Check out the trailer for F$#king B@%ch, a new music video for Kid Tiger’s song “Seasick; Homesick”, and the short film “My Dad Lives in a Trunk”.

Holy Smoke is offering you a unique way to celebrate your life.

Produced by Cara Gordon

Take a road trip with alt.news as we go down to Alabama to visit the birthplace of Kermit the Frog. Then we’ll stop to play at the City Museum, a multistory playhouse in St. Louis. After that we’ll grab a bite to eat at Moonshine Store, home of the moonburger in Southern Illinois. Lastly we’ll visit the owners of Holy Smoke who are providing a unique end-of-life option for the hunting and outdoor enthusiast.

And we don’t get to experience any of it.

Because when it’s springtime for us the heavy productions are just beginning and the doors to studios and editing rooms close to lock us away until summer.

The productions come not just from our Cinema and Radio/Television courses, which are always a *ahem* top priority out of respect for our wonderful and talented professors. But also from alt.news with out last two episodes due in April and May.

For our May episode we always produce a short, 15-minute film, and this year we’re shooting “My Dad Lives in a Trunk”, written by Tim Venhaus. The movie is about a young man in love dreading the thought of introducing his eccentric dad to his girlfriend.

Coupling the movie this year in the final episode is a music video for the song “Seasick; Homesick” by Kid Tiger. Produced by Kevin Ryan and directed by Haley Conner, the video follows Kid Tiger’s dramatic escape from prison as they try to return home.

Still, we can’t complain too much.  Productions have been heavy, but when working on a studio set like this, and following tommy-gun battles through these back-alleys, we don’t miss the sun and spring too much.

Kid Tiger

"My Dad Lives in a Trunk"

Second Stride is a nonprofit organization that helps rehabilitate racehorses for new lives away from the tracks.

Produced by: Kyle Loughrin

Join us for a 24-hour dance marathon to support youth cancer victims and their families.

Produced by: Kyle Loughrin

Calls From Home is a radio program in Kentucky that broadcasts messages to prisoners from their families and friends who can’t afford the high costs of making a direct phone call to the prison.

On this episode we go to Lemp Mansion, a brewery in Missouri that is haunted by ghosts of the family that owned it. Then we head up to Iowa to dance all night to support a charity dance marathon for cancer victims. After that follow us to Kentucky where a radio program called Thousand Kites allows families to send out messages to loved ones in prison, and to finish it off we’ll stop for a bite in Springfield, Illinois, home of the famous horseshoe sandwich.

We last blogged about a pre-production workshop that produced the script for alt.alarm, the alarm clock that will go as far as creating a nuclear holocaust just to get you out of bed. Well tonight you can watch the finish product, along with a spotlight on a Springfield, IL sandwich stuffed with enough calories to make all of America proud. In fact when filming A History of A Horseshoe we learned it was never too early to eat an open-faced fried chicken sandwich topped with fries and smothered in cheese. By 11am D’Arcy’s Pint was packed with hungry customers all ordering some version of this famous sandwich. Watch with an appetite tonight, it’s a most cheesiest adventure.

After indulging in a horseshoe you can always burn the calories with a dance marathon. The University of Iowa hosted a 24-hour dance charity for cancer victims this spring, and I assume watching our segment on this event burns as many calories as participating in it. At least I hope that’s the case, because I missed a Biggest Loser marathon, which put me behind on my weekly workouts.

For those with strong stomachs, we also have a segment on Lemp Mansion, a haunted brewery in Missouri. It’s sort of a Blaire Witch Project meets Ghost Hunters meets the ever-continuous Paranormal series (or so I’m told), and this segment is certain to leave you with sweat-soaked, hard-stopping, bed-wetting nightmares for at least the next two weeks. But don’t let this scare you from the segment; we lost two crew members on the shoot and don’t want their ghosts to wander the halls of Lemp Mansion in vain.

Lastly tonight you’ll see a touching segment on Calls From Home, a radio program in Kentucky that broadcasts calls to prisoners from their families, who often can’t afford the high cost of calling the prisons directly. Not to be put off by our usual blend of weird, this segment highlights a serious problem of communication in our American prison systems which put a huge cost burdens on the families that prisoners leave behind. Calls From Home helps level the playing field by opening a vein of free communication via a weekly one-hour radio segment where families can call and leave messages for the loved ones they want to reach.

So watch tonight at 10, or check out the episode streaming online tomorrow!

On the set of Alt.Alarm

On set of A History of a Horseshoe