective Pulse are a familiar sight to anyone who’s spent time in downtown Charleston over the past year.  They’re the buskers who can be seen and heard on Capitol Street, usually in front of the library.  If you’ve taken the time to listen, you know that they create a beautiful, ethereal sound.  It seems like music from another age.   We brought them into LiveMix Studio and recorded four tunes, two of which you hear in this episode of RFC.  The other two are going to have more ambitious video treatments, and will be on future shows.   MCP is a true creative force, and we hope to have more music and film from them in the future. 

The Concept were the big hit of episode seven of RFC.   This time around they get the “music video” treatment.   “Guitar Pick In My Kool-Aid’ is a killer song, and when The Concept came into LiveMix, they recorded it, but technical glitches made the audio unusable.  Rather than discard the video, I synced it up to the demo of the song that The Concept had up on their Myspace page.  It didn’t match up perfectly, but I had an idea for how to cover the parts where it didn’t.  The video takes place inside a jug of Kool-Aid, with a guitar pick floating around.   Not only is it a fun feature of the video, but it also covers up some of my sloppy post-production lip-sync. 

And we can’t ignore the co-star of the video, the D’Addario Light Medium .027 Guitar Pick.  I had hoped to bring you an interview with the Guitar Pick, but success seems to have gone to his head, and his agent isn’t returning my calls. 

This episode also features animation and a puppet show by Frank Panucci.   Frank also creates most of the interstitials that you see on the show.  The animated short is a CGI sequel to “Ribbon Driving” from our second show.  The puppet show is quite possibly the darkest humor piece we’ve run on RFC. 

We shot the host segments last Sunday morning around the downtown area.  Now, I will let you in on a secret:  I hate it when people use “bloopers” to fill up time on a TV show.  I find it unprofessional and usually not entertaining for anyone who wasn’t there.   Having said that, the outtakes for this episode of RFC are hysterical.  I discovered that Capitol Street, in front of the library, is the LOUDEST PLACE ON EARTH!  You won’t get to see these bloopers, because we’d have to bleep the heck out of them.  It’s amazing how oblivious to cameras people have become.  Nothing makes for better TV than having somebody standing ten feet away decide to start a conversation with his buddy, who’s driving a car one block over.  Still, we plan to go back to the downtown area to shoot future shows.  We’ll just pick a quieter time than Sunday Morning. 

That’s the story behind the show. Go watch and enjoy it, and if you are so inclined, go to the RFC store and buy some merchandise.  You still have time to be the first!  And you can check out our “Arrogant” shirt, here.  Also, we now have aMySpace page.  Sign up for bulletins and contact information, if you are in a local band and would like to be on Radio Free Charleston.  We are looking for area bands to be on future shows.

Sunday Evening Video: The Lost Episode Of RFC

January 17, 2010 by rudy panucci

Last June, when I posted over thirty of the early episodes of Radio Free Charleston here in PopCult, I missed one. While these shows had been removed from the Gazette servers due to space issues, one of them seemed to have been removed from existence entirely. Appropriately enough, it was episode 13. The show was a great one–with music from The Concept and Martyranny’s Collective Pulse, plus animation and a disturbing puppet show from Frank Panucci. I also horribly mis-pronounce the name of one of the bands during the entire show! Add to that host segments where I wore a vintage T-shirt from a Shepardstown alternative band of the late 1980s, World Without Fear, and you have a pretty loaded episode of RFC..

Last week, while in the midst of having three (count ‘em, three) external hard drives fail (two have been resurrected so that the data can be rescued) I discovered all the raw files necessary to reconstruct this lost episode. There’s a new introduction, and I had to guess at the interstitial bits, but I’m betting this is a 95% accurate recreation of our first show for 2007. You see the restored version of RFC 13 at the top of this post (or at this link, if all you see is goofy code). You can read the original production notes at this link. Next week’s Sunday Evening Videos will bring you two very special episodes from 2008.