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.