The origin for the Two Minutes of Terror series is my hatred of cell phones. I’m not a very social person in real life outside my circle of friends, primarily due to cell phone addiction in society. Have you ever had to wait in line and listen to people complain about their lives to their friends on a cell phone? I have, many times. You know what? I absolutely hate it.

I hate talking to people and being interrupted by a cell phone, or a text, I hate it even more when that person HAS to text or answer the phone, especially when they text back the other person and say “No, go ahead I’m listening” and expect you to keep talking to them. I understand multitasking, and I understand people love to keep in touch with each other, but it’s so ridiculous it’s not even funny — especially also being hit by a texting asshole driving their car not paying attention to the guy crossing the street.

Bad Signal

“Bad Signal” is all about my hatred of cell phones and the people who use them 24/7. The character “The Lucky Lady’s Death” in “Bad signal” really shows how much I hate cell phones as well as my contempt for people who over use them. While this character doesn’t overuse her cell phone really in the episode, the brutality of it gets the point across. The cell phone is the monster of this episode, and sets the tone for the series.

The inspiration for this episode was primary my disgust on cell phone addiction, I kept it simple and short. I probably could have added a little bit more to this episode’s story, but even now I’m not sure what I could have added.

The character “The Lucky Lady” was given kind of a generic look, and I wish I had designed her to stand out a little more. I feel her outfit is a little bland in terms of style and color.

The Watcher

“The Watcher” is about cell phones just being noisy obnoxious devices. There are so many times you don’t want to hear a cell phone go off, in a theatre, when you’re trying to go to sleep, if you’re having a good conversation with someone — it’s just a nuisance.

Which is where the monster “The Watcher” comes in, The Watcher is actually a monster I came up with about 2005 for a script I wrote and haven’t gotten back too. I went for irony on the monsters name here, The Watcher has amazing hearing but it’s also blind. Gotta give your protagonist some chance of escaping from something that A: has amazing hearing and B: is faster than Albert Wesker.

This proved to be the most popular of the three episodes, which I’m starting to agree with.  It’s been pointed out to me that this is the only monster that the protagonist has any chance to escaping, as the “evil cell phone” pretty much paralyzed you, and there is no real way of getting away from episode 3’s monster once you’re in its domain.

The character “James” is modeled after James Sunderland from Silent Hill 2.

This Old House

“This Old House” is about cell phones actually being useful, but not for communication. The bright LCD screen on a cell phone is actually a pretty good flash light. About a year ago my father and I were driving a “thing” (a Volkswagen vehicle for those who don’t know) and it was an incredibly windy end of summer day as we were driving and the thing has a roof that can collapse so you can drive freely in the sun on a warm spring day.

Unfortunately it wasn’t really made for 40 MPH wind, and it didn’t help that the roof didn’t properly latch (this was a used vehicle BTW) so it kept trying to blow off and we kept trying to fix it until my side of the roof flipped off some and we had to pull over at midnight to fix it.

Problem: No flash light, we could see how to properly re-attach it. Solution: Nintendo DS. My DS put out plenty of light and helped us resolve the problem. I ended up checking out the strength of the cell phone’s light later on and found it also to be pretty strong.

Thus the “Little Lifeguard” using her cell phone as a flash light around the basement.

“This Old House” was my most ambitious episode due to how much ground I had to cover on it, establishing the setting was vital on this episode, and I succeeded amazingly well — but unfortunately I ended up flubbing some on the monster of this episode.

The monster was fine, but It ends up striking too fast before too much of a sense of dread is established, I really should have waited another 6 seconds before introducing the monster in this episode, as well as added a little bit more to the episodes creepiness. Live and learn.

The “Little Lifeguard” is actually modeled after her voice actress, the only difference is that Hnilmik has slightly curly hair instead of straight hair. The look of the character is actually based off a girl I had a crush on a few years back who was part of the swimming team at my college.

I was happy to finish this series off, even at three episodes total it was a very difficult and draining process. For my very first series it wasn’t a bad experiment.