CageMatch 4-12-07

What a week! Very busy making videos, very little sleep. I had a play to do on Wednesday that took a lot more work than I had bargained for, and then CageMatch last night. The play went pretty well, with a few technical glitches since we never had a tech rehearsal. I made eight videos for that little production. Yow.

Then last night we had CageMatch. This was Scott's last show, so he had an idea of how he wanted to go out. It was up to me to make it happen. Go check out the video here, and then we'll discuss.

So obviously, Scott's idea was to kill Biff off the same way Poochie was killed off in The Simpsons. I couldn't find the English language version to study, only this one. Anyway, Scott and I went back to Biff's home away from home, University Massage, and did the pretape. Later on, we got Bill Henderson as CageMatch President Jack Tunney to dub in the voiceover for the freezeframe. I tried to make the video itself a shot-for-shot remake of the original Poochie video, and it was a bear. I drew the tv frame in Illustrator, built the animation pegholes from a screengrab of the original, and carefully formed the word "Biff" from existing letters in the handwritten message at the end (which is a screengrab of the actual message used in Poochie.)

I then produced a tribute video for the fallen Biff Hobgood, which you can view here. The best part about this was that I found a song on iTunes called "It Was Close" (Biff's catchphrase is "it wasn't close!") I bought the song, but then found out they only say "it was close" once in the song, so I had to remix it to get two instances for Biff to respond to. I used a lot of footage we had shot for the Biff entrance video, but never used. I really liked the slow transitions between the stills from the Biff Hobgood entrance video, which everybody was familiar with but which had a much different feel with the slow fades here. I was particularly happy with the look of the slow-motion "shocker" at the end. I was worried that it might be too poignant though, so I threw in the "shut up" to end the whole thing.

Now it's all over and I'm ready to sleep.

Oh, and the screens for this show can be found, as always, here.