Friday, June 29, 2007

CageMatch 6-28-07

Another night, another CageMatch. This week's challenging team called themselves "Threadless". I was really stuck for a way to translate that team name into a dramatic video. What can you do with "Threadless"? Well, the only thing it sparked in me was the Three Fates of Greek mythology, so I went with that. Only problem is, there's quite a dearth of Fates imagery out there on the web. Really only one painting that I could barely find a usable size of, a sculpture which horribly Eurocized, and a sand sculpture. So I ended up using the first painting and the sand figures, and then filmed my own segments of the Town Manager's Executive Assistant toying around with some thread. Those filmed segments turned out great, and I sepia-toned and mirrored them to give the impression that it was more than one person. Oh, and I finally figured out how to bring images from Photoshop with transparency to Final Cut. (Turns out the trick is to save them as a 24-bit PNG.)

The logo for Threadless was a challenge as well. My immediate thought was to use empty spools, but someone else said they thought needles would be more immediately recognizable. So off I went in a search of a good high-res closeup of the eye of a needle. Harder than it sounds, but eventually I found one. I also got some needles off of a stock photo site, and used them in the background as well as a flying needle that slashes a picture in two late in the video.

The musical intro this week (the part that you hear during the initial DSI identity logo) is my most obscure reference ever. Any ideas?

The video is here.
The Threadless logo is here.

As for the show itself, both teams did quite well. Remi was great as Evil Billionaire Troy Sterling in his second outing. He came up with a great angle about Scott Sullivan being late on a house payment, and Sterling buying the mortgage out from under him, offering to bet the house against the hosting job in CageMatch. It was a rough crowd, but a good number of people got into it and laughed along. (And Sterling once again bet on the wrong team, so he got his house back. Yay!)

1 comment:

Ted Hobgood said...

Okay, nobody bit on the question raised in this post:

>
The musical intro this week (the part that you hear during the initial DSI identity logo) is my most obscure reference ever. Any ideas?
>

So here's the answer: The musical intro is eight notes, each of which is an F (there are two sets of four notes, an octave apart). So they're F notes, and there are eight of them. "F" plus "eight" equals "Fate", which is the central theme of the video. Despairingly clever.