Monday, April 27, 2015

The Recordist

By Andrew Moore(@ashok0)

Retention rate is an absolute KILLER on the World Wide Web. Try Googling "+supplex +scully" in 2015, and you'll get 0 relevant results. In 1998, Supplex was a wildly popular website that hosted content related to The X-Files. Alas, this occured during a long forgotten era when GeoCities was a popular Web host, ISDN was considered "high speed", and Vivo and RealPlayer were still king of Internet video. Fast forward 10 to 15 years later, and there are no remnant traces of vast amounts of Web 1.0 content anywhere in cyberspace.


 When Fringe was given a solid end date in 2012, I began to worry that over time, Fringe content, along with Anna Torv's videos and photos, might slowly be lost from Web 2.0. FOX would surely be closing down www.fox.com/fringe and fans might start closing Fringe-related accounts. I immediately started saving all FOX material, fan distributed material, TV spots, Web spots, episode stills, electronic press kits, magazines, interviews, SDCC panels, photoshoots, event photos, etc. for personal reference. I found that quite a few things were no longer on-line, but I was able to find trace elements of missing content via Tumblr GIFs and forum posts which I indexed for reference.

By Summer of 2014, I believed I was nearing completion of my Fringe catalog, and casually mentioned my project to a few of my Twitter followers, including Subject13Fringe. In September of 2014, Subject13Fringe suggested that we work together and design a website to host our Fringe libraries. She --- along with all the Torvettes who have done nothing but pour out love for our show via social media ---- convinced me that Fringe was something worth saving long after it had gone off-line.

What followed was an extensive 8 month campaign of hunting down the material in our Fringe catalog which was still missing from our archives. Our project was completed in April of 2015 and AnnaTorverse.com was born. My hope is that, in 2036, a search for very specific Fringe content won't result in 0 hits. Fringe was more than a show and is far too special of a show to be lost over time.  But the love and support I have received from Fringies these past few years has convinced me that Fringe will live forever.  <3

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Friday, April 24, 2015

Fringe Jukebox (1/16)

By @DannaAissa, @Chapman2014 & @Fringemania
Fringe is full of good music, that's a fact. I had been thinking about including a Fringe Music section on my blog when I discovered that @Chapman2014 had a list with some of Walter's favorite titles. I asked her to complete the list and write a few posts but while she was working on it she found out that it had already been done on @Fringemania's blog. This series of posts follows the list on that blog although we also added other musical references. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do!



 SEASON 1
1x02 The Same Old Story
- Christopher is looking for his next victims
   
Young Men Dead - The Black Angels
Skin Head - The Glass Helmets ( We couldn't find this song on the internet. Here is some info)



- Peter sings to help Walter fall sleep
  Row Row Row Your Boat - popular children's song


1x03 The Ghost Network
- John Scott's funeral
- Walter and Peter have breakfast in a cafe


Smoke From A Distant Fire - Sanford & Townsend
- Walter asks Peter to play Bach's Mass in B minor on the piano while they're in the lab. We wanted to include it anyway although Peter doesn't play.


Mass in B minor - J.S. Bach
- Walter plays something on the piano but we couldn't find out what it is. Any ideas?

- Olivia asks Peter to play some Bach on the piano. Peter plays some Jazz instead, a piano cover of this song:
 Someone To Watch Over Me - George & Ira Gershwin (minute 1:17)


1x04 The Arrival
- September is having lunch in coffe shop at the beginning of the episode.


Crazy - Willie Nelson
- Walter meets September in a cafe.


- On the "first" encounter between Peter and September, Peter says random things that September repeats at the same time. Peter mentions these two songs:

 I want to hold your hand - The Beatles

 Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds - The Beatles

More every three weeks!

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Friday, April 17, 2015

Walter Bishop's Deli (1/4)

By thecortexifan (@thecortexifan)

 PART 1

It all started when a Fringie came over on a Saturday evening to watch the re-run of 3.09 Marionette. We decided it should be “Walter food” for dinner. So we had chicken strips (we don't like wings) and strawberry milkshakes.

But that wasn't enough. My mind was being silly and crazy that day.
Walter was talking about “milk that doesn't go bad, and cheese” and later he licked the (supposedly) ashes of Amanda Walsh.

  



So... I created the “Marionette plate”,  mostly for “show and tell.“
I cut up cheese, put milk in this little pitcher, used cocoa powder for the ashes, and added some Red Vines, because... ;)
I think it was a success because from that moment on, every time we would get together and watch Fringe, we would try to recreate the food items Walter mentioned or presented. Red Vines, strawberry milkshakes were almost always part of out get-together's. 






We also had lots of floats. We used root beer, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi or orange juice, vanilla ice cream or frozen yogurt, added whipped cream, sprinkles and our straws were Red Vines.








Pretty much the first time we see Walter, he mentions food. 

1.01 Pilot
Walter: "They have this horrible pudding here. Butterscotch pudding on Mondays. It's dreadful."





Peter said it best. 

2.10 Grey Matters
Peter: "Every time Walter asks for a piece of food..., he's trying to recreate a moment in time to help him remember." 




 Let's dive in to some more of Walter's creations. I tried to list them in the order as they appeared on the show, not necessarily in the order I made them. 



2.07 Of Human Action
Walter: "Oh, don't be ridiculous. You were abducted. Of course you need crepes!"






 I'm not going to tell you recipes for crepes. You can find recipes online that serves your diet. After you baked them... let loose and be creative.


We boldly used bacon, Nutella, whipped cream, Red Vines, sprinkles, and fruit. Every one of them just tasted delicious.



As I mentioned in the beginning that our first Walter food dinner included chicken strips. Those were from BK, I think. Later for one of the "Fringe" parties I held, I made my own. 
2.22 Over There Part 1
Walter: "Double breaded for a big crunch. It's so good. Tastes just like on our side. It was Wednesday, 1983, when I happened to identify the last of the 11 secret herbs and spices."
Well, I just used pepper. I bought a few chicken breasts (depending again on the number of people you will have) and cut them in pieces. I left some natural. For the others I used an egg, crunched up french fried onion, and pan fried them. 







They were delicious and we went crazy because... we discovered that dipping them in butterscotch pudding... is awesome. Lol. Thanks Walter. 






credits: screencaps are from fringefiles.com, transcripts are from fringepedia.net, and the other pictures are mine. 
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Friday, April 10, 2015

Things you never noticed about Olivia's apartment (1/7)

By Danna Aissa (@DannaAissa) & LB.C (@Chapman2014)

Have you ever felt lost in Olivia’s apartment scenes? Did you ever have the feeling something has changed but don't know what? You’re not alone! We noticed that too, so we investigated a little bit and found out that Olivia’s apartment is changing all the time. We’re going to expose the main "discoveries" we've made.


#1 Olivia's apartment completely changes after episode 1x06

In episodes 1x01 to 1x06, the living room and bedroom were integrated into one space, and the kitchen door was in front of the bed. You can clearly see that in episode 1x04 when Olivia arrives home, goes to the kitchen and John Scott appears.



But from episode 1x09 on we see 3 different spaces and the kitchen is now at the other end of the apartment.


The apartment is so different, you'd think she'd moved to a new one. It turns out that the shot of the building's façade, at the start of every apartment scene, is always the same (We'll talk more about the façade later on). Maybe she moved to another apartment inside the same building? But again, the image preceding the apartment scenes always shows the same windows. Maybe she refurbished the apartment? That doesn't seem possible either. So what happened? 

Here are the plans of both apartments:




More every three weeks!

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Friday, April 3, 2015

Fringe Forward vol. 1

By Ellen (@fringecomix)

Well, it only took two years, but there’s finally a web comic!

Henry-Cover-small
See the beginning of the Fringe Forward Project, or just skip to the web comic currently in progress.

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Friday, March 27, 2015

The Best Fringe Tour Ever - Part 9 (out of 9)

By Danna Aissa (@DannaAissa)

Last Summer @Odunham4life and her husband wanted to do a Fringe tour in Vancouver for their wedding anniversary. I had been in Vancouver a couple of months before, so she asked for my advice and I provided her with all the information I had been gathering about Fringe filming locations (I published a post about that, click here). She put together all the information from the different sources and prepared the best Fringe tour ever!

On her return, she tweeted lots of pics comparing stills from the show with pics from the real Vancouver, but you know how Twitter is, everything happens very fast and those tweets are now buried and forgotten, so I thought about writing some posts and keeping them handy. I have her permission to do it, of course! ;P
<- Part 8


The Bishop house

Click on the tweet to see larger pics and conversations



Fringe Division Over There

Click on the tweet to see larger pics and conversations
Location: www.vpl.ca

Sam Weiss' Bowling Alley


Click on the tweet to see larger pics and conversations


Harvard University
Click on the tweet to see larger pics and conversations
See this location on Google Maps




Click on the tweet to see larger pics and conversations
See this location on Google Maps



Click on the tweet to see larger pics and conversations
See this location on Google Maps

Markham's
Click on the tweet to see larger pics and conversations
See this location on Google Maps
THE END

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Friday, March 20, 2015

A Short Story About Love


A shared passion for Fringe created a quantum-entangled friendship for two women who might never have met otherwise – OConnellAboo, a broadcast traffic coordinator from New York City, and Dixie, a computer security analyst from Nashville, TN.  They encouraged each other to start writing Fringe fic at the end of S3; despite the show ending a couple of years ago, they still talk writing, travel, politics, life -  almost every day, and both credit Fringe as being the catalyst for their life-long bond.
How did you start writing Fringe fic?


Dixie: OC and I were both part of the now-defunct Television Without Pity forums.  We seemed to have similar opinions, liked a lot of the same fics, had the same snarky sense of humor, so we sort of talked each other into writing something.  I had never written fic, but she had – we knew we both wanted to write Fringe fic, but were hesitant to take the next step.  I trusted her to give me her honest opinion about what I wrote, she did the same, and that’s how we became each other’s Betas. 
My first story was a “6B”-inspired fic.  Like everyone else, I watched that episode a thousand times and the idea that sprang from it just wouldn’t leave me alone.  It kept me awake at night, like a movie playing in my head.  Finally, I wrote it down and sent it to OC.  That was "You Belong With Me".

OConnellAboo: I had written some fan fiction before for X-Files (dating myself here!), as well as a screenplay for a Final Draft competition a bunch of years back.  After Dix and I hit it off online, we decided to be each other’s cheering squad/nudge/beta.  My first story was “I Still Dream Of Organon” a fill-in-the-blank for “LSD” in S3.  The scene of Walter trying to bring Peter down from his acid trip really touched me; it showed Walter in such a lovely paternal mode, despite the bizarre circumstances.  So, I wanted to continue it a bit more.  The title comes from a Kate Bush song, “Cloudbursting,” about a child’s relationship with her father, and it always reminds me of Walter and Peter.


Where do you get your inspiration?
Dixie: Fringe is a paradise for fic writers – there are so many events or incidents that are loosely explained or not explained at all, so many story lines with opportunities to ‘fill in the blanks’. I like working within or close to canon, so a lot of my stories are imagined as ‘missing scenes’, such as “Consequences Both Obvious and Unforeseen” from  “The Firefly” in S3, or “I Believe You Call It 'Love'”, set between “The Human Kind” and “Black Blotter” in S5.

The relationships in Fringe are fertile ground for writers, too. There was always something that could be explained, analyzed, or more fully addressed. Being a network show, there were ALWAYS things that didn’t get full closure in the episodes – like Peter’s obsession with the shape-shifters in S3. Did anyone REALLY think Olivia would just let that go? I didn’t, and “Full Disclosure” sprang out of that. “Brookline” expanded on the scenes near the end of S4, when Peter and Olivia were looking for a house, and looks at how Peter reacts to becoming a father.

Fringe had great teasers, thanks to Bart Montgomery and Ari Margolis. We used to go NUTS, especially when the new season teasers were released, because we didn’t know what was about to happen. The S5 teasers inspired me to write a series of stories set in 2036, which were seriously jossed as the season progressed… but it was fun to do a little world-building within the framework we saw early on. Those were “Shine”, “So Many Things to Say”, “Just As He Always Did”, and “Out of the Amber.”

OConnellAboo: As  Dix said, Fringe is just a total playground of the imagination for a writer – sometimes because it’s so frustrating! As my list of stories indicates, I get most of my inspiration from the relationship between Walter and Peter; to me, they’re the great love story of the series, and that story wasn’t explored nearly enough for my liking. 
This is going to sound weird, but I’ll also, on occasion, come up with a title, and think of a Fringe situation to match it later. I was watching a production of Hamlet, and thought a phrase Hamlet used to describe his father would make a great story title. I thought for a bit, and decided that Peter’s impending fatherhood – and his relationship with S4 Walter – would be a great match, and my story, “Hyperion to a Satyr”, was born.


How do the two of you work together?

Dixie: The beta part is easy now; OC is a great writer to start with, so there was seldom anything grammatically incorrect for me to worry about. The fun thing about working with the same person is that you learn each other’s style. We kick around ideas as we start to write something new, and I rely on her to keep me honest with tricky plot / time lines.
One of my favorite stories is one we wrote together. We both had thought that “Everything In Its Place” had a lot of possibilities for a backstory – it’s the episode where Walter wants to take Gene out of the lab on a ‘field’ trip – and we came up with “Grazing Day”. OC is a master at writing the Peter / Walter relationship, and I love to write POlivia, so it was a good fit. We each wrote sections, then collaborated heavily on the transitions between scenes. 

OConnellAboo:  We work together so well; while our styles differ somewhat, the spirit of our writing is very similar. We like to get to the heart of a situation – Why is someone acting the way they are?  What’s the emotional fall-out? That’s the kind of stuff we really enjoy, so it’s great fun to beta. And Dix has such a great command of language and nuance, it’s hardly any work at all to be her beta. Everybody should have a “job” that’s this much fun.
How long does it take to write one of your stories?
Dixie:  Most of my one-shots took a couple of days, maybe a week if I needed to research details or polish the dialogue. The multi-chapter pieces could take a month to six weeks, although the two stories I’m working on right now have been ‘works in progress’ for over a year. I try to have a piece completed before I publish, although again, the two stories I have up now are incomplete – I have a general idea of where I’m going, but nothing is set in stone yet.

OConnellAboo:  It varies for me – the 25-ish chapters of “Matters of Great Import” stretched out over about eight months. I usually have an end-game in mind – I know pretty much how my stories will play out – but sometimes the detours are the most fun. 
The amount of time I’ve spent writing one-shots varies; I literally wrote my story, “Snub”, in a half-hour fit of pique when John Noble had yet again been overlooked in the Emmy nominations. I think that might be the fastest I’ve ever written, but my one-shots usually take me from a couple of hours to a day or so to write, depending on word count and the amount of research I need to do to keep my universes straight.
Favorites?
Dixie:  There are lots of great writers in the Fringe fandom, but OC is my personal favorite. “No Nay Never No More / Horseman, Pass By” are a pair of one-shots set in S5 that I love – AU, but could easily be canon, and the two never fail to make me cry. “Cut Him Out In Little Stars” won a Fringenuity contest for love stories, and it’s another beautiful short story. “Matters of Perception” and “Matters of Great Import” are enthralling multi-chapter fics that are beautiful portrayals of the Peter/Walter relationship, loosely based around S4. 

Out of the stories I’ve written, I think “Thirty Days” is my favorite. It’s a multi-chapter fic that picks up the story with the final scene in 5.13. Joel Wyman talked about the feeling he wanted to leave fans with after the finale – "I would want to sit in my car the day after the final episode and think, ‘I know it's over, but I can kind of imagine where everybody is. I can still feel these people I loved. They're not gone.’“ “Thirty Days” was my way of doing that, and of saying goodbye to the series.

OConnellAboo:  So many favorites – almost all of them written by Dix. I love “You Belong With Me”, and “Thirty Days”, but one of my favorites is a one-shot she wrote called “Full Disclosure”. It really explores Peter’s feelings about the Machine, and addresses the story thread from “Reciprocity” that the writers mysteriously dropped. I also enjoyed a story by Corwin of Amber called “Hollenhund”, which is about how Walter’s father, Robert Bischoff, came to America. It’s twisty, history-bending fun.

Of my stories,  I supposed I’m proudest of my two multi-chapter monsters, “Matters of Perception”, and “Matters of Great Import”, because I wasn’t just filling in gaps; I took the Fringe universe somewhere it hadn’t been, for better or worse, and wove an entire tale of my own. For sheer fun, I loved writing “Grazing Day”, with Dix. It was like an online Vulcan mind-meld, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor. We played to each other’s strengths, kept each other’s timelines in check, and just had an absolute blast doing it.  It’s a wonderful thing to have a collaborator you totally, 100% trust.

My plain-old, flat-out favorite, though? “Brown Betty: I'm Getting Sentimental Over You”. I absolutely loved writing that, and was tickled at the reception it got from the community.

     




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