Lessons In Creativity

I think several of the people I know read this blog might be interested in this article. Mark Kennedy (not to be confused with Marc Kennedy) discusses how his young daughter reacted to the 1977 Star Wars film, and then analyzed why certain parts of the movie worked so well. If you're interested in writing, editing, or storytelling, you might enjoy reading the article. Made me think about pacing and revelation.

CageMatch 1/24/08

Had another CageMatch last night. Was a pretty good show; missed having Remi there though. Did the final reveal of the XXXXX logo video, proclaiming CageMatch's Fiftieth show to take place on February 9. Espionage A Trois finally was defeated, and Zach Ward got his first CageMatch win in his own theater, so that was amusing. I was quite happy with the poster design for this show. The video was okay, but obviously a rush job.

One bad thing did happen at last night's show. When I ran down to do my normal leap up the stairs at the top of the show, I stupidly decided to try something new in mid-air, and ended up dislocating my left knee in a rather nasty landing that twisted my lower leg. I tried to cover for it, and I don't think the audience noticed for the most part, but damn it hurt. During each hosting segment, I limped up the aisle but tried to walk as normal as possible on stage. (The show must go on!) Ryan Blackledge was kind enough to help me get all my stuff to my car after the show was over, but damn, driving home in that straight-shift car was brutal. I ended up taking today off of work, which they weren't overly happy about. (Morale at the job these days is at an all-time low.) Fortunately, I've gone through the dislocation thing before (albeit a looooong time ago!) and have some braces and my Classy Freddie Blassie cane to get around with for a bit. I'm thinking it'll be okay in a couple of days.

Also got two great purchases yesterday. My Ultimate James Bond box set of dvds arrived (42 discs for $80, yes!!!) and the very kind John Loftin made a purchase on my behalf of the academic version of Final Cut Pro Studio (sweet!). So now I'll be able to make that really kickass dvd of all my CageMatch videos I had been thinking about. It should be ready for the 50th CageMatch Extravaganza (February 9th, folks!) Watch this space for sales information!

SuperMeme

Ethan Kaye came up with this funny idea: taking a particular amusing series of classic Superman panels and replacing the text. Go check out his versions first.

Then Jeff Scronce (nee Skronch) made his own, converting Ethan's hilarious idea into a meme. Go check out his stuff now.

Now that you've seen the innovators, you can go see mine:
Adam West
Motorhead
Star Trek
007
Superfriends

And finally, a blank version in case anybody else wants to give it a go.

EDIT:
God, this is far too addictive. Here's another one.

EDIT 2:
And yet another one.

A Bit More Fame

Mr. Erik Martin pointed me towards a mention my "Ten" video got on a thread on A Special Thing (a comedy forum.) This is not the first time I've been labelled as "a crazy fan"...HAW!

Kill All Invaders

So apparently the latest trend in online web games is the genre of "Tower Defense Games". Basically, in these games there's a little winding path wandering through your kingdom, and every once in a while evil baddies will start wandering down the path. You have to place little weapon-laden towers around the path in an attempt to whomp these nogoodniks before they make it to the end. There are a number of different weapons to choose from with a variety of effects. In addition, you can upgrade towers as time goes on.

For some reason, I find these little games engrossing. I'm normally not a big fan of strategy games, but this one is so linear, with just options for weapon choice, that I find it quite accessible.

I started off with Laser Defense, and it's probably still my favourite due to the wide variety of weapons. I like the "techy" feel to it too, what with the graph paper and the lasers and whatnot. Today I discovered Flash Element TD and its beta-test offspring, Flash Element TD 2. The first one is very fun, very nice graphics. Try that first so you'll have an appreciation of the second version. I'm still testing that one, but it has great promise. The creatures have better graphics and more amusing noises, and it looks like the weapons will be even cooler once you get to the upper levels. The second version also has a different mechanic, where instead of the creatures cycling through your pathway, they go to the end and try to steal a "flag" and bring it back. When you finally kill them, they drop the flag where they lie. I think TD2 (at this point anyway) is easier, but loads o' fun.

There's LOADS more of games from this "tower defense" genre; just search your favourite local flash game site, and you're sure to find some fun.

Revisualizing Cinema

Nice post title, huh? Sufficiently academic, I hope. But seriously, I like the idea this guy has come up with for summarizing the overall look of a film. He feeds a movie into this program that takes a screengrab every second and reduces it to a mere 8x6 pixels. Then all those shots are strung together in one overall picture that lets you see how the film flows in terms of colour and overall look. By reducing the individual screens down to such a small size, you get sort of an average feel of each second, and looking at them en masse gives you a feel for how the entire movie ebbs and flows. Interesting idea.

Check it out on Brendan Dawes Dot Com.

Being Creative

So this is the first year I've ever had a New Year's resolution. I decided to keep a blog that simply documented every creative thing I do this year, whether it's a video or a wacky Photoshop of somebody's face on a wildebeest or something. Hopefully it'll be fun to see en masse as it grows.

So head on over to A Wretched Hive and check out the first entry for the year (my Amazon video review of The Ten!) and then add the site to your RSS feed so you can follow along at home as I add on new wackiness throughout the year.

CageMatch 12/27/07

The last CageMatch of the year was a non-title affair, as half of the challenging team was comprised of visitors from out of town, namely Corey Brown and the artistic director of the UCB, Anthony King. Since the title was not at stake, the storyline I came up with was that Oh Double-P decided that Espionage A Trois was getting a little lazy over the holidays, and so she brought in an elite team of former agents to give the squad a special training session. (Well, it amused me anyway.)

I haven't been in a very productive mood lately, so the video was cranked out in five hours the day of the show. Couldn't have done it without the fabulous performance by Corey Brown, who really understands my vision of CageMatch as an old-school wrestling show with an ongoing storyline. He gave a great promo that really made the video.

Check out the vid here and the identity screen shown above here.

Little Batman

Oh my fucking god, this is the best thing EVER. Some guy made an homage to the old 1960s Batman show, but with kid actors! The boy doing Batman is GREAT! The costumes are amazing, the attention to ridiculous detail is hilarious, and the Batmobile...my go, the Batmobile. I would've killed for that when I was a kid.

Check out Little Batman: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

I want to make movies now.

Random Stuff

* Just came back from filming for Beatbox in Chicago. That was fun. Very cool people. Wish I could've seen them perform in their natural element. Jenny and Neil particularly impressed me with their rap ability and presence. I can't get enough of Dave Ries in da b-boy stance. Zach was very kind to bring me along to work with the Beatbox folk.
* Rene Duquesnoy is a very good host. We had a faboo party in his palatial estate, got taken to some great places to eat, and generally shown the best parts of the city. And I sang Bon Jovi on Rock Band.
* Got to see Halsted Street. All my life, as a wrestling fan, I was always led to believe that this was the toughest place in the world, the only place that could've turned out such beasts as The One Man Gang and The Road Warriors. Imagine my surprise when Rene laughed and told me that was the gay district. (Which is where we had an amazing meal at a diner. They gave us bananas. Heh.)
* Found a great retro toy store that I could've spent major cash in. They had a Fisher-Price Airport new in a sealed box for $100. Geez. I was amazed to find they had a basket of figures and vehicles for a buck apiece. I bought all their wood figures, along with another Sesame Street Susan. Some of these looked brand new. Amazing.
* Had my first Chicago hotdog, as well as my first real Chicago pizza. Both were good, but the pizza was comparable to the frozen Home Run pizza (they were both quite good). The Chicago hotdog is a completely different animal though... delicious. We stopped at a real dive to get the dog, and I amused/disgusted Rene and Zach by eating a french fry out of the trashcan.
* I love the way Chinese restaurants celebrate Christmas. These blinky-light pastel musical trees on top of a restaurant in Carrboro amuse me.
* I took Monday off of work to recover from the trip. Turns out I needed it. I was completely wiped and wasted the whole day. I'm gonna need to be a video-making machine for the rest of the week.
* The security chick at Chicago's Midway Airport informed me that my driver's license had expired in October. Oops. They didn't catch that at RDU. (I'm glad they didn't--I would've been worrying all weekend about getting past security in Chicago!) Got a new license today, and it was very easy. The folks in Carrboro are courteous.
* Amusing thing heard at the Driver's License office: Two girls claiming to be sisters were there to get licenses. One said she was there to get hers reinstated after being revoked. The other said she was from out of state and her purse was stolen with all her id information. The DMV woman asked her if she had ever gotten a license in North Carolina, and the girl's "sister" replied, "She's gotten pulled over and got a ticket in North Carolina." Yeah, that'll help, baby.

I told my mom last week that my fondest Christmas memory was when I was nine and she made me an advent calendar out of hollowed-out walnuts that she rubber-cemented back together with crackerjack toys inside. So yesterday she showed up where I work and brought me a NEW walnut advent calendar---made from the SAME walnuts she used thirty years ago!

The walnuts have the numbers 1-24 written on them, and you open up one each day to find a prize inside. This version has little folded-up strips of paper inside each nut, which might be puzzles, word scrambles, or pithy quotes. I particularly liked the quote for the first day, which was as follows:

Some days, doing "the best we can" may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn't perfect--on any front--and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else.

-Fred Rogers

I can certainly relate to that...I get frustrated when things don't turn out as perfectly as they do in my dreams, whether it be an art project or a video production or the love for a girlfriend. It helps to sit back and remember that we can only do so much, as outside factors like time, resources, or the independence of other people can sometimes hinder our dreams. In any situation, we can only do our best.

Another Poster Design

Designed another action/thriller poster this week--this for the next Espionage A Trois show. Joe Stanton and John Loftin are "Extraordinary Rendition", and they have done several great shows together, starting with their excellent performances in this year's Dual Duel. I love the outfits they came up with for this photoshoot. Crazy tough bastards.

The backdrop behind the Extraordinary Rendition fellows turned out nicely. The whole backdrop of the poster is a gradient that goes from a midnight blue at the top and bottom to a slightly lighter blue in the middle. So on top of that, I threw a pic from iStockPhoto of a room with lots of plumbing and dials and whatnot ('cause we kept talking about waterboarding when we were doing the photoshoot). The room looked a little too antiseptic and pristine, but I fixed that. I had taken some closeup pictures of a train that was parked near the theater, and used a shot of a stained and rusted patch behind the engine to overlay on the room, which gave the PERFECT effect.

Remi looks fabulously evil, Jeff Scronch provided a fabulous photo of Espionage A Trois and Oh-Double-P, and even Scott Sullivan made the poster this time around!

FYI, I got copies of the Silence Is Golden poster printed at Zazzle, and they arrived yesterday. They're 20"x30" HUGE, and look AMAZING.

I'm Famous Again

It's been a weird couple of days...some great stuff, some surprising stuff, some wistful stuff... premieres, revelations, regrets, a lot of laughter, far too many tears, and more alcohol than usual. Overall, I think everything is going to be fine. There's lots more projects on the calendar for the near future, with special CageMatch shows, a dvd I'm producing, a music video I'm directing, and of course, Christmas and all the hoopla and merriment and family wackiness that surrounds that. So I have hope that things are going to be good.

The latest bit of positivity is that it turns out that Patton Oswalt DID see the Kinda Patton II: Werewolves and Lollipops project I did for Jason a few months ago. And now I have my own page on Patton's website! Chekkit out here. (Dig that animated header!)

And also this weekend, my friend Matt sent me a copy of the documentary they did on our old OMEGA wrestling promotion (as detailed here) and I've watched a few minutes of it. It looks like it's going to be really, really good. Tells the story of how a bunch of kids from rural North Carolina got together and made one of the best independent wrestling federations in the country. And best of all, I host all the segments of the documentary! I'm in the extras too, talking about how I met the boys and got involved. I haven't watched the whole thing, but I'm told Matt puts me over hard, which would be really cool. It's nice to have one's contributions recognized.

I also just got a dvd in the mail from Mr. Erik Martin that he wants me to produce a promotional video for, so that'll be fun. And this Friday I'm going to try to start work on a music video for Jackson's great song, "Cigarettes On The Ground".

Gotta stay busy, or you'll go insane. Believe me, I know.

Alcohol

If you really apply yourself, Woodchuck amber cider will get you fucked up,

Crazy Voicemail

So the other day I heard the Assistant to the Mayor laughing his head off. Turns out he was listening to a voicemail left by a guy who was very irate. We had to listen to it several times before we figured out what his beef was. Turned out he was upset at some referee call in a middle school basketball game or something. We thought the call was hilarious because:

1. It's an amusing thing to get nuts over, a basketball call in a school game.
2. Overreaction is always funny.
3. Cursing is funny.
4. We don't run the school system. And most importantly:
5. He was trying to call the City of Durham. We ain't Durham.

Enjoy the call here.

CageMatch 11-29-07

This week's CageMatch video is done in the style of a spy movie commercial, as if it were the sequel to Espionage A Trois' first blockbuster movie. Here it is.

This one took a lot of planning. It started with the name of the fictional movie, "Silence Is Golden", which resulted in the poster design. Then I found a Garbage song entitled "Silence Is Golden", which was perfect, since Garbage has done a James Bond movie song before. That inspired the whole feel of the video.

I decided to do the voice differently, based on an old radio promo for "Live And Let Die". I wrote the script last week, and recited it for days before I actually recorded it. We did a pretape for the Secret Agent Headquarters segment two weeks ago, and I got a little time with Zach on Tuesday at lunch to tape his segments. Had to go out and buy Goldfinger and Man With The Golden Gun on dvd for the weapons segment. Took some pix of my sister on Thanksgiving for the "shh" silhouettes seen above. Tommy's jacket was the wrong colour (a light tan instead of black) so I recoloured that in Photoshop.

I was particularly happy with the introduction sequence for each character in Espionage A Trois. Those pretty much turned out exactly how they appeared in my head. Great pictures taken by Jeff Scronch.

Some framegrabs are here.

This Is Tonight

Silence Is Golden poster
Originally uploaded by TedHobgood

Poster for the 11/29/07 episode of CageMatch, featuring Espionage A Trois defending against a man whose actions speak louder than his words, Silence DoGood!

I'm actually going to order some 20"x30" prints of this. Sweet.

Rappin' Disaster

Okay, this is probably the most embarrassing thing I've done since...well, the LAST time I recorded a rap. And that was a loooong time ago, when my friend Tim and I wrote a rap about "Fratty Baggers", the fratboys who would hide their beer in paper bags like winos---not because they didn't want you to know they were drinking, but they didn't want you to know they were drinking cheap beer. (Bad for their rich image, I guess.)

Anyhoo, this little ditty was born out of a email that one Jeff Scronce sent around to me and a coupla pals. Jeff linked us to this site, featuring a guy rapping about the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It was amazingly stupid and funny. Ethan Kaye then responded by saying

Sounds like that old-school 80's hip-hop. "My name is XXXXX
and I'd like to say..."

Well, for some reason I found that inspiring, so in the next fifteen minutes or so I wrote the following lyrics:

My name is *FEMA*, and I'd like to say,
I can rap about disasters in a *MILLION* ways!
Hurricanes, tornados, and a big ol' flood,
Fema gonna be there in yo' neighborhood!
Dolin' out cash for b-boys and b-girls
Helpin' y'all while the turntable twirls

The F is for "Fresh", 'cause we're cool like dat,
The E is for "Excitin'", 'cause we're the hot cats,
The M is for "Da Most", most from coast to coast,
And the A is for "Awesome" like butter on toast!

Wave your hands in the air, 'cause you know we really care!
Whoop-whoop! Whoop-whoop!
The roof! The roof! The roof has been repaired!
Whoop-whoop! Whoop-whoop!

Problem is, when I got home, I was still thinking about the stupid thing. Aaaaaaand I ended up recording it.

And here it is! The cool thing about Box.net is you can either download it or play it right in the browser! (You can also get the file here.)

Facts About Goldfinger

I recently purchased the James Bond film "Goldfinger". That got me to thinking about the character who has lent his name to the title of the movie, namely one Auric Goldfinger (pictured here). I thought it might be nice to make a concise list of Mr. Goldfinger's distinguishing characteristics, as spelled out in the film's theme song.

KNOWN FACTS ABOUT AURIC GOLDFINGER:

• He's "The Man"
• Possesses "The Midas Touch"
• Also possesses "A Spider's Touch"
• Has a cold finger
• Possesses "Web of Sin"
• Can speak "Golden Words"
  
• Known to utter lies
• Can deliver "Kiss of Death"
• Has heart of gold
• Heart is also cold
• Loves only gold
• Only gold
• No, seriously, he loves gold

CageMatch 11-8-07

I haven't worked this hard on a video since Night of the Living Improv. Check out the Espionage A Trois video here, and then come back for discussion.

Back? Excellent. So this took a lot of preparation. Once I learned of the supacool name of the team for this week (which happened Oct 22) I started planning. I knew I wanted to do the James Bond "travelling circles"/gunbarrel beginning, but using all three group members. So we set up a pretape session to get that footage. I went out and bought a stack of guns for them to use. The one problem with the shoot, which I didn't consider, is that the white backdrop doesn't go to the floor, so I couldn't show them full-body, like in the real Bond footage. Ah well.

So I actually wrote out a full textual storyboard for this video (which I usually don't do) due to its complexity. I loved the pan up the shot of Panthro, making them look menacing. And the fade-up of the three champion pins, followed by the fade-up of the three silhouettes worked perfectly. The growing effect of the silhouettes to fill the screen with black worked beautifully as well.

I studied all the Bond movie gunbarrel sequences to try and make mine fairly accurate. The travelling circles worked well; those are just internal shape generators in Final Cut, keyframed. I went out and bought a copy of Diamonds Are Forever, and captured and altered the gunbarrel with VLC and ImageWell. Then I worked on the blood sequence, to make sure that would be ready. I pulled the sequence from The Spy Who Loved Me into Flash and rotoscoped the blood frame by frame with the paintbrush. I tested it as a multiply overlay in Final Cut, and it worked great. I was saving the walkons for last.

Next on the list of things to do was to select the music. I have far too huge a library of spy music, but went through all the appropriate stuff, agonized over it, and decided on a track called "Destroy Silicon Valley" from View To A Kill for the moody opening, then the gunbarrel music from Thunderball, and the Bond theme from Dr. No. (I also used a version of the Bond theme as interpreted by wacko jazz saxman John Zorn for Espionage A Trois' entrance at the show.) I recorded the voiceover, spent a heck of a time getting the gunbarrel music to repeat three times, and exported it to disc.

Then I had to tackle the logo. We had taken the shots at Katie's house the same day we did the walking sequence video. I took a bunch of shots, and wouldn't ya know it, had to use three different ones to get the look I wanted, as no one picture contained good looks from all three folks. That was a bitch, balancing out the different lighting and gamma to get everything looking like one shot. Lots of masking on the bedspread. I added in the headboard from some puffy headboard company's website, and overlaid it with a brown tint to make it look like the fancy sort of bed James Bond would make sweet love in. The wall is a texture from a clipart package we have at work. The cigarette in Katie's hand was just a rolled-up piece of paper. I added the smoke in and played with it until it looked accurate. Kit kindly provided the martini glass, and Colette provided the cock-shaped toothpick. I just loved the expressions on everybody's face, especially Katie looking so secretive and sly and seductive. You can see a better view of the E.A.T. identity screen here.

The biggest battle was the gunbarrel sequence itself. I wrestled for hours trying to get the circular travel mattes and the gunbarrel pics and the walking pretapes all lined up. Not much to say about it really, except that it took about six hours to do. I ended up exporting Kit's bit to an image sequence and going through it frame-by frame, hand-editing out the background, and then pulling it back into Final Cut to make into basically what amounted to animation. I really wanted to have a circle follow Kit as well, but my brain was dead at that point, and I just couldn't figure out how to get it to overlay the background gunbarrels while still letting Katie and Tommy shine through. (I finally figured it out as I was dropping off to sleep, but by then it was too late.) I overlayed the blood rotoscoping, had a lot of fun doing the circle animation and identity reveal, and thought that turned out quite nice, very evocative of the classic Bond look. The lettering for the identity screen was done in LiveType and imported into Final Cut. I tacked on the end sequence, and Bob's your uncle.

Everybody seemed to dig it, and the Espionage folks were most appreciative. That felt nice.

Thanks for dropping by. We'll be back with more video nuttiness after Thanksgiving.


Oh, and the opening sound? Add a comment to this post if you figure out the dual meaning.