TV Land Haiku Meme

Ok, so I'm reading "TV Land To Go: The Big Book of TV Lists, TV Lore, and TV Bests" by Tom Hill. Good book, lots of tv nostalgia and odd facts. There's also a bunch of original material created for the book. Some of their ideas for tv shows are pretty brilliant, like a detective show called "That's The Man!", where Tony Randall plays "a classically trained artist who has fallen on hard times and taken up work as a police sketch artist.[His] refined sensibility and distaste for mingling with riffraff can't overcome his burning desire to see justice done". Brilliant.

But what I post about today is another one of their genius ideas: the TV Land Haiku. Their theory is that the brief-but-rigid artistic structure of the haiku is the perfect method "for expressing the essential truth in some of our favorite TV shows and characters."

Check out the following examples:

"Dragnet"
Stern morality
Blue squares bust far-out hippies.
The names have been changed.

"Family Affair"
Mom and Dad are gone,
But Uncle Bill is rich, yay!
Who wants pony rides?

"Hogan's Heroes"
Underground allies
What tunnels? I know nothing.
Silly old Germans!

So, inspired by that, I decided to create some of my own:

"Match Game"
In the Land of Blanks
Brett Somers is Match Game king
And Charles is her queen.

"The Love Boat"
Where else could Zsa Zsa
Make sweet love with Van Patten
Exciting and new

"Venture Brothers"
The Monarch will rant,
Hank and Dean will fail again,
And Brock will whoop ass.

"Wrestling Announcers"
Jim Ross reigns today
Lance was a stalwart hand, but
Solie was the Dean.

"Bill McNeill"
The man loved his cane,
And loved women even more.
But Rocket Fuel, DAMN!

"QI"
The Earth has two moons?!?
"Cruithne?" Are you mad, sir?
That's rubbish; prove it.

So that's my contributions. I now ask you to create your own and pass it around the interweb, on blogs and Facebook and Twitter and all those doohickeys. I particularly challenge the pop culture haiku masters: Kit FitzSimons and Jeff Scronce! Go to it, lads! (And link back here.)

Oh, and maybe use the #tvhaiku hashtag, if you feel like it. Now go get famous.

Catching Up On Stuff

Haven't posted in about a month, let's get caught up, shall we kiddies?

Videos I've done recently, with brief remarks:

4DDI vs Shapeshifter - Had a fun time playing around in Motion to do the Dr. Who-y effects. Loved the way the merging of Andy and Kit turned out. Went back to an old trick with the morphing effect, and any excuse to use the remix of the Superfriends theme is a-ok with me.

4DDI vs Average Ducks - Wasn't really sure what to do with a group with the name "Average Ducks", until I thought of the old Warner Brothers cartoon, "A Corny Concerto". So this is an homage to that. Hadn't played in Flash in a long while, so that was fun.

Cohost #1: Nikolai - CageMatch ran for the whole month of July as part of the Summer Slamtacular. As part of the festivities, I featured a different cohost each week. First was Zach Ward as Nikolai. Basically, I just let him rock it in front of the green screen and chopped up his bits into a video mix with illustrations. I was tickled to find that Eastern European song about Nikolai....

4DDI vs PTSIAM - Time to ramp it up. PT is always inspiring, and so we turned it up a few notches for this one. I liked having Pt's "origin story", and then putting him in two different movies and the cartoon. All greenscreened and masked and whatnot. Strangely enough, PT just happens to own a real Maltese Falcon. Hard to edit the movies down to be brief but still make sense and tell the story, but I thought it worked out okay. The South Park sequence was done in Flash, with PT's bits all drawn by hand and animated into the existing footage.

Cohost #2: Jeff'Ray - Bryan Barnes did an awesome job as "The Homosexual Agenda", a character Joe Stanton dreamed up a year ago. We made sure he was a very positive figure, and the comedy came from Scott Sullivan not knowing how to deal with a very "out" gay man.

Verna Applebottom's Big Day Out - Paula Pazderka asked me to produce this for her, a parody of the Chico's clothing stores. I love that song--"It's Chico Time!"

PTSIAM vs Senior PGA - This time I framed the PTSIAM sequence with Zach and Jeremy going to see Star Wars. The idea was that people would wonder where and when PT would crop up. And of course, it was funny to have PT misinterpret instructions and break the X-wing. Whups! Lots of work in Motion, learning how to autotrack movement and make clips match movement. The first sequence worked perfectly; really should've reshot the others to make them look better. Loved Jeremy's visuals at the end.

Cohost #3: Donnie Tucker - Mary Sasson as a guy from Pittsburgh. "Go stillahs!" I got some ideas on typical Pittsburgh photos from some YouTube videos by natives.

DSI Corporate Commercial - Made this one in less than 24 hours, from notification to execution. Basically just used a bunch of transitions in Final Cut and a lot of DSI photos, along with a few simple tricks.

Ignite Raleigh Opener - Got hired to produce a video to open the first meeting of the Ignite Raleigh group. We gathered the organizers together at DSI and did a pretape of them getting frustrated with some old PCs and then taking out their aggressions on the machines, a la Office Space. All the PC screen images and the explosions were done in post with Apple Motion.

And I think that catches us up! See you again soon.