An Online Commercial I Made

The commercial I just made for the NC State Fair just went live. They wrote the script, and I directed, shot, and edited.

TV Land Haiku Meme

Ok, so I'm reading "TV Land To Go: The Big Book of TV Lists, TV Lore, and TV Bests" by Tom Hill. Good book, lots of tv nostalgia and odd facts. There's also a bunch of original material created for the book. Some of their ideas for tv shows are pretty brilliant, like a detective show called "That's The Man!", where Tony Randall plays "a classically trained artist who has fallen on hard times and taken up work as a police sketch artist.[His] refined sensibility and distaste for mingling with riffraff can't overcome his burning desire to see justice done". Brilliant.

But what I post about today is another one of their genius ideas: the TV Land Haiku. Their theory is that the brief-but-rigid artistic structure of the haiku is the perfect method "for expressing the essential truth in some of our favorite TV shows and characters."

Check out the following examples:

"Dragnet"
Stern morality
Blue squares bust far-out hippies.
The names have been changed.

"Family Affair"
Mom and Dad are gone,
But Uncle Bill is rich, yay!
Who wants pony rides?

"Hogan's Heroes"
Underground allies
What tunnels? I know nothing.
Silly old Germans!

So, inspired by that, I decided to create some of my own:

"Match Game"
In the Land of Blanks
Brett Somers is Match Game king
And Charles is her queen.

"The Love Boat"
Where else could Zsa Zsa
Make sweet love with Van Patten
Exciting and new

"Venture Brothers"
The Monarch will rant,
Hank and Dean will fail again,
And Brock will whoop ass.

"Wrestling Announcers"
Jim Ross reigns today
Lance was a stalwart hand, but
Solie was the Dean.

"Bill McNeill"
The man loved his cane,
And loved women even more.
But Rocket Fuel, DAMN!

"QI"
The Earth has two moons?!?
"Cruithne?" Are you mad, sir?
That's rubbish; prove it.

So that's my contributions. I now ask you to create your own and pass it around the interweb, on blogs and Facebook and Twitter and all those doohickeys. I particularly challenge the pop culture haiku masters: Kit FitzSimons and Jeff Scronce! Go to it, lads! (And link back here.)

Oh, and maybe use the #tvhaiku hashtag, if you feel like it. Now go get famous.

Catching Up On Stuff

Haven't posted in about a month, let's get caught up, shall we kiddies?

Videos I've done recently, with brief remarks:

4DDI vs Shapeshifter - Had a fun time playing around in Motion to do the Dr. Who-y effects. Loved the way the merging of Andy and Kit turned out. Went back to an old trick with the morphing effect, and any excuse to use the remix of the Superfriends theme is a-ok with me.

4DDI vs Average Ducks - Wasn't really sure what to do with a group with the name "Average Ducks", until I thought of the old Warner Brothers cartoon, "A Corny Concerto". So this is an homage to that. Hadn't played in Flash in a long while, so that was fun.

Cohost #1: Nikolai - CageMatch ran for the whole month of July as part of the Summer Slamtacular. As part of the festivities, I featured a different cohost each week. First was Zach Ward as Nikolai. Basically, I just let him rock it in front of the green screen and chopped up his bits into a video mix with illustrations. I was tickled to find that Eastern European song about Nikolai....

4DDI vs PTSIAM - Time to ramp it up. PT is always inspiring, and so we turned it up a few notches for this one. I liked having Pt's "origin story", and then putting him in two different movies and the cartoon. All greenscreened and masked and whatnot. Strangely enough, PT just happens to own a real Maltese Falcon. Hard to edit the movies down to be brief but still make sense and tell the story, but I thought it worked out okay. The South Park sequence was done in Flash, with PT's bits all drawn by hand and animated into the existing footage.

Cohost #2: Jeff'Ray - Bryan Barnes did an awesome job as "The Homosexual Agenda", a character Joe Stanton dreamed up a year ago. We made sure he was a very positive figure, and the comedy came from Scott Sullivan not knowing how to deal with a very "out" gay man.

Verna Applebottom's Big Day Out - Paula Pazderka asked me to produce this for her, a parody of the Chico's clothing stores. I love that song--"It's Chico Time!"

PTSIAM vs Senior PGA - This time I framed the PTSIAM sequence with Zach and Jeremy going to see Star Wars. The idea was that people would wonder where and when PT would crop up. And of course, it was funny to have PT misinterpret instructions and break the X-wing. Whups! Lots of work in Motion, learning how to autotrack movement and make clips match movement. The first sequence worked perfectly; really should've reshot the others to make them look better. Loved Jeremy's visuals at the end.

Cohost #3: Donnie Tucker - Mary Sasson as a guy from Pittsburgh. "Go stillahs!" I got some ideas on typical Pittsburgh photos from some YouTube videos by natives.

DSI Corporate Commercial - Made this one in less than 24 hours, from notification to execution. Basically just used a bunch of transitions in Final Cut and a lot of DSI photos, along with a few simple tricks.

Ignite Raleigh Opener - Got hired to produce a video to open the first meeting of the Ignite Raleigh group. We gathered the organizers together at DSI and did a pretape of them getting frustrated with some old PCs and then taking out their aggressions on the machines, a la Office Space. All the PC screen images and the explosions were done in post with Apple Motion.

And I think that catches us up! See you again soon.

Voice Recognition Star Wars

While doing the photographs for the latest Patton Project, I came up with one of my more brilliant ideas. I had put on my favourite movie, Star Wars: A New Hope, to play in the background while I took pictures. Then I decided to Twitter about it, but in a unique way: I used an iPhone app called "Vlingo" that can translate your voice into text and then post it to Twitter. I figured I'd see how it handled my favourite Star Wars quotes. It's not exactly 100% accurate (especially when doing Darth Vader and Ben Kenobi impressions), but that was the main point: let's see how the text gets mangled.

I actually came up with the voice recognition idea a little way into the movie, and missed a few of the quotes at the beginning, so I've gone back and added a few at the beginning and a few I missed in the middle, but all have been Vlingoed. See how many you can recognize!

1. "Long time ago and galaxy far far west"
2. "We do"
3. "is this a calls lecture where is the am about to go"
4. "There's 1 set to stun"
5. "I'm going to regret this" (score!)
6. "Call die before she tells you anything"
7. "Don't get to the with may"
8. "Call Tuesday to it is you did his you'll"
9. "web search George"
10. "Poser program for etiquette and protocol"
11. "Can you speak bocce" (wow!)
12. "Is going to Austin to pick up some parking burgers"
13. "the start to unit have a bad motivator"
14. "Bank of America, well that is going to feels so good"
15. "hi and see 3 PO Ching side alterations"
16. "You're the 1 Canobie for my only hope"
17. "We are just crazy old Matt"
18. "Is going to check the baby"
19. "It's around us Patrick source pines the galaxy picked up"
20. "Dangers your Starfleet command at not just the Playstation"
21. "The ability to destroy upset insignificant next to the power of the folks"
22. "Send people always ride single file I need the number is"
23. "I find your lack of state and disturbing"
24. "Quantum on the way to the force become a gym I love my father"
25. "Most Isley spaceport you'll never find out more rigid hive of scum and put it in a"
26. "Google need to see if this application"
27. "At the joy joy looking for"
28. "We go serpentine here"
29. "This s*** the bed Kessel run with 12 parts sex" (it put in the asterixes itself...)
30. "traveling to Harbor Stacy like bustin crops bored"
31. "Loof for another topic American retarded than they move systems"
32. "That's no moon it's the space station" (very close!)
33. "Who is more for lish the folk all the fool who doesn't"
34. "What an incredible snow you discovered"
35. "I got a bad feeling about this" (hey! It got another right!)
36. "Mike is that walking carpet on my way"
37. "I love you I was about the monitor now I am the masta"
38. "Your power is all week old Masson"
39. "you call twins or if you strike me dial I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine"
40. "Story show together c'mon very whole together"
41. "Baseballs I will Pratts and mighty 16 back home"
42. "May the force be with you" (another match!)
43. "Google power to front deflector screens switch l power to front deflector strains"
44. "Evacuate dynamo the trials I think you overestimate their chances"
45. "It because like beggars canyon back home"
46. "You suck balls look" (I SWEAR that's what it came up with)
47. "you are a queer can know what day is going to go home"
48. "Call jott kid that was in a million"
49. "Remember the force be with you always" (close!)
50. "Calorie!"

And that's the end of "Voice Recognition Star Wars". I hope you had a lovely time. I'll post the answer key in a few days.

CageMatch and Banana Breakup

I'm woefully behind on my blog/video updates. I did CageMatch a few weeks ago, and then the Banana Breakup Extravaganza last week.

First, CageMatch. Not much to say here, except that I didn't have much of an idea for the video, and didn't get an opportunity to meet with the 4DDI guys, so the whole thing was just based around one of the members not being able to make it. I had the Beer graphic already laying about, basically, so that was easy to throw in.

The Banana Breakup video was a lot more satisfying. Got some time with Kit and Eitan to do shots and video before the show, so there was a lot more raw material to work with (and the BB boys are always so fun to work with as well.) The opening shoutout to Biff Hobgood was Kit's idea, and very funny to us since we knew it would be over most people's heads. (If it's over your head, check out the Biff Hobgood surprise return video.)

I really wanted to do a decent (if quick) overview of Banana Breakup's history, so consulted my files, went through all their past videos, and selected some clips to use. (One bonus: Joe Jones made his return to the theater after several months off, and Kyle Chorpening was there as well, so they both saw the shotout to Panthro.) Then we went into the whole "BB vs BB" bit, which was amusing. By the way, nobody really knew we were presenting the show in a faux CageMatch format, so the whole video thing was a surprise. I loved the way the still of the masked BB turned out, photoshopped with a "photocopy" version of the picture overlaid on itself and tweaked a bit to give it that hyperreal look. The "good" BB reply was hilarious, with Eitan's "honesty and wits" and Kit's "tonight at dawn" ad libs. I was also quite happy with the "flaming faceoff" animation at the end. And was quite pleased with the song I picked for the end, The Donnas covering Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself." The ersatz Hall of Champions was a surprise for the boys, in an attempt to make 'em laugh.

Stills, as always, are here.

PS: the live show included another surprise: Scott Sullivan performing a Banana Breakup rap live on stage. From a rapping standpoint, it was a humiliating failure, but from a comedy standpoint, it was a decent success, as 40 year old guys fucking up a rap onstage while dressed in a blinged-out t-shirt and hat turns out to be pretty laughworthy.

Another CageMatch

Had another CageMatch extravaganza last night. Here's the video. Come back and we'll chat.

The "multicultural" screen with the city landmarks in the background originally was supposed to be the Sister City identity screen. I was up until 4 am on Friday working on the image, but decided it was far too busy for an identity screen. As I drifted off to sleep, I dreamed up the postcard idea, loosely basing it on the film "Dark City", which Kit and I had watched earlier in the week. I had fun making the image, and was quite pleased with the deco-esque gradients and whatnot. The multicultural screen turned out pretty nice; I was especially pleased with Andy's two halves, and Zannie as a geisha. And that's all there is to it, really.

Stills are here, as usual.

Inspiration From Teddy

So I had a hard time being productive today. (It's been a rough week.) I finally decided to go lie down for a bit to clear my head. Ended up picking up my copy of Don Rosa's "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion" that my mom had gotten me for Christmas, which had been sitting next to the bed untouched ever since.

Excellent book; ended up spending the bulk of the afternoon consuming every page and panel. Towards the end of the tome, Unca Scrooge meets up with President Teddy Roosevelt and (as part of the tale) Scrooge recalls words that Roosevelt had told him years earlier (which, in reality, is a paraphrase of a real quote of Roosevelt's):

"Don't live by the doctrine of ignoble ease, but by toil and effort, labor, and strife! The highest forms of success comes to the man who shirks not from danger or work, and who therefore wins the ultimate triumph."

Those words seemed to be appropriate for my current situation, and I reproduce them here in hopes that they might touch other people as well. I have several friends who are very successful in their chosen fields, and they got there through dedication and hard work, pushing aside any obstacles in the pursuit of their dream, while always keeping their eyes focused on their goal. I envy these friends of mine. I know they are a different breed of person than I am, and I cannot duplicate their way of living and believing, but I can hope to emulate them in some small way, and sometimes it's through wise words like those in the excerpt above that help drive people like myself who don't have the natural attitudes and abilities of those rare people who truly know how to live life to the fullest. It's even more helpful (for me, anyway) when it comes via a comic book.

Oh, also, "Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye".

Green eyes and big admiration go to Matt, Larry, and Zach. Keep doing great things; in addition to your own success, you inevitably inspire others.