The Legion of Justice Heroes

So a few months ago, my friend Sylvia invited people to come partake (in a few months, ie, last week) of a murder mystery party. Sylvia doesn't buy these in a box from a store; she writes them up from scratch, creating all the characters, their motivations, their interrelationships, EVERYTHING. I don't see how she does it.

Anyway, she had a fairy tale murder mystery party a year or two ago, and it was amazing, great food, great backstories, and people had an amazing time fleshing out their fairytale characters and acting like complete nutballs. (Aaron and Fiona as obnoxious-accented Hansel and Gretel were particular standouts.) I participated in that one, and was an old man whose mission was to get rid of a magic amulet before midnight. I palmed it off on Bryan Barnes, and he aged like 120 years in seconds (and then we had a hilarious slow-motion chase around the theater.)

ANYWAY anyway, a few months ago, Sylvia invited me to do the superhero thing, but I was feeling all "wah-wah, whine-whine" antisocial and obnoxious, so I politely declined (even though I had had a ball at the fairytale one).Turns out Aaron couldn't make it either (as he had to infiltrate some conservative sect and steal their liquor and down pillows or something...) so Sylvia cast him as the superheroes' sidekick (who I dubbed "The Amazing Wonder Keck") and asked me to film a simple scene of him being tortured; something for the heroes to fight for.

Well, you know me: always happy to help a friend out when I can, and if it involves video and campy superheroes, well, always happy to make it eighteen times more complex and giggle the whole time doing it. So I volunteered to do a kidnapping scene as well, and we brainstormed and created some visual gags, some taunting scenes, and the mandatory use of Burgess Meredith Penguin Gas. (which turns out to be fun & easy to do in After Effects!)

I also decided to attempt to make a Superfriends-style animated opening as well, and wanted a Legion of Doom group of villains. Somebody came up with a name that I vetoed, with me saying I wanted a "Man From U.N.C.L.E." style acronym. Aaron, being a smartass, said "why don't you just go with A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.?" Me, being a smartass, said "yeah, right, why don't YOU come up with a cool name that long, with those letters?" Aaron, being a genius comedy writer, came up with one in like four minutes, and it got included in the video (and I made us buttons!). I had fun coming up with all the villainous characters; they were supposed to be illustrated, but got axed due to time constraints. The heroes DID get illustrated; Sylvia sent me Facebook pix of the various folks involved, and I drew my best attempt at them, costumed as their hero. I would draw one person, show it to Jason, and he'd show me what could be improved to make it actually look human ("You got the boobs wrong AGAIN.") Pencils were scanned into Photoshop and cleaned up, then imported into Toon Boom Studio for inking and colouring. I had already designed all the logos for the heroes and the villains in Illustrator. I also had a great time writing the voiceover script for the animated opening, trying my best to channel Ted Knight.

The live action stuff was filmed over at Casa Keck (after kicking Fitz out, for secrecy reasons). It was insanely hot that day, so filming exteriors whilst wearing longsleeve black "Goon" shirts was less than pleasant for me and Miss Toth, but we had a blast. Got in some good visual gags and some blooper material. Moving inside, we set up my new chromakey screen and suspension stands from Digital Juice (which were AWESOME--I wanna do more chromakey work now!) We filmed the restaurant scene in front of Kit's colelction of Multiple Man sketches, which made it look like a sort of superhero Sardi's, which I thought was funny. We also managed to include our fabled Old Bay Seasoning (in-joke.) After we finally beat Aaron until he learned the actual name of the superhero group name, and after I learned how to fake out to the camera so you could read my shirt, we had that scene in the bag. I had found some great cotton batting that looked like oversized comedy rope to tie Wonder Keck up with, so that looked funny. Aaron got into character quickly, and adlibbed most of his stuff. I took several takes to ramp up my own energy and get into the part (the early takes on the blooper real are painfully low-key.)

Breaking all the equipment down and heading home, it took a week or two to find the time to log all the footage and get it roughly edited, then another solid week to add the music, supers, graphics, and special effects (did I mention the Penguin Gas?) Matching the virtual table movement to the zooming and panning of the camera was difficult, so it looks a little rough--but darn good enough for a one-shot party, I'd say! The important thing was the comedy. Sylvia did a bang-up job of making a ludicrously large plate of spaghetti and meatballs, and Aaron made an annoyingly hilarious pesky sidekick.

Finally it was party day! We headed over to Sylvia's gaming friends Will and Allison's house (they were very awesome, with a cool place, and I need to hang with them more.) Kit arrived about the same time we did, and everybody else managed to arrive by twenty minutes later (by which time, Kit had not yet entered the house. Everyone else was scared to go out and find out why, so I was delegated to go check up on him. If you know Kit well, you wouldn't be worried--he was just putting together a rather complex outfit.)

Everybody seemed to really enjoy themselves. The videos played quite well through the XBox 360, and seemed to add to the mood (screaming during the Troubalert klaxon has now become an ongoing bit). Kit's character, Vector, had size-changing powers, so Kit creatively (and amusingly) replicated that by having a series of different-sized action figures to represent him. Fiona made for a hilarious FDR Lass: "We have our four freedoms: Freedom of speech, freedom from fear,...and the other two freedoms." The guy playing DYRE (think Incredible Hulk) was fabulous. At first, I thought he was an utter buffoon and a shallow actor, as his Hulk-ish character was pretty simple. But then he reverted to his "Bruce Banner" identity (by putting on a suit and tie) and revealed his brilliance (both his character's brilliance and his own brilliance at playing the character!) The plot ended up going in directions we couldn't have imagined, with an explosive ending. Sylvia did an amazing job giving everybody fun characters to play with interesting motivations, and creating a world for them to live in. (And she invented an awesome supervillain off the top of her head: The Great Molesto.)

Oh, and I have to mention that Will infused his own liqueurs, which is awesome, and he was kind enough to let me try his basil liqueur, which was satisfyingly evil-looking with it's cloudy swirls of dark green--it tasted amazing.

So here's the stuff:

Videos are here (now including bloopers from the filming!)
(it's a playlist, so you can either watch them individually or let them all play through.)

Stills from the video production are here.

Pix from the party itself do be here.

Enjoy!
-Ted

An Online Commercial I Made

The commercial I just made for the NC State Fair just went live. They wrote the script, and I directed, shot, and edited.

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.

CageMatch and Banana Breakup

I'm woefully behind on my blog/video updates. I did CageMatch a few weeks ago, and then the Banana Breakup Extravaganza last week.

First, CageMatch. Not much to say here, except that I didn't have much of an idea for the video, and didn't get an opportunity to meet with the 4DDI guys, so the whole thing was just based around one of the members not being able to make it. I had the Beer graphic already laying about, basically, so that was easy to throw in.

The Banana Breakup video was a lot more satisfying. Got some time with Kit and Eitan to do shots and video before the show, so there was a lot more raw material to work with (and the BB boys are always so fun to work with as well.) The opening shoutout to Biff Hobgood was Kit's idea, and very funny to us since we knew it would be over most people's heads. (If it's over your head, check out the Biff Hobgood surprise return video.)

I really wanted to do a decent (if quick) overview of Banana Breakup's history, so consulted my files, went through all their past videos, and selected some clips to use. (One bonus: Joe Jones made his return to the theater after several months off, and Kyle Chorpening was there as well, so they both saw the shotout to Panthro.) Then we went into the whole "BB vs BB" bit, which was amusing. By the way, nobody really knew we were presenting the show in a faux CageMatch format, so the whole video thing was a surprise. I loved the way the still of the masked BB turned out, photoshopped with a "photocopy" version of the picture overlaid on itself and tweaked a bit to give it that hyperreal look. The "good" BB reply was hilarious, with Eitan's "honesty and wits" and Kit's "tonight at dawn" ad libs. I was also quite happy with the "flaming faceoff" animation at the end. And was quite pleased with the song I picked for the end, The Donnas covering Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself." The ersatz Hall of Champions was a surprise for the boys, in an attempt to make 'em laugh.

Stills, as always, are here.

PS: the live show included another surprise: Scott Sullivan performing a Banana Breakup rap live on stage. From a rapping standpoint, it was a humiliating failure, but from a comedy standpoint, it was a decent success, as 40 year old guys fucking up a rap onstage while dressed in a blinged-out t-shirt and hat turns out to be pretty laughworthy.

Recent Videos for DSI

Two new videos up now, one on YouTube and one on Facebook.

First is is the new intro for Season Two of our acclaimed DSI High show, a sort of improvised sitcom. I based it on last year's video (which, strangely enough, I don't seem to have blogged about or even posted!) I used Pulpmotion to do the yearbook bit at the beginning; I may recreate that whole thing on my own, so I have a little better control over it. I like the character introductions (it helps that the adult/student ratio was more even than last year); separating them into "teachers" and "students" makes the characters esier to identify. The "running through the halls" scene turned out quite nicely. I just shot that as a hand-held video on my still camera, and then used Quicktime Player to save selected frames into a folder, using Photoshop to format them for Final Cut. The group shot at the end was fun; I just had to pull Spencer's face in from a different shot, do a lot of lighting readjustment, and slap a brick wall behind them. There's a faded, peeling walrus mascot sort of hidden on the wall; you can see a better still of that shot here. Lastly, I re-edited the Bowling For Soup song so it ended with the end of the video, and by accident, the line "here we go again" lined up nicely with the introduction of the DSI High logo. Yippee!

Second is the first draft of the DSI Witness News intro. I meet with Zach tomorrow for revision notes, but was asked to upload the current version as a promo for the next show. You can find it here. I used a new program I bought recently, Kinemac, which is awesome. I tried to make the video as slick and as-like-a-real-newscast as possible. I plan on adding some animated tubes snaking around on the "News/Sports/Entertainment" page; we'll see what else ZW wants for the video. I particularly like the 3D animated logo, with the extruded words appearing as the cube rotates.