Shows I Watch That You Don't Watch #1

Welcome to the first in a series of posts designed to introduce you to tv shows that I enjoy, but which you may or may not be familiar with. I do this with the hope of introducing folks to some good entertainment that they may not otherwise trip over.

Y'see, I haven't had cable or satellite or anything else for a decade now. Odd, considering I have a degree in popular culture, but I found it a waste of my money. When I visit friends' houses and flip through their channels, I almost never find anything I would sit down and watch. And yet, just having all those channels was like heroin. In the dying days of my cable subscription, I would find myself just zoned out in front of the tv after work, spending hour after hour blindly flipping through the channels. So I quit cold turkey, and rarely regret the choice.

Instead, I buy dvd collections of old tv shows, watch stuff friends download for me on Torrent or that I get off Usenet, and I watch a lot of stuff on YouTube.

Today, we're looking at something I discovered on YouTube, via a connection with another favourite show of mine, QI. Two of the regulars on that latter show (Phill Jupitus and Bill Bailey) are the semipermanent team captains on a BBC quiz programme entitled Never Mind The Buzzcocks. Ostensibly, it's a battle of music trivia, as two teams of celebrities answer questions about bands and the music scene. The entertainment value, however, comes from the fact that nobody really takes it that seriously (well, almost nobody) and there's just a lot of sniping about. The guests are mostly C-list celebrities or big pop stars that have made tabloid headlines lately. The host, Simon Amstell, is hilarious, and a complete prick. He never hesitates to bring up a celebrities problems or shortcomings, and it's hilarious to see how people will take his needling, whether they'll get pissed off or just take it in stride. Jupitus and Bailey are both great comedians and think fast on their feet.

I have all of last season (thank to my buddy Jackson) and all of this season (via both EasyNews and YouTube. A good place to start is with the November 23, 2006 episode, which has some great guests and hilarious moments. The highlight is Doctor Who actor John Barrowman, who is ridiculously handsome, and takes barbs from Simon Amstell all through the show, taking it all quite well and playing along to great effect. The episode is available in three parts on YouTube. A list of guests appearing on the show throughout its run is available on EpGuides.com. Oh, how I'd love to get my hands on some pre-2006 shows!

So if you like bad British pop music, making fun of C-list celebrities, and sarcastic insults, check out Never Mind The Buzzcocks.

ISIDTA 16 : Alien Pets Dog final

ISIDTA 16 : Alien Pets Dog final
Originally uploaded by TedHobgood.

So this week I was completely clueless about what I was going to do for ISIDTA. At lunchtime yesterday, I communicated my plight to Jackson who said, "draw an alien petting a dog too hard." Why? I don't know. But I did it.

View the cartoon full-size here.
Inks are here.
Kit's ISIDTA will be located here.
My previous drawings can always be found here.

Art Tips Roundup!

The picture is from Roy Lichtenstein's "Meat". Anyway, here's a list of a bunch of great sites I've found recently for art tips, tutorials, and inspiration.

Ten Things Every Beginning Artist Should Know from Empty Easel

101 Projects For Artists And Illustrators from Dani Draws (GREAT jumping-off points and idea motivators!)

What Tools People Use from Comic Tools (ongoing blog)
Where They Use 'Em from On My Desk (ongoing blog)

The International Animated Film Society (just an incredible warehouse of information, including scanned instruction books from the glory age of animation)

How A Mad Artist Inks from Tom Richmond (EXCELLENT two-part inking tutorial. Opened my eyes.)

How Copper Is Made from Kazu Kibuishi. (I've blogged about this before in the tutorials tag, but it's so damn good, let's put it here too.)

Word Balloon Tips from Balloon Tales (they have lots of other good tips and tutorials as well.)

Misc Tutorial Sites:
Computer Arts UK (they have a good magazine too)
Graphics.Com (random, broad, nicely done)
GFXArtist (illustrator-y, painter-y, good basics)
Illustration Class (great tutes, great format)
The Photoshop Experiment (lots of good Photoshop tips as they pertain to drawing)
Itchy Animation (I want to try his Inking In Illustrator method)

One Turntable And No Microphone

Christian Marclay is an amazing sound artist. He toys and tinkers with turntables and records, and produces some amazing sounds. I particularly love the way he cuts up multiple albums and sticks them back together as vinyl collages that can actually be played, resulting in a wild look and some intriguing rhythms.

Check out a brief documentary of Marclay here.

PS: After you watch that, watch the new iPhone commercial. Notice anything similar?

PPS: Better version of the iPhone commercial (including an HD option) available now from Apple.

CageMatch 2/22/07

We had CageMatch last night, and it was a first for us: the challengers (and new champions!) were not DSI folk, but a Level 2 class from IO South. It was great to have outside folk competing, and the guys were as nice as can be. I look forward to working with them again on March 8.

The video was almost silent this week, as I haven't had a voice for over a week now, being sick since the Festival ended. In the end, the humidifier made all the difference, and a last-minute video was made. It was just a series of simple photos and fades, but it did the trick.

I was quite pleased with the identity screen for the IO team, Dead Man Pinata. Believe it or not, I couldn't find a picture of a skeleton pinata. Good lord, I figured there'd be loads of 'em for the Day Of The Dead celebrations, but no. So I drew this little skeleton, adapted from two different DOTD pictures I found (one for the skull and one for the body) and did a quick-and-dirty pattern fill of the white and black sections using paper strips from a Dora The Explorer pinata. (Can you imagine kids beating Dora to get the candy out of her? Weirded me out.) I tried to make it a *bit* 3D and pinata-y by dragging back a black fill of the silhouette and touching it up a bit. The font is from one of my favourite movies, Bloodsucking Freaks.

View the video here.
View the Dead Man Pinata screen here.

Be More Like Kong

Sometimes I wish I was more like Scott Jennings.

Why, you say, would that be? Why would you want to be like a man who, when many people think of him, the immediate word that springs to mind is "asshole"? Or maybe "scary". Or "intimidating".

Well, I'll tell ya why, son. Because Jennings knows who he is, knows where he stands, knows where he wants to go, and finds a way to get there. He isn't afraid to do what he wants to do or say what he wants to say. Jennings is a man of action, a man of adventure, a man of determination. He tries. He succeeds. He kisses girls.

I don't kiss girls. I mean, I have...and I'd like to again. I just don't. Because I'm not a man of action. I'm a man of inaction. I'm not outgoing. I'm not determined. I'm not brash or bold or brave. I generally accept whatever is going on. I try my best not to offend anybody. In fact, I go so far in my desire to not offend anybody, that I push down my own desires in favour of others.

So that's what I admire about Jennings. He dreams. He dares. He does.

I worry. I wring my hands. I wither away.

I think that's one of the main reasons I lost Leesa. She like a man of action. Most women do. I'm not much of a man of action. I love to dote on others, love to do things for people, love to keep people happy. Unfortunately, I don't do the same for myself. I think she liked a bit of assertion, a bit of manly stand-uppishness, a bit of "we are doing this because I say we are, so like it or lump it". I didn't do that, and when she said we should take a break, I said "okay" because I thought that was what she wanted, when really it was her way of challenging me to step up for myself and make her bow to my wishes.

So I should start thinking of myself more, be more assertive, and stand up for my own interests.

Easier said than done. I've known that for years. One begins to worry, really.

Anyway, all of this came to a head because somebody who used to work here at Town Hall wants me to come work for him in the private sector, managing the front desk and designing presentation books and designing computer data management systems. None of it thrilling work, but the pay would be good. So I met with the guy I know, and now he wants me to meet the guy who runs the business. And I'm terrified, because I'm not good at change, not good at thinking of my own future and my own well-being. It's no big deal; it's a coffee conversation about a job I don't really care about, and don't care if it goes either way. But it just struck me as symptomatic of what's wrong with me and why I haven't been happy for years now. Not since Leesa.

I wish I could be more like Jennings. I wish I could be sure of who I am and what I'm made of. I wish I could go out and get a career I enjoy. I wish I could kiss girls.

This is another one of those no-comment posts that are thankfully rare. I usually keep this crap to my silent self. A good place for it.

Hayashi Bomb

Insane.

Do You Like Grapefruit?

This makes me do the laughing.

Animated GIFs of phone conversations between P. Diddy and Bjork. It's the same kind of funny one gets from the hilarious Touchdown Turtle.

ISIDTA 15 : superheroes

ISIDTA 15 : superheroes
Originally uploaded by TedHobgood.

Ok, this week's drawing is a little cruder than I had intended it to be, because I somehow managed to slash open my finger on a tin of leftover chicken pot pie, and so my drawing ability has been dealt a bit of a blow. (It's the index finger on my right hand, a most important finger for many activities.)

Also, I've just noticed that this is the first post I've made to the blog since LAST week's ISIDTA! Well that's sad. Thing is, I've been miserably sick for a week, and haven't been much in the mood for posting or much of anything else. I've been in and out of work for the past week. Even more seriously, my voice is practically gone, so I'm not sure how I'm going to be able to get on stage for CageMatch this week. Erg.

So, on to the commentary. This idea just popped into my head while reading Dean Trippe's Butterfly. I pencilled the various elements in my sketchbook, as best I could with a bum finger. Then I scanned 'em into the computer, composed the panels and inked them with a Photoshop brush and the Wacom (since I could undo my many screwups). And voila.

View the cartoon full-size here.
Here's one that might fit better on the screen.
Kit's ISIDTA can be found here.
My previous drawings are here.

ISIDTA 14 : Green Onions

Green Onions
Originally uploaded by TedHobgood.

This week's ISIDTA was an experiment; Kit came over and we had the Kit Is Twenty-Seven Birthday Challenge, where we agreed to each draw a four-panel cartoon, handing off our sketchbooks after each panel so that each person alternates drawing a panel. We had a time limit of 10 minutes and 27 seconds per panel, which we quickly agreed to lengthen out to 15 minutes and 27 seconds. We got a random suggestion from a newspaper, which was "tests rule out all but green onions." Neither of us used onions.

When I went to scan this this morning, I had forgotten that my copy of Photoshop had gone belly-up, and I couldn't scan anything. (It's a completely legitimate copy; I have no idea what happened--the application icon turned to a document icon, and now it won't work. I'm pissed.) Anyway, that's why this looks so weird; it's just digital camera shots of my moleskine. (Well, it also looks weird because each panel was drawn in fifteen minutes by two crazed Challengers...)

Kit's entry into the Kit Is Twenty-Seven Birthday Challenge can be found here.
My previous ISIDTA entries are here.

Eh, It's Just Puppets...

My pal Nick Faber reads this blog, and he's also starting to get into stop-motion animation. I just tripped over this great resource, and instead of just emailing him, I figured I'd put it up here so that a) he could read it, b) I could remember where it was, and c) others with like mind might enjoy it. So anyway, Nick check this out.

Found via the fine folks at Ward-O-Matic.

Turn Out The Lights, The Party's Over

So the Seventh Annual Dirty South Improv Festival has come and gone. Whew! I'm not sure I've ever worked so hard in my life. I produced nine different videos for the Festival, ten if you count the huge revision I had to make for the Festival opener, and two of the videos didn't even get shown! I took Thursday and Friday off of work, and still almost didn't finish my stuff on time.

Everything I was involved with went well. Friday's ComedySportz show was okay. It didn't end well, and I felt forced into calling it a tie, which sucked. Oh, and in trying to install the Mr. Voice software on my laptop, the system crashed and corrupted the disk, and I had to wipe the drive clean and reinstall everything. That ate up a good five hours. (Wade, it wasn't the software's fault; my laptop was already acting wonky.) Got to see Fit SitzKimons on the way out; it was very cool to see him back at a DSI event, even if only as a spectator. Hopefully he'll be able to mend some fences and come back where he belongs, as one of the biggest talents and hardest workers in improv. In the meantime, we're getting together on Tuesday for a birthday celebration (his) and a fun ISIDTA experiment; so I'm looking forward to that.

After ComedySportz, I had a little break before CageMatch, and hung out with Jackson, which was cool. To tell the truth, I was really worried that the Cat's Cradle show would deplete my audience, but we held the start of the program for ten minutes, and ended up with a standing room only crowd of about a hundred odd people. So that rocked. The best part was the huge contingent of Siegel-Prov supporters that showed up in true wrestling fan style carrying posterboard signs supporting Dan and Dave. The videos went over quite well, and really seemed to charge up both the audience and the performers. The Impatient Theatre Company won the Triple Team Terror match, so I got to show my Frank Sinatra video, which the crowd seemed to like. The Siegel-Prov entrance was mindblowing. The crowd was ready to see them, and the video whipped them into a frenzy. Dan and Dave ended up winning, which was nice. I was happy that they finally got the Ten Grams Of Gold that didn't exist when they were champions before.

Afterwards, all the teams were really kind. They seemed excited that I had made each of them a dvd with all the videos on them, and they were very complimentary of the way I ran the show. I ended up hanging out with Chris Biddle of International Stinger the next night, and he told me how much fun he had doing CageMatch. Several people commented on the great interplay that Scott Sullivan and Biff Hobgood have on stage, which was gratifying since I'm never sure what the hell is happening when we're up there. All in all, I think I hit my goals on the DSIF7 CageMatch; I really wanted to show people from around the country how a CageMatch show can be done with style, with all the videos and characters and whatnot, and I think a lot of people will go back home with CageMatch as one of their big memories of the Festival. Thanks to Scott and Tommy for helping put out such a great product, thanks to HARSH, International Stinger, and The Impatient Theatre Company for putting on such great segments, and a special thanks to Siegel-Prov for always being so kind, generous, thankful, and damn funny. Todah rabah.


ComedySportz on Saturday was MUCH better than Friday. The crowd was bigger and had more energy, and it went off without a hitch. Zach was kind enough to bring my niece Amelia on stage for one of the games. My favourite part of ComedySportz was flirting (or trying to flirt, more likely) with the cute redhead sound-and-light tech, Holly. You can sorta see her off to the side in this picture. She was really cool, has mad theater tech skills, is amusingly sarcastic, and is mighty hot as well. I gave her my email addy. HAH! Like anything will become of that...

And then at 9:30 on Saturday, it was time for PT Scarborough Is A Movie. This was actually the show that I hyped up the most. We made 100 PTSIAM buttons to give out to all the performers, along with flyers in all their goodie bags, and I plugged the show during CageMatch. Well, word got around somehow, and the theater was sold out for PT's show, which was sweet. PT and I made a little surprise intro video for the show, featuring PT's favouritest movie of all time, Back To The Future. That went over well, but didn't get the huge pop I thought it would, probably because a lot of people didn't know it was PT. Eh, who cares. I made it for PT's amusement more than anything else, and he seemed to love it. It certainly got him jacked up for the show, because he KILLED. Bigtime great show, and I think he got an even better reaction than the all-star headline act. We did Bullitt, and PT worked wonders with it, making up phone sex chat callbacks, hesitant assassins, and one annoying fan. Definitely one of the top highlights of the Festival.

It was very cool to see Jackson come out for both CageMatch and PTSIAM, and Scotts came to see PT's show as well. Thanks for the support, guys.

Then I teched The Bat, which went well, and got to play my We Are From The Dirty South song at the end, which seemed a good way to usher people off to the party. I actually WENT to the party, which was amazing. Got to hang with the aforementioned Chris Biddle, Corey Brown, Dave Siegel, and EITAN!!!! Came home about 2:30 am, and couldn't get to sleep until 6; I was still wired with adrenaline. After all my responsibilities were over, my immune system crashed, and now I'm sick. Woohoo. Stuffly and sniffly. And tomorrow, back to work.

So a good week's work done, well-received videos and performances, and now, rest. I'm off to Nyquilize myself. I'm really happy with what we did this week. Zach did an awesome job of pulling off the impossible to make this Festival happen. Amazing.

Here's some of the videos I made for the Festival, for your viewing pleasure.
CageMatch preview
CageMatch show open
Siegel-Prov entrance
Impatient Theatre entrance
HARSH entrance (which didn't actually get shown--a YouTube exclusive!)
International Stinger entrance (also didn't get shown)
PTSIAM show open

Enjoy.

ISIDTA 13 : a quick one

ISIDTA 13 : a quick one
Originally uploaded by TedHobgood.

Here's a visual pun of sorts for you, representative of the offering itself. This week has been incredibly hectic as I prepare videos for the 7th annual Dirty South Improv Festival, and I didn't have much time to create something for this week's ISIDTA, so I threw together this hasty cartoon during lunch yesterday. Hopefully next week's will be better.

See the cartoon here. Get it? 'Cause the kid has a ball, and there's a circle painted on the ground, and the other kids are playing, and the police guy was playing, but now he can't play anymore. Get it? I'm such a card.

Better art can be seen on Kit's ISIDTA blog here.
My other stuff is here.

DSIF7 Preview

Not a lot of posts lately. I've been crazy busy (or crazy withdrawn, depending on the day). The latest bit of busy-ness has been preparing for the Dirty South Improv Festival, taking place this week in Carrboro. It's a pretty big deal, so they tell me. I'll be doing a special CageMatch this Friday at 11:00 pm at the DSI Comedy Theater. I'm also producing PT Scarborough Is A Movie the next night at 9:30. There should be video goodness aplenty for both shows, with any luck (if it doesn't kill me). Here we have the preview trailer for CageMatch. I'm trying to make it a blockbuster of a show. We'll see if anybody shows up.

For the kiddies (well, anybody really, but it is family-friendly) I'll be part of ComedySportz on Friday and Saturday at the ArtsCenter at 7:00 both nights.

The videos have been a real bear lately. I've been trying to do them in Final Cut on my new Mac Pro, but I'm not used to the program yet. I actually lost all my work twice while making this CageMatch trailer; I finally gave up, so this version is a little squooshed and distorted. I think it's a memory problem (I need more memory for the Pro, but it's like $1000 per stick). It's sort of disconcerting that all my work gets lost when the memory craps out, though. Tonight I have to reedit, or re-create to be truthful, a video I made to introduce the Festival. My first attempt really didn't have the feel that the theater wanted, so I have to start almost from scratch with a new music bed and a rerecorded v/o. Argh. Then there's six more CageMatch videos to make, and a little pretape for PTSIAM. Sleep? Hah!

A Gift From Patton!

a gift from Patton!
Originally uploaded by TedHobgood.

Sometimes good things do happen. (Not often, but sometimes.)

Remember the present I made for my buddy Jackson ("A Kinda Patton Christmas"?) If not, check it out here. Well, Patton loved it, said it made his year, and guess what? He sent me a present for my very own! I was quite surprised to get a package in the mail containing Patton's actual cast jacket from the upcoming Brad Bird movie Ratatouille AND a Patton-made dvd of the entire Comedians of Comedy series. SWEET! Thanks, Mr. Scoops!

It was very kind of him to do this for me, and I really appreciate it. The truly great thing is that I really like the jacket, and it fits me quite well. It's the kind of thing I would buy myself, except a) it was free, b) it's a real cast jacket from a real movie, c) it was a gift from somebody I find to be really entertaining, and d) it reminds me of good times with good friends.

Check out me, the coat, and the bootleg dvd here.

PS: Here's a trailer for the movie. I'm sure me and Jackson will be first in line. I'll wear my coat.

Smooth and Fine

I am horrendously jealous of how easily this guy can a) quickly draw an amazing human figure without so much as a pencil guide underneath, and b) effortlessly get such a beautiful line variation from a brush pen with such precise control. I'm sure it took years of practice to get this good, but I still am horrendously jealous. If I could draw like this, I'd be cranking out wrestling animations every day.

Drawing da hoboes.