Wicked Pixel Cinema is made up of a group of filmmakers/film lovers who seem to just want to make some flicks. They're a tight knit group of friends who work seemingly well together and at the heart are very professional, but still know how to have a good time. Making films for no one but themselves it's obvious that these films are made simply for the love of filmmaking. Their films are bold, daring and quite often shocking. Long before I knew anybody from Wicked Pixel Cinema on a personal level, their films were a favorite around Monster Headquarters.

At the head of Wicked Pixel Cinema and Thrill Ride Media is Eric Stanze. Eric is a soft-spoken mild mannered guy, hard to believe he directed such hard-core horror outings such as Ice from the Sun and my personal fave, Scrapbook. Eric sat with me for a bit and chatted giving me an extensive rundown of Wicked Pixel Cinema, directly from his own point of view. Before you delve any deeper into my findings from my set visit, I'll give you an abridged version of just who Wicked Pixel and Thrill Ride Media are, straight from the boss.

Even before they were Wicked Pixel Cinema they were making movies with titles like The Scare Game and The Fine Art. Originally Tempe Entertainment distributed some of their titles, but Stanze soon broke off on his own to start Wicked Pixel. Scrapbook (a Wicked Pixel Cinema film) is still Stanze's favorite and the one that he says he feels most satisfied with as a director. In addition to making films for Wicked Pixel Cinema, they make films for b-movie.com under the moniker Sub Rosa Extreme with titles like I Spit on Your Corpse, I Piss on Your Grave. While they may not have as much freedom with titles like these (foreign investors made content requirements for I Spit) these films still manage to have the Wicked Pixel touch and feel. Obviously they feel more at home making films for themselves like the nearly wholly improvised Scrapbook. It gets a bit confusing at times as to who's behind what, though essentially it's the same group of folks behind each flick.

Thrill Ride Media is another company run by Eric Stanze, this time specializing in DVD authoring. They have quite an impressive set-up over at Thrill Ride and I was really blown away by the amount of care that went into each production. Thrill Ride Media is solely responsible for authoring and menu design for all of the discs selling at b-movie.com. It's steady income, yes...but it just serves to pay the bills on a very expensive and hi-tech set-up that I doubt many other indie filmmakers are dealing with. What's next for Wicked Pixel Cinema? They are trying to secure financing for their biggest production yet, a film called Tempest of the Dawn with a proposed 1.2 million dollar budget. From the sounds of it, this could be the film that pushes them over the edge.

The weekend that I was visiting, the Wicked Pixel crew were in the middle of shooting Savage Harvest 2: October Blood with Wicked Pixel regular Jason Christ (the first SH was directed by Stanze) in the Director's chair. What follows is a complete report on my experiences as I hung out with nearly the entire crew from Wicked Pixel Cinema over the course of a 4-day weekend. This is my story and I'm sticking to it.

Would you like to move on to day one? Then please, be my guest and accept this short cut, just click here!