CageMatch 3/28/09

Another day, another CageMatch. View the video here.

First off, just a note of how annoying it was that twenty people showed up very late to the show. Like fifteen, twenty minutes after showtime. Incredibly inconsiderate and rude. If we had started the show already, all the commotion from the crowd arriving halfway through the first set would've interfered with the first group's performance. Drives me nuts when people show up late.

Anyway, that was the video. Couldn't really deam up a viable way to present a group called "Finding Emo" without making it depressing, let alone making it uberdramatic. Kit FitzSimons to the rescue! It was his idea to do a sort of Wizard-of-Oz sepia-to-colour thing to show the difference between the two teams. I flipped that around and had it go from colour to b&w, and actually used the Oz footage. The music at the beginning is the opening overture to the movie as well. The music then turns into My Chemical Romance as we go to black and white (also pulled down the gamma at the same time as the dsaturation, for that extra-gloomy look). Then finished it all off with a slapped-together mashup of Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" with the opening drums from the Go-Go's "We Got The Beat".

Putting the heads on the characters at the end was amusing. The girls sent me shots taken for this express purpose; I used an old photo of Joe, but spent a long time touching it up with streaked magenta eyeliner, skull earring, lip ring, etc. Then I ended up making it black and white and small, so you don't really see any of that. Hilarious.

Probably the shortest CageMatch video ever. And the assholes who came late talked loudly through most of the video, so nobody heard the text. Ah well.

Zombie Marx Brothers

Here's a little something amusing I made at the prompting of a friend. It's the Marx Brothers, if they were zombies.

CageMatch 2/28/09

Did another CageMatch video for Saturday. I actually did this whole one in about four hours, from creating the identity screen for Baby Pranks, to editing the stills for the video, choosing and editing the audio, performing the voiceover, and editing the video. Whew! I had no time during the week to do the video, as I was busy producing a corporate show for DSI, including a last-minute video shoot and production for a Sham Wow parody (visible here). That one actually got some network news coverage, so that's cool.

Watch the current CageMatch video here.

Back in CageMatch land, I dreamed up the concept while showering that morning. Figuring that working backwards would be the best plan, I started brainstorming what the name "Baby Pranks" made me think of. Baby made me think of Child, so I thought, "what phrases use the word 'child'?" A child shall lead them, child's play, etc. Eventually I ended up with "man, woman, and child", and thought it might be fun to say Senior PGA were bragging about how they could beat anybody, man, woman, or child. That meant the video would have to set up PGa as becoming cocky, and the rest wrote itself.

No real big technical innovations here. I do want to point out that the material in the background of the Baby Pranks identity screen is from the old Johnson Smith novelties ad from comic books of old. And I liked the way I re-edited the Salt N Pepa song to go straight from the "baby baby" part to the "yoyoyoyo" part, fairly seamlessly.

That's it. We now return control to your regularly scheduled program.

Professional Regurgitator

So I have a lot of dvds I haven't watched yet. I'm one of those people that collects things and then never uses them. In the case of dvds, it simply never occurs to me to sit down and watch a movie. It never enters my mind. When I'm on my own, I gravitate to wandering through RSS feeds or YouTube or something, never simply sitting in front of the tv.

So the other day I decided to pop a dvd into the computer and watch it in a little window while I was working on Photoshopping some stuff for a DSI gig. The dvd in question was a documentary on vaudeville hosted by Ben Vereen. It was a good overview of the life of a vaudevillian and the history of the art form itself, with rare clips of footage from various vaudeville stars (and non-stars). I found one particularly intriguing act on YouTube, one of the clips that was on the dvd. This is Hadji Ali, who was what vaudevillians labelled a "professional regurgitator". His act consisted of him swallowing things and bringing them back up.

One of the reasons I'm so fascinated by this act is that it seems, at first blush, to be so ridiculous. Did people in the Depression really spend their hard-earned two bits to see a guy swallow stuff and then bring it back up again? Is that entertainment? The other reason I'm fascinated by this act is that, yes, it is entertainment. Hadji Ali has a great act, unusual though it is, and I kept my eyes glued to his performance, and was rewarded for my virtue with a stunning finale. Go watch Hadji Ali, you'll be glad you did.