CageMatch 12/27/07

The last CageMatch of the year was a non-title affair, as half of the challenging team was comprised of visitors from out of town, namely Corey Brown and the artistic director of the UCB, Anthony King. Since the title was not at stake, the storyline I came up with was that Oh Double-P decided that Espionage A Trois was getting a little lazy over the holidays, and so she brought in an elite team of former agents to give the squad a special training session. (Well, it amused me anyway.)

I haven't been in a very productive mood lately, so the video was cranked out in five hours the day of the show. Couldn't have done it without the fabulous performance by Corey Brown, who really understands my vision of CageMatch as an old-school wrestling show with an ongoing storyline. He gave a great promo that really made the video.

Check out the vid here and the identity screen shown above here.

Little Batman

Oh my fucking god, this is the best thing EVER. Some guy made an homage to the old 1960s Batman show, but with kid actors! The boy doing Batman is GREAT! The costumes are amazing, the attention to ridiculous detail is hilarious, and the Batmobile...my go, the Batmobile. I would've killed for that when I was a kid.

Check out Little Batman: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

I want to make movies now.

Random Stuff

* Just came back from filming for Beatbox in Chicago. That was fun. Very cool people. Wish I could've seen them perform in their natural element. Jenny and Neil particularly impressed me with their rap ability and presence. I can't get enough of Dave Ries in da b-boy stance. Zach was very kind to bring me along to work with the Beatbox folk.
* Rene Duquesnoy is a very good host. We had a faboo party in his palatial estate, got taken to some great places to eat, and generally shown the best parts of the city. And I sang Bon Jovi on Rock Band.
* Got to see Halsted Street. All my life, as a wrestling fan, I was always led to believe that this was the toughest place in the world, the only place that could've turned out such beasts as The One Man Gang and The Road Warriors. Imagine my surprise when Rene laughed and told me that was the gay district. (Which is where we had an amazing meal at a diner. They gave us bananas. Heh.)
* Found a great retro toy store that I could've spent major cash in. They had a Fisher-Price Airport new in a sealed box for $100. Geez. I was amazed to find they had a basket of figures and vehicles for a buck apiece. I bought all their wood figures, along with another Sesame Street Susan. Some of these looked brand new. Amazing.
* Had my first Chicago hotdog, as well as my first real Chicago pizza. Both were good, but the pizza was comparable to the frozen Home Run pizza (they were both quite good). The Chicago hotdog is a completely different animal though... delicious. We stopped at a real dive to get the dog, and I amused/disgusted Rene and Zach by eating a french fry out of the trashcan.
* I love the way Chinese restaurants celebrate Christmas. These blinky-light pastel musical trees on top of a restaurant in Carrboro amuse me.
* I took Monday off of work to recover from the trip. Turns out I needed it. I was completely wiped and wasted the whole day. I'm gonna need to be a video-making machine for the rest of the week.
* The security chick at Chicago's Midway Airport informed me that my driver's license had expired in October. Oops. They didn't catch that at RDU. (I'm glad they didn't--I would've been worrying all weekend about getting past security in Chicago!) Got a new license today, and it was very easy. The folks in Carrboro are courteous.
* Amusing thing heard at the Driver's License office: Two girls claiming to be sisters were there to get licenses. One said she was there to get hers reinstated after being revoked. The other said she was from out of state and her purse was stolen with all her id information. The DMV woman asked her if she had ever gotten a license in North Carolina, and the girl's "sister" replied, "She's gotten pulled over and got a ticket in North Carolina." Yeah, that'll help, baby.

I told my mom last week that my fondest Christmas memory was when I was nine and she made me an advent calendar out of hollowed-out walnuts that she rubber-cemented back together with crackerjack toys inside. So yesterday she showed up where I work and brought me a NEW walnut advent calendar---made from the SAME walnuts she used thirty years ago!

The walnuts have the numbers 1-24 written on them, and you open up one each day to find a prize inside. This version has little folded-up strips of paper inside each nut, which might be puzzles, word scrambles, or pithy quotes. I particularly liked the quote for the first day, which was as follows:

Some days, doing "the best we can" may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn't perfect--on any front--and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else.

-Fred Rogers

I can certainly relate to that...I get frustrated when things don't turn out as perfectly as they do in my dreams, whether it be an art project or a video production or the love for a girlfriend. It helps to sit back and remember that we can only do so much, as outside factors like time, resources, or the independence of other people can sometimes hinder our dreams. In any situation, we can only do our best.

Another Poster Design

Designed another action/thriller poster this week--this for the next Espionage A Trois show. Joe Stanton and John Loftin are "Extraordinary Rendition", and they have done several great shows together, starting with their excellent performances in this year's Dual Duel. I love the outfits they came up with for this photoshoot. Crazy tough bastards.

The backdrop behind the Extraordinary Rendition fellows turned out nicely. The whole backdrop of the poster is a gradient that goes from a midnight blue at the top and bottom to a slightly lighter blue in the middle. So on top of that, I threw a pic from iStockPhoto of a room with lots of plumbing and dials and whatnot ('cause we kept talking about waterboarding when we were doing the photoshoot). The room looked a little too antiseptic and pristine, but I fixed that. I had taken some closeup pictures of a train that was parked near the theater, and used a shot of a stained and rusted patch behind the engine to overlay on the room, which gave the PERFECT effect.

Remi looks fabulously evil, Jeff Scronch provided a fabulous photo of Espionage A Trois and Oh-Double-P, and even Scott Sullivan made the poster this time around!

FYI, I got copies of the Silence Is Golden poster printed at Zazzle, and they arrived yesterday. They're 20"x30" HUGE, and look AMAZING.

I'm Famous Again

It's been a weird couple of days...some great stuff, some surprising stuff, some wistful stuff... premieres, revelations, regrets, a lot of laughter, far too many tears, and more alcohol than usual. Overall, I think everything is going to be fine. There's lots more projects on the calendar for the near future, with special CageMatch shows, a dvd I'm producing, a music video I'm directing, and of course, Christmas and all the hoopla and merriment and family wackiness that surrounds that. So I have hope that things are going to be good.

The latest bit of positivity is that it turns out that Patton Oswalt DID see the Kinda Patton II: Werewolves and Lollipops project I did for Jason a few months ago. And now I have my own page on Patton's website! Chekkit out here. (Dig that animated header!)

And also this weekend, my friend Matt sent me a copy of the documentary they did on our old OMEGA wrestling promotion (as detailed here) and I've watched a few minutes of it. It looks like it's going to be really, really good. Tells the story of how a bunch of kids from rural North Carolina got together and made one of the best independent wrestling federations in the country. And best of all, I host all the segments of the documentary! I'm in the extras too, talking about how I met the boys and got involved. I haven't watched the whole thing, but I'm told Matt puts me over hard, which would be really cool. It's nice to have one's contributions recognized.

I also just got a dvd in the mail from Mr. Erik Martin that he wants me to produce a promotional video for, so that'll be fun. And this Friday I'm going to try to start work on a music video for Jackson's great song, "Cigarettes On The Ground".

Gotta stay busy, or you'll go insane. Believe me, I know.

Alcohol

If you really apply yourself, Woodchuck amber cider will get you fucked up,

Crazy Voicemail

So the other day I heard the Assistant to the Mayor laughing his head off. Turns out he was listening to a voicemail left by a guy who was very irate. We had to listen to it several times before we figured out what his beef was. Turned out he was upset at some referee call in a middle school basketball game or something. We thought the call was hilarious because:

1. It's an amusing thing to get nuts over, a basketball call in a school game.
2. Overreaction is always funny.
3. Cursing is funny.
4. We don't run the school system. And most importantly:
5. He was trying to call the City of Durham. We ain't Durham.

Enjoy the call here.

CageMatch 11-29-07

This week's CageMatch video is done in the style of a spy movie commercial, as if it were the sequel to Espionage A Trois' first blockbuster movie. Here it is.

This one took a lot of planning. It started with the name of the fictional movie, "Silence Is Golden", which resulted in the poster design. Then I found a Garbage song entitled "Silence Is Golden", which was perfect, since Garbage has done a James Bond movie song before. That inspired the whole feel of the video.

I decided to do the voice differently, based on an old radio promo for "Live And Let Die". I wrote the script last week, and recited it for days before I actually recorded it. We did a pretape for the Secret Agent Headquarters segment two weeks ago, and I got a little time with Zach on Tuesday at lunch to tape his segments. Had to go out and buy Goldfinger and Man With The Golden Gun on dvd for the weapons segment. Took some pix of my sister on Thanksgiving for the "shh" silhouettes seen above. Tommy's jacket was the wrong colour (a light tan instead of black) so I recoloured that in Photoshop.

I was particularly happy with the introduction sequence for each character in Espionage A Trois. Those pretty much turned out exactly how they appeared in my head. Great pictures taken by Jeff Scronch.

Some framegrabs are here.

This Is Tonight

Silence Is Golden poster
Originally uploaded by TedHobgood

Poster for the 11/29/07 episode of CageMatch, featuring Espionage A Trois defending against a man whose actions speak louder than his words, Silence DoGood!

I'm actually going to order some 20"x30" prints of this. Sweet.

Rappin' Disaster

Okay, this is probably the most embarrassing thing I've done since...well, the LAST time I recorded a rap. And that was a loooong time ago, when my friend Tim and I wrote a rap about "Fratty Baggers", the fratboys who would hide their beer in paper bags like winos---not because they didn't want you to know they were drinking, but they didn't want you to know they were drinking cheap beer. (Bad for their rich image, I guess.)

Anyhoo, this little ditty was born out of a email that one Jeff Scronce sent around to me and a coupla pals. Jeff linked us to this site, featuring a guy rapping about the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It was amazingly stupid and funny. Ethan Kaye then responded by saying

Sounds like that old-school 80's hip-hop. "My name is XXXXX
and I'd like to say..."

Well, for some reason I found that inspiring, so in the next fifteen minutes or so I wrote the following lyrics:

My name is *FEMA*, and I'd like to say,
I can rap about disasters in a *MILLION* ways!
Hurricanes, tornados, and a big ol' flood,
Fema gonna be there in yo' neighborhood!
Dolin' out cash for b-boys and b-girls
Helpin' y'all while the turntable twirls

The F is for "Fresh", 'cause we're cool like dat,
The E is for "Excitin'", 'cause we're the hot cats,
The M is for "Da Most", most from coast to coast,
And the A is for "Awesome" like butter on toast!

Wave your hands in the air, 'cause you know we really care!
Whoop-whoop! Whoop-whoop!
The roof! The roof! The roof has been repaired!
Whoop-whoop! Whoop-whoop!

Problem is, when I got home, I was still thinking about the stupid thing. Aaaaaaand I ended up recording it.

And here it is! The cool thing about Box.net is you can either download it or play it right in the browser! (You can also get the file here.)

Facts About Goldfinger

I recently purchased the James Bond film "Goldfinger". That got me to thinking about the character who has lent his name to the title of the movie, namely one Auric Goldfinger (pictured here). I thought it might be nice to make a concise list of Mr. Goldfinger's distinguishing characteristics, as spelled out in the film's theme song.

KNOWN FACTS ABOUT AURIC GOLDFINGER:

• He's "The Man"
• Possesses "The Midas Touch"
• Also possesses "A Spider's Touch"
• Has a cold finger
• Possesses "Web of Sin"
• Can speak "Golden Words"
  
• Known to utter lies
• Can deliver "Kiss of Death"
• Has heart of gold
• Heart is also cold
• Loves only gold
• Only gold
• No, seriously, he loves gold

CageMatch 11-8-07

I haven't worked this hard on a video since Night of the Living Improv. Check out the Espionage A Trois video here, and then come back for discussion.

Back? Excellent. So this took a lot of preparation. Once I learned of the supacool name of the team for this week (which happened Oct 22) I started planning. I knew I wanted to do the James Bond "travelling circles"/gunbarrel beginning, but using all three group members. So we set up a pretape session to get that footage. I went out and bought a stack of guns for them to use. The one problem with the shoot, which I didn't consider, is that the white backdrop doesn't go to the floor, so I couldn't show them full-body, like in the real Bond footage. Ah well.

So I actually wrote out a full textual storyboard for this video (which I usually don't do) due to its complexity. I loved the pan up the shot of Panthro, making them look menacing. And the fade-up of the three champion pins, followed by the fade-up of the three silhouettes worked perfectly. The growing effect of the silhouettes to fill the screen with black worked beautifully as well.

I studied all the Bond movie gunbarrel sequences to try and make mine fairly accurate. The travelling circles worked well; those are just internal shape generators in Final Cut, keyframed. I went out and bought a copy of Diamonds Are Forever, and captured and altered the gunbarrel with VLC and ImageWell. Then I worked on the blood sequence, to make sure that would be ready. I pulled the sequence from The Spy Who Loved Me into Flash and rotoscoped the blood frame by frame with the paintbrush. I tested it as a multiply overlay in Final Cut, and it worked great. I was saving the walkons for last.

Next on the list of things to do was to select the music. I have far too huge a library of spy music, but went through all the appropriate stuff, agonized over it, and decided on a track called "Destroy Silicon Valley" from View To A Kill for the moody opening, then the gunbarrel music from Thunderball, and the Bond theme from Dr. No. (I also used a version of the Bond theme as interpreted by wacko jazz saxman John Zorn for Espionage A Trois' entrance at the show.) I recorded the voiceover, spent a heck of a time getting the gunbarrel music to repeat three times, and exported it to disc.

Then I had to tackle the logo. We had taken the shots at Katie's house the same day we did the walking sequence video. I took a bunch of shots, and wouldn't ya know it, had to use three different ones to get the look I wanted, as no one picture contained good looks from all three folks. That was a bitch, balancing out the different lighting and gamma to get everything looking like one shot. Lots of masking on the bedspread. I added in the headboard from some puffy headboard company's website, and overlaid it with a brown tint to make it look like the fancy sort of bed James Bond would make sweet love in. The wall is a texture from a clipart package we have at work. The cigarette in Katie's hand was just a rolled-up piece of paper. I added the smoke in and played with it until it looked accurate. Kit kindly provided the martini glass, and Colette provided the cock-shaped toothpick. I just loved the expressions on everybody's face, especially Katie looking so secretive and sly and seductive. You can see a better view of the E.A.T. identity screen here.

The biggest battle was the gunbarrel sequence itself. I wrestled for hours trying to get the circular travel mattes and the gunbarrel pics and the walking pretapes all lined up. Not much to say about it really, except that it took about six hours to do. I ended up exporting Kit's bit to an image sequence and going through it frame-by frame, hand-editing out the background, and then pulling it back into Final Cut to make into basically what amounted to animation. I really wanted to have a circle follow Kit as well, but my brain was dead at that point, and I just couldn't figure out how to get it to overlay the background gunbarrels while still letting Katie and Tommy shine through. (I finally figured it out as I was dropping off to sleep, but by then it was too late.) I overlayed the blood rotoscoping, had a lot of fun doing the circle animation and identity reveal, and thought that turned out quite nice, very evocative of the classic Bond look. The lettering for the identity screen was done in LiveType and imported into Final Cut. I tacked on the end sequence, and Bob's your uncle.

Everybody seemed to dig it, and the Espionage folks were most appreciative. That felt nice.

Thanks for dropping by. We'll be back with more video nuttiness after Thanksgiving.


Oh, and the opening sound? Add a comment to this post if you figure out the dual meaning.

Give 'Em Hell, Harry

Harry Truman tells us what we're NOT going to do about communism. The past echoes to us here in the present. Makes you think.

See the video here.

CageMatch 10-25-07

Another CageMatch, another dollar. Not my dollar, but a dollar nonetheless! Here's the video; watch it, and then come back for info.

Okay, so I went with a Halloween theme, since this will be the closest show we do to the holiday without going over. (Please have your pet spayed or neutered.) Most of it is stock footage from the Animation Factory, but I thought I used it fairly cleverly. I composited the first bit out of a still from AF, the DSI logo, and an animation from AF. The funny thing is, the animation had a moon in it, and I needed to line it up in the sky with the DSI logo. But that made the animation off-center, so if you watch it closely, the bats actually fly off the right side and disappear behind an invisible curtain. I didn't think it was too obvious, so I left it in.

The second song is one of my favourite Kiss numbers, "I Love It Loud". I extended the first drum bit so I could talk over it, then timed the speech so it went right into the lyrics. I thought it was amusing that I say "It's Halloween, and the possibilities are *frightening*" and then Gene Simmons starts off the song with "Stand up, you don't have to be *afraid*". It all makes sense in subtle ways.

The Gladiator identity is just a screen from a video game, together with a lightning background I dropped in, and a text logo I made with some pattern overlays and a distortion filter. You can see it better here.

How cool does PT look as The Emperor?

Can you identify the beginning bit and the link therein?

Shots from the show itself are here.

The Remains Of Vaudeville

I've been a fan of oldtime radio for a while now, listening to tapes of Jack Benny and Burns and Allen and whatnot since college. I've also read a lot of their biographies, and am currently making my way through the tales of Fred Allen. Allen has a lot of great stories about his vaudeville days, and it's interesting to think about a time in history when a person or group with a good eight-minute act could make a living for the rest of their life touring the various vaudeville circuits around the country. Of course, when radio came along, your fine polished act would be eaten up in a quick eight minutes, and then they'd say "what else ya got?"

Thanks to the existence of YouTube, we can peek into a little of what vaudeville was like and get aat least a taste of the unique vanished talent of that age. The picture accompanying this post is Mr. Wilbur Hall, who I had never heard of before today. He's performing a novelty violin solo act that is just amazing. You just don't see people doing stuff like this today. (And yes, he really is playing the violin here.)

I discovered that video after watching an incredible performance by Spike Jones and His City Slickers of a piece called "I Like To Sock Myself In The Face", but oddly enough, after being online for a year and viewed by over 45,000 folks, the uploader took it down sometime today. Anyway, here's another look at the weirdness and talent that is Spike Jones. Oh, and if you've never seen their classic short film for the post-prohibition song "Cocktails For Two", well check it out.

Some of y'all know I'm a huge fan of Cab Calloway. Through Cab, I discovered the amazing talent of The Nicholas Brothers, two of the best tapdancers that ever lived. Check out Cab and Fayard and Harold in this clip from Stormy Weather.

W.C. Fields got his start as a juggler, and here is his performing some of his old juggling act within the context of a larger movie. An amazing juggler who everybody knows as a movie comedian.

I was really hoping to find some footage from the movie "College Humor", which had some great vaudeville acts sandwiched in between scenes, but to no avail. Go out and rent it.

CageMatch 10-12-07

Had another CageMatch last night. Crappy attendance (like about eight people. It's hard to get fired up in front of eight people.) The video was well-received though, so I was pleased with that. This was a good one actually. Watch it here first, and then come back and read the spoilers and we'll discuss in the next paragraph.

This is the next paragraph. Have you watched the video already? Good. Can you believe that Thundercats footage? That really made the video; it was a lucky discovery. I dug around on YouTube for some Panthro footage, and found that clip and knew it would be the centerpiece of the video. What Panthro is actually saying is "You're looking at the champion scrounger," but he blends the beginning of "scrounger" in with the end of "champion", so it's pretty much tailor-made for a CageMatch video. You just edit it after he finishes the "s", and you've got him saying "you're looking at the champions." Fabulous. (You can see the original video here, at around 1:10.)

The "tiara crowning picture" is an amalgam. We didn't actually crown them at the same moment.

Joe was confused about the picture of them in suits. Y'see, Kyle had his CageMatch Champion pin in his lapel. Joe chided him at the time, saying "you don't wear buttons in a suit". So he was surprised to see himself wearing a button in his suit. (I, of course, photoshopped it in there.)

I was quite happy with the "floor is lava" effect at the end. It amused me.

We liked the video so much, we stayed after the show as they were putting up chairs and watched it again. That made me feel real good, to have people appreciate it like that.

Oh, and this is my 600th post on The Transmutation Effect. Let the confetti fall.

The Sound Of Violence

My birthday is coming up in two weeks. If anybody wants to get me something, this is a good option.

I'm not the world's biggest football fan (I like it, but I don't go out of my way to watch it) but the NFL Films music is just incredible. I used selections from this album to make all the DUAL DUEL videos this past month. It's just the perfect music to use for upbeat, driving conflict-oriented videos. Some of it is dynamic, some is cheesy, some is amusingly rooted in the 1970s, some is timeless. I love it all.

CageMatch report

Had another CageMatch this weekend. Here's the video and here's the pics.

It's hard to animate in Final Cut.

DUAL DUEL Night Three

Had the finals of DUAL DUEL last night. I sucked, but fortunately Remi picked up my slack and kept the show going, and Tommy Dynamite hit all his cues solid and went to bat when I screwed up the timing. They rocked.

I was out of sorts for some reason. Definitely not my best night. I don't think the audience noticed much (they're there to see the performers anyway, so I guess it doesn't really matter). All the teams put on a great show, and Panthro won the Grand Championship, due in part to their hilarious costume changes. Joe Jones ended up in a skintight kid's Superman outfit, and Kyle stripped down to his pants (I think Erik Martin convinced Zach that Kyle was completely naked.)

Video is here, screens are here.

DUAL DUEL Night Two

Another night of DUAL DUEL has passed. Another six teams have competed, and now we have the final four set for next Thursday's tournament. Whew! This multi-team every-week schedule is wearin' me out!

The show went even better than last week. A number of teams upped the ante and did some wild prepared stuff to make their shows special. Panthro opened up their set wearing hoodies and looking thuggish, then took those off to reveal choir robes and did a preaching segment, then took those off and had ties on underneath to do the rest of their show. Awesome. Exactly the sort of wackiness I love seeing in CageMatch. Then Crush really costumed up for their bit, with amazing makeup and outfits, as well as a hilarious way of editing their scenes that you just had to see. And Banana Breakup rocked the house with their frenetic high-above-the-stage action. (Panthro and B.B. ended up winning the evening.)

All in all, a fun night, and if you can, you should really come out next Thursday at 9:00 for the finals. It's going to be awesome, with great teams and as much ridiculous production value as I can cram into it.

Here's this week's video. (BTW, I defy anybody who reads this blog to figure out the meaning of the initial mystery sound this week.)
Here's the screens for the six teams. Vestigial Brain's art is courtesy of the one and only Remi "Artist To The Stars" Treuer (not to be confused with Troy Sterling, evil billionaire.)

Kinda Patton II: Werewolves and Lollipops

Project X revealed!

A few months ago, Patton Oswalt sent me an advance copy of his new album, Werewolves and Lollipops. Remember the crazy thing I did last Christmas for my buddy Jason? As you may recall, Patton himself really dug it, and even included it prominently on his website. Well, when he sent me the cd, he asked me to do the project again, and since last week was Jason's birthday, I spent the last two months or so assembling all the stuff mentioned on the album. So last Friday I hauled three huge boxes, three big bags, and a case of PBR over to Jason's and we assembled in his kitchen. We played the cd, and as Patton mentioned an item, I would haul it out and present it to Jason. It was a hilariously fun evening.

You can check it out here. Probably won't make too much sense if you haven't heard the album (which you should go out and buy, 'cause it's great). Go through it photo by photo to see the comments (or turn on comments in the slideshow).

I'd like to thank the following people for helping out on this immense project: Andy Neal at Chapel Hill Comics for donating the Hal Jordan figure; Nathan The Temp at work for giving me syringes and a beta blocker; my mom for making the grey drapes, giving me the wonderful fireflies, and going wayyyy above and beyond the call of duty for punching out most of the roses; Town Attorney Ralph Karpinos for the coat hanger used in the Dukes of Hazzard diorama (as well as the egg for the cupcakes, which I ended up not using when I ran out of time and just bought cupcakes); Arek Kempinski for donating the ancient cellphone; Carol Abernethy for going to CostCo for me; my buddy Ray Hunley for mailing me the Harlan Ellison; Johnny Fabulous for donating the HP Lovecraft; Town Manager Roger Stancil for going to Fayetteville to get me the Tony Roma stuff; Jeff Scronce for doing the incredibly artistic and fabulously repulsive Cirque du Soleil drawing; and to Katie Shutrump, Joe Stanton, Becky Whittemore, Jeremy Griffin, Callie Peck, Zannie Gunn, and Collette Henderson for posing for the cover of Rape Stove: The Stove That Rapes People. I couldn't have done it without you folks.

Hey, I'm Famous

Looks like the OMEGA documentary I participated in is finally becoming a reality. I'm actually even in the teaser video! More videos are here, and you can preorder the dvd set here. I haven't seen it yet (dammit, where are my free copies!?) but it looks to be pretty damn cool. I filmed all the intros for the various segments as Scott Sullivan, and then did a sitdown interview as Ted Hobgood, done in the center of the empty Southern Pines National Guard Armory, where OMEGA was born.

For those of you who don't know about OMEGA, it's the pro wrestling promotion that I used to work for as announcer, commentator, graphic designer, costumer, etc, etc. It was created by Matt Hardy and Tracy Caddell in the early 1990s as the East Coast Wrestling Federation, which then became the New Frontier Wrestling Alliance (a name I was proud to have come up with!) and finally OMEGA. This small wrestling group from rural North Carolina put on some of the best shows in the country, and our tapes were traded all over the world. People came all the way from New Jersey to see our shows. We produced more homegrown wrestling superstars to make the bigtime than any other independent wrestling organization in America. I never made it big, but I'd like to think I had a small part (albeit a very small part) in helping the guys realize their dream.

I'm really looking forward to checking this documentary out.

DUAL DUEL Night One

Yesterday was Night One of the DUAL DUEL, a little three-day two-person-team tournament I'm producing for DSI. It was an incredible show, and very personally satisfying. Everybody seemed to really appreciate what I did, and many folks came up to me afterwards and thanked me for the production. I tried my best to go around and thank everybody as well, as the groups all had really high energy and everybody seemed to be excited about participating. It was a good feeling.

But between that and Project X (more on that later) I'm exhausted, so that'll have to do for the description of the DUAL DUEL Night One.

Here's the video.
Here's the six new team identity screens.

Revisiting PTSIAM BTTF

So way back in February of this year, PT and I did a very special episode of PT Scarborough Is A Movie for the annual DSI Improv Festival. We produced a little surprise intro to the show, where we bluescreened PT into his favourite movie, Back To The Future. I just came across a few stills of that session, and thought some people might be amused or interested to see a glimpse of how we did it. It was pretty simple, actually; just required some pre-visualization. I had the whole thing in my head, and I just had to match it up in real life.

Here's the final product.
Here are the stills: one, two, threeeeeee!

Basically, I printed out a screen capture of the scene we wanted to drop PT into: the shot of the flaming tire tracks after the DeLorean has come back from its test mission. That let me approximate the right camera angle to shoot PT from. Then I went out to a couple of fabric stores to find a good shade of blue fabric. I cut it in half and sewed the two lengths together to make a big square, and we just went down to my recycling area and threw the fabric over the back of the enclosure, pushpinning it down where it was draping wrong.

Then I just had PT plop down on the fabric and say his lines. For the cigarette-lighting part, we first tried to actually light the cigarette on a Jesus candle, but ended up using the shot you see here, where he already had the ciggy lit and just mimed leaning over to light it. After it was all in the can, I took it all into Final Cut and got rid of the bluescreen via advanced technology and selected my takes. The scene we were supering PT onto is only about three or four seconds long, so I spent a little bit of time reversing and overlaying it over and over to get a usable length out of it. There's actually a license plate spinning around on the ground, but we planned the shot so that PT would be obscuring.

I think it turned out dandily.

We need to get PT back on stage again. I miss his performing genius.

DUAL DUEL is coming...

Next week, in fact. Check out the teaser here.

Hey, this might be a good time to test Blogger's new video uploading feature.

Cornering El Gigante

This past weekend, my ol' buddy Ray (famed for his appearances in two episodes of I'm Sorry, I'll Draw That Again) came down for a whirlwind visit. Ray is my oldest pal, and whenever we get together, we can just fall into our old ways and hang out and talk about the geekiest things possible and laugh until we cry and our faces turn red.

We could only hang out for a few hours, but in that brief time, Ray, his brother Dave, and The Great Keijiro (appearing without his trademark mask) all conquered the monstrous El Gigante burrito at Bandido's. Then, wearing their championship t-shirts, they wandered over to the DSI Comedy Theater, where I secretly arranged to have Ray shanghaied and pushed onto stage, where he performed some comedy improv in the game "Four Corners" during ComedySportz. Check out the adventures de Ray here.

Besobaru

Japan rules. Even their baseball is better than America's.

The Dark Dream

So I had this weird dream last night. It was about a movie that starred The Simpsons and Calvin and Hobbes, but it was a dark horror movie in the Cthulhu vein. It took place in a small New England town, and the town square (a sort of grassy open meeting place that would hold flea markets on the weekend) was covered overnight with weird thrown-together shacks that looked like the folk art of the damned. One had little cages that were full of small toys, one of which had hundreds of little rubber gorillas in it. People disappeared, there were rumours of mysterious killings and women giving birth to hideous creatures, but it was discovered that a small girl held the key to the mystery. That girl turned out to be Maggie Simpson. Occasionally, Calvin would chime in with some learned witticism as the lynch mob trudged through the snow. One of the most frightening moments in the movie came after the wedding scene, when a woman married the priest of He Who Must Not Be Named, in an attempt to save herself. But after a Christian church service that attempted to exorcise the spirits of evil, the bride appeared at the back of the church hall, only she was now just a bridal gown wrapped around a sheaf of cornstalks. Ooooo...

Somewhere in there I was going back to college, living in a towering dorm with an absent roommate, really hungry and sleepy, and my mom cleaned up my room.

This is what happens when I eat too much pizza after being in the sun too long.

How I Spent My Saturday

This weekend I did a lot of stuff, and had my camera. Here's how I spent my Saturday.

Went to Mom's house in Burlington to celebrate her birthday. Fixed her computer and gave her cool presents, like a Lego backpack and the pictured fan that spells words as it spins. We also went out to an antique mall and Big Lots and all that sort of stuff, but we had to stop at a local veterinary hospital that had hilarious huge inflatables of a tick and a mosquito. It was particularly ironic that these were lit up by floodlights which were covered by dead bugs.

We ate at the Blue Ribbon Diner, which was pretty amazing. I'll definitely be returning. Lots of good food choices. Apparently, each month they have a different burger, and this month featured this amazingly titled item. Believe it or not, I decided I had to get something else, that being the "Knife 'n' Fork Chuck Burger". Not as cool a name, but check out that description! "Black Angus Chuck Burger on 'Texas Toast' topped with cheese, bacon crumbles, a little brown gravy and an onion ring on top. Served open-face with 'gravy fries'" Well, I was sold. That whole description sounds like a Patton Oswalt routine. Had to do it. Here's what the masterpiece looked like.

Back to Carrboro to do some shows at the DSI Comedy Theater, saw a really great Cajones set and a decent episode of Match Game. Then off to Casa Ward to play Scattergories. Fiz SitKimmons and I were a team, and we smoked the fuck out of everybody. Mainly because in the final round, I volunteered Hollywood Hulk Hogan and Hunter Hearst Helmsley. It was fun to be around everybody, especially Eitan, who made it into just about every picture. Finally met the lovely Kathleen, who did not sing "Take Me Home Again", but was fun to be around. Katie was giggly, Joe was amusingly caustic, and Tommy tragically died and was marked by his assailant.

Oh, and Jeremy got his revenge on me by using my camera to take a picture of his man-staff.

Sunday had no pictures, but Brantley and I brunched, I shopped, I napped, and I lazed.

Flea Market Wackiness

So this weekend I went out to do some flea marketing with my friend Jess, and we came across some nutty things, which I thought I'd share with you courtesy of the fine folks at Flickr.

Actually, it all starts the day before when I saw a cool crack in the sidewalk that looked like a directional arrow, pointing straight down the street.

Okay, onto the fair. We got there and discovered that the Dorton Arena was hosting some sort of Christian inflatable party activity demonstration fair. Oh YES! Music was provided by, of course, Heaven. The whole arena was full of these giant bouncy amusement thingamajigs. Jess and I were quite amused by the inflatable church, thinking that there should've been a sign that read "If the chapel's a-rockin', don't bother knockin'." For some reason, I just loved the roller coaster with the stiff-backed inflatable people jammed into their ascending car. The best one, though, was the huge Steroid Man that invited you to jump up and down under his crotch.

Elsewhere at the fair, we had the loneliest employee in the park, trapped in her giant orange pac-man. I waan't quite hungry enough to have a giant neon fried Twinkie. I think the most artistic shot of the day came from some lovely painted mermaids. My favourite product was the extremely creepy chimp-dominated Noah's Ark, accompanied by the pitiful Cleopatra.

But the photo of the day has to go to something Jess pointed out at a booth selling crappy purses. Yes, please.

CageMatch 8-9-07

We had another CageMatch last night. Not much to say about the production side. I had a devil of a time coming up with a screen for the challengers, 1-2-3 Ingestion. Lordy, these names. The video was a simple affair, focusing on Elaine's stupendous achievement of five CageMatch wins. I amused myself by using incidental music from "Battle Of The Planets" and a remix of Europe's "Final Countdown". I also chose an amusing entrance theme for 1-2-3 Ingestion, "Eat The Rich" by Aerosmith.

The identity screen is here, the video is here.

We also premiered the new CageMatch Loser Pin last night, via a special appearance from PT Scarborough as famed Smitty's Bar postal deliveryman Shoney "Postie" Taylor. PT was hilarious, as usual, and it seemed like people were really happy to see him on stage again, so that was cool. Elaine gave a boffo show and won their sixth title, a measure equaled only by the now-legendary Siegel-Prov.

After the show, a bunch of us moved over to Speakeasy and celebrated Joe Stanton's birthday. Much fun was had by all, Zannie and Becky danced to the live tunes of Big Fat Gap, and I kicked Zach Ward in the balls. Zach and I also made plans for the upcoming Dual Duel tournament in September, which should rock (if people actually form two-man teams and submit them...). I love tournaments. Brackets rule.

Yes, I Bought An iPhone

Well, I was planning to wait until the price dropped and they worked the kinks out, but after an upsetting trip to the dentist, I decided I deserved a present, and bought myself an iPhone. Yeah, it was expensive (I got the 8G model); yeah, the per-month charge is expensive (another $20 on top of the $40 I'm already spending); yeah, AT&T sucks (but I was always happy with Cingular, and couldn't find a provider in town who I liked more); BUT I bought one anyway.

I like it. Lots. My number one love is that it just WORKS. I've had smartphones before (a Treo and a Kyocera Palm), but they were clunky, the applications didn't work consistently, and the interface was atrocious. The iPhone is very smartly designed, and works like you expect things to work. The touchscreen is phenomenal. The apps are quick, useful, and fun to work with. The interface helps you do what you want to do instead of getting in the way of what you want to do. And my biggest bane from my old phones is nowhere to be seen, as the iPhone syncs beautifully with my computer, sharing calendars, contacts, pictures, mp3s, movies, and just about everything.

The camera is pretty damn phenomenal for a phonecam, taking clear 1200x900 pictures (that get reduced to 640x480 when emailing the pictures from the phone; the full rez versions get synced to iPhoto when you dock the iPhone). I didn't like the software-based keyboard at first, but I'm quickly getting used to it, and it's certainly the best on-screen keyboard I've ever used. The Google Maps interface rocks, and was immensely helpful while wandering through NYC this past weekend. I also had the Manhattan subway system map stored in my Photos application if I ever needed that. There's a dedicated YouTube program which can be amusing, although there's a lot of YouTube videos that haven't been formatted for the iPhone yet. Hell, I even check on my one share of WWE stock every once in a while with the Stock app.

What it doesn't do: to my knowledge, the Notes program doesn't sync to anything openable on the host computer, which is pretty surprising. The camera is stills-only, so you can't take video (which is also pretty surprising, since you have tons of onboard storage space). There's a big omission in that there's no To-Do list. And currently, the iPhone doesn't do Flash, so you can't watch cool animations or see some features of websites. (This is why not all of YouTube is accessable yet.) All of these can be easily fixed with a firmware upgrade, and I'd be willing to bet they will be.

One of the most glaring omissions, for me anyway, is that this thing is an iPod AND a phone and YET, you can't use your own mp3s as ringtones. This smacks of some stupidass agreement that Apple made with recording companies or AT&T or something, and it pisses me off. There's a third party app that fixes this error, but I haven't tried it yet for fear of fucking up my phone. The onboard ringtones are great, and there's enough other toys to play with in the iPhone, but for an iPod phone to not let you use custom mp3s as ringtones is outrageous.

But overall, is it worth it? Hellz yeah. I wanted a phone that worked and worked well, that would sync cleanly and work smoothly on a day to day basis. I didn't need the iPod functionality--I have an iPod for that! But now that I have the iPhone, I notice I am just listening to music or watching videos when I might not otherwise do so. The speakers in the iPhone are pretty decent, and you can just set the thing down and listen without the need for earphones. The video screen is huge and crazy sharp. People are really impressed when I show off the ripped dvd of DON that I have on there. It's a lot smaller than the Treo I used to use, and unlike the Treo, it doesn't crash or run out of juice randomly. The iPhone actually fits invisibly into my daily life, as a good tool should.

I heart my iPhone.

What Not To Do At A Wrestling Event

So in the latest issue of The Wrestling Observer Newsletter, they're talking about a lucha show in Los Angeles that drew a huge crowd. This part amused me:

Probably the funniest story of the night is one that nobody saw. Someone tried to mug Kayam and Enigma de Oro after the show in the parking lot with a gun long after almost everyone had left the area. You have to understand the two were wearing their masks and in nice suits, so the scene had to be something right out of a Santo movie. Both guys simultaneously attacked the gunman and tackled him to the concrete, and held him down until security came.

Can you picture that? Hilarious.

NYC Trip 2007

So last Friday, me and PT Scarborough Is A Tourist went to New York City to visit our ol' buddy Ethan Kaye Dot Net. Herein lies our tale. All my photos can be found in a set here, or you can click the individual photo links as they appear in the report.

We started early on Friday the 27th. Very early. PT showed up at my house at 3:15 am. (I was amazed he made it on time--fifteen minutes early, even!) PT had been up all night, and would go on to stay up for about 42 hours. Anyway, we had to be at the airport at 4:00, so off we went. When we went through security at the RDU airport, we emptied our pockets, took of our shoes, dumped our carryons onto the belt, etc. I get through first, and as I'm filling up my pockets, I notice like three of the security people reaching for aerosol cans and spraying them about. What is this, I think, some sort of bomb-detecting spray? Then I notice they're cans of Lysol at about the same time I hear them say "something is smelling up the place bad!" As a joke, I point at PT and say it was him. Obvious thing to do at the moment, right? Well, it was him. He had to take his shoes off and send them through the xray, and apparently he's been wearing those same shoes since spring with *no socks*. Oh god...the smell just wafted through the whole security checkpoint. It was like the stench of a dead hobo. I can't describe it. I started laughing like an idiot, but it was foul. When we got into the city, Ethan and I made PT go to a shoe store and buy new shoes, then walk out to Union Square park and change shoes and socks out in the open (we could still smell them in the open air and moved away a bit). We then told him to just throw his old shoes in the garbage; they weren't coming back to the apartment.

So we get to our plane, and it was TINY. Only 13 rows, two seats on one side and one on the other. We were in the last row. PT sat by the window, which was odd, since he's aerophobic. Still, he enjoyed the view. We just zipped up to NYC in no time, then got a very nice cab with a very nice driver that dropped us off directly in front of Ethan's apartment. Ethan's apartment, by the way, was nice. Good location, with a 24 hour bodega two doors down, a pizza place on the other side, great restaurant next door (named "Toast"), and a train stop on the corner. Wow. And inside it was spacious and clean and cool and looked basically just like his Chapel Hill apartment.

Our first stop was a restaurant called, oddly enough, Jackson Hole. As we were making our way there, Ethan went on and on about how big their burgers were, yadda yadda yadda, whatever Ethan. Well, he was right. These things were huge. Hopefully, PT will upload the burger pix he took while we were there, and I'll include a link in an addendum. They claimed these things were seven ounce burgers, but there's no way. Like ten ounces, maybe. And delicious. Ethan urged me to try a bialy, which was good, but I was really craving a real New York bagel. (By the way, the spellcheck didn't like the way I first spelled "biali", and suggested "labial" as an alternative.)

We then jumped back on the subway and started our tour through the city, basically shopping like madmen. Our first task was the aforementioned replacement of PT's shoes. I wish I had taken a picture of him changing shoes, but there were unsavory characters about, and I didn't want to flash the iPhone. I lose track of what we did when, but I think we went to The Strand at this point, and to a comic book shop or two. We stopped by Virgin Records, and I bought Patton Oswalt's new album (which you should all buy) and some stuff for my mom. In the evening, Ethan tried to take us to a barbecue restaurant. It smelled great, but we have barbecue in North Carolina, and I wanted New York food. So fortunately, they were full up and we just had a pizza from the place near Ethan's. It was delicious.

The next morning, Ethan had a show at UCB at 7:30 am, but he left at 3:30 am to watch some shows and warm up. We didn't have a key to the apartment, so PT and I were locked in jail until Ethan returned around 10:30 or so. After a while, we realized that one of us could leave, and the other could buzz him back in. So PT Scarborough Is A Smoker was chosen to make the bagel run, and upon his return I finally had the delicious New York bagel I had been craving. Ethan came back with his parents, and we had a nice visit with Annie and Danny before seeing them off. We then headed for The Village for some GREAT fun. We hit MORE comic book stores, including my favourite, the two-story Midtown Comics, where I bought a great Don Bluth animation book. Went to my new favourite store in the world, Toy Tokyo, which is just PACKED with cool Japanese toys. I could've spent hours and many hundreds of dollars in there. I bought several blindbox toys which were pretty cool. Ethan then took us to an INCREDIBLE vintage toy store a few doors down which had all sorts of crazy shit on shelves and in cases and hanging from the ceiling. Another place where you could spend a bundle, but I was overjoyed to find a Mego-style Mils Mascaras figure for only $10. Sweet.

Lunch on this day was one of the huge highlights of the street. I asked my native New Yorker friend Carlo where I should go in NYC, and the first thing he said was "Dumpling Man". One look at the website and their cool logo made me want to go, but once I saw the menu page, I was hooked. You order your dumplings, and women behind the counter make them, completely by hand, fresh for you. I got some of everything, and scarfed it down. Cheap, fresh, delicious, my kind of place. Didn't hurt that there was a hot tattooed chick behind the register who I got to smile for me. PT and Ethan seemed to dig it too. Even Evil Ethan liked it.

We found a cool niche dvd store where I found the copy of H.O.T.S. I had been looking for for years, a memory from the early days of Skinemax. We also hit a really nice dirty book store with a grand selection of dvd titles, including some really kinky themes I hadn't seen on dvd before. Dinner was at the restaurant right next to Ethan's apartment, a place called "Toast". It was pretty good, and we all flirted with the waitress. Ethan will be making his move soon.

The next morning was the start of our hellish trip home. We got up at 7:00 am for an 11:00 am flight. Waiting for the 1 train took about a half hour of standing in the early morning heat. Then there was construction on the line, so the train was very slow. When we reached Penn Station, we had to book it to make it to our connection to NJ Transit to take the train into Newark. That was a nice ride, but boy is New Jersey a trashhole. And PT wasn't looking too good this early in the morning. I thought the train took us to the airport, but it turns out we needed to take ANOTHER train to the airport proper. The airport area looked like a war zone or somewhere Swamp Thing might live. Take my advice and avoid Newark. The check-in person was actually really nice, but the security sucked. We waited an hour to get through the security checkpoint, and they were rude and ridiculous. I may never fly again, due to the stupid security checks.

So then we got into our gate area, and there was NOTHING back there to do. There was a sandwich place, a "Dick Clark's American Bandstand Bar", and a coffee stand. No bookstore, no newsstand, no shop of any kind. What a hole. We waited an hour for our plane; turned out it was the same tiny one we flew up on. We even had the exact same seats, in the last row, next to the huge loud engine. So we wait a bit before taxiing out to the runway, wait in line for a while, then get out of line to make room for other people. Apparently, there was some weather between Newark and Raleigh that was a problem. So after a looooong time of sitting there, the captain finally gets on the blower and informs us that we've been given a new flight plan, but don't have enough fuel, so we have to go back to the terminal and load up again. All of this, and the row in front of us was two parents and their baby and toddler. Devils. Then back in line, wait for a while, and finally take off. We were supposed to leave at 11:00. We left at 2:00. That's THREE HOURS on the runway. Fuck. And PT was freaking out, because a) he's plane-o-phobic and b) it had been hours since he had a cigarette.

So from then on, it was no big deal. At least the view was pretty. We flew home, got out of the airport, we got into PT's car, and journeyed back home. All in all, a fine trip. Good to see Ethan Kaye Dot Net again, nice to roam about NYC, and fine food and shopping. We agreed it was a good vacation, but PT summed up the airline experience nicely with this.

CageMatch 7-26-07

So we had CageMatch last week. Normally, this report would've been up the next day, but six hours after CageMatch ended, I was on my way to New York City. (Post about that coming soon.)

The video came out nicely. It's here. The storyline was that a great team had returned, but they were going up against a team who were trying to reach the lofty goal of becoming five-time champions. I separated out the graphics for the Caligula logo so I could fade those in bit by bit for dramatic effect. Remi drew a cool alternate logo for Caligula that I really loved, so I used it in front of a creepy optical illusion video I nipped from YouTube. I bought the trophy picture off of iStockPhoto, and was rather happy with the way I lettered it. The music at the end is Drain Sth, whose lyrics I love so much, I extended the ending longer than I normally would.

Revealing Visual Effects

This should be of some interest to readers of this blog who are interested in video editing and visual effects. Nastuh Abootalebi is an effects artist who has worked on such films as Run Lola Run, and this site is his online portfolio.

What's really cool about the videos he includes here is that if you click on them, you'll be presented with a side-by-side comparison, with the original shot on the left, and then his processed final shot on the right. It's quite illuminating to see just how some of these shots were staged and changed. I found it rather inspiring.

Tomb Raider Animated

I've always loved Tomb Raider. My type of game; lots of exploring, lots of puzzles, a little fighting that's not too difficult, all in all a nice mix. Now Turner Broadcasting has commissioned a series of animated shorts called "Re/Visited", where different people interpret the whole Lara Croft mythos. The first one is masterminded by Peter Cheung, the guy behind the groundbreaking Aeon Flux series. Pretty cool, eh? One feature I really love is how the opening for the show displays the pencil tests and animatics for the animation; very inspiring.

The videos are premiered on the Gametap site, but you can also view them on YouTube (and save them if you use something like the fabulous Video Downloader for Firefox. Then use iSquint, and you can watch them on your iPod or iPhone.)

CageMatch 7-13-07

Time passes, and we have another episode of CageMatch. This week, we didn't have a challenger signed up until late Sunday, when Kit allied himself with Marc Kennedy and somehow came up with the name "WhatCHU Got To Say About That?". Actually, their name was "WhatCHU Got To Say About It?" but I screwed up while making the logo, and it was too late to fix it.

Anyway, let's just say that the name didn't inspire any immediate themes in my mind as regards the promo video. I mean, what sort of dramatic situation can you build out of a generic question? So I mentioned this to Kit, and he came up with a number of possible suggestions. I didn't act on any individual one, but seeing them en masse did give me the idea for a video theme: that I couldn't make up my mind what the theme was.

So the first two things that popped into mind was the song "Fire" by Ohio Players, making Kit and Marc into firemen, and then "Cold As Ice" by Foreigner and making them into hockey players. But once I found the Foreigner cd, I cracked up at the idea of making it an all-Foreigner video.

The other songs are related to the team name: we start off with "Say, Say, Say" by Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney, and end with "Walk Idiot Walk" by The Hives, which starts off with a nice scream and the appropriate lyrics " Well, Is it true what they say about it/You wanna do what I do and I doubt it."

We only had like four people in the audience last night, so the video wasn't exactly received with a huge ovation, but that's life. Also, Tommy Dynamite was away in Chicago, and Kit was supposed to be doing tech but obviously couldn't, so I ended up teching the show. Remi did a great job hosting CageMatch all by his lonesome, starting off with a hilarious dance sequence to his own intro video. His "evil billionaire" thing came off really well this week, and I really liked the way he got over the gambling part of the character, betting on the teams and whatnot.

Ah, almost forgot the links. Here's the video, and here's the identity screen.