Sunday, August 17, 2008

CageMatch 8/16/08

Just a quick report this time. Had another show yesterday. This time around I didn't get news of the challenging team until this past Tuesday, and the name was a hard one to form a video concept around. The team was called "Flâneur", and I just didn't know what to do with it. In the end, I decided to just make fun of the name and let the natural comedic hilarity of John Loftin make the video. So go watch it here and then come back for a chat.

So the first part of the video is centered around Banana Breakup and their historic fifth win. I liked having the scroll with the win records for each team--lends a bit of historic importance to the whole thing. I used the old Sesame Street clip to amuse myself and buck up my spirits.

The Flâneur identity screen baffled me at first, but in the end I just found a cool old drawing of Paris with a superimposition of old clip art. The Raven was a joke I threw in for Kit, as every time I heard the name "Flâneur", I thought of Lenore from the Poe poem "The Raven". The Wikipedia segment seemed to go over quite well-- just a quick capture with ScreenFlick and a few text overlays. Another bit just to amuse myself was to have the covers the books by the high-class authors mentioned in the Wikipedia article. I knew it would bring the energy of the video to a grinding halt, but it made me laugh.

The surprise reveal of Loftin and Lillith at the end worked surprisingly well. All it is is me holding a copy of the Banana Breakup picture (printed on a piece of paper) in front of the camera lens. Loftin reachs out and crumples it and starts his diatribe. The trick is to pick the exact frame to switch from the in-computer picture to the held-in-front-of-the-camera picture, and the whole thing is dramatic and seamless. I was sorta proud of that.

And now it's 11:30 at night and time for bed. Good night Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.

The identity screen for Flâneur can be seen at the usual place.