"Bradford Rant: Beginnings" Has Made Its Debut!

 By: Andrew Bermudez

(Mustache Maniacs Film Co. Headquarters; July 2, 2023)

    It seems like most of our efforts these days are currently focused on preparing for Twenty Years Young next year, but never fear! We've just released our BRAWL 2023 entry, Bradford Rant: Beginnings!

Bradford Rant: Beginnings Has Been Released!

    BRAWL 2023 has just concluded, and that brings with it our latest film, Bradford Rant: Beginnings! Resurrecting a previously-developed but scrapped project, Bradford Rant: Beginnings takes the mostly-vague character of Dr. Bradford Rant (the founder of the Bradford Rant Institute of Cosmic Kinesis) and tells his own story of when he was just breaking into the scientific field. Specifically, this film takes an anecdote from his background (literally just part of a sentence) about his apprenticeship with Dr. Giacomo Berenices and explores that relationship in detail. The film has been imbedded above for your viewing pleasure.

Who is Bradford Rant?

    For those who are not aware, Dr. Bradford Rant started out as a character that was involved in a promotional campaign for the now-defunct MMOG LEGO Universe. To make a long story short, the institute that he founded was the center of a pre-release plot that involved pods with messages from the game's universe crashing onto Earth and being later recovered. Those messages included calls to help save the LEGO Universe from the Maelstrom, with fans around the world tasked with finding the remaining pods.

    If this sounds familiar, that's because this campaign was adapted into our cinematic universe as a multi-film subplot of Project U that began in A Friend of the Police. It hasn't been touched on in some time (the last time anyone heard from a pod was in 2015), but Bradford Rant: Beginnings does take the framework of that story and expand on some of the characters mentioned, both of which were little more than faces with names...at least, until now.

Our First-Ever All-AI Voice Cast and What this Means for the Future.

    Perhaps more surprising, though, is the fact that this film features something that we did not expect to do (or, honestly, did not want to do in the first place): this film features an all-AI voice cast, a first-ever for us. We've been tinkering with AI recently (the why will be revealed later this year), but this film forced our hand in a way that we did not expect: Andrew Adkins could not reprise his role as Dr. Bradford Rant (from the Third Fan Choice Awards) and a prospective actor for Dr. Giacomo Berenices never responded to our messages in spite of auditioning. No one else auditioned, so we used AI instead.

    It is worth mentioning that AI has advanced tremendously recently. As you may have heard in the film, AI-generated voice acting can now replicate human inflection, regional dialects and accents, and convey emotions. It was just a matter of directing the AI software on what is happening to get the right tone. Granted, it wasn't all perfect, but this film proves that, should it ever become an emergency, AI voice-acting is a viable solution for us.

    This, however, does NOT mean that we'll replace all of our actors with AI. If we need to, we'll use this technology, but our first course of action is to still audition for human actors.

Lead Out

    And with that, we have explored another minor character in detail, further fleshing out the official canon! We'll update you later about the competition results, as well as our applications of AI for next year.