Entries from April 2009 ↓

Here’s a song I made with Garageband, protesting the Bailout. I used some clips from a CBS news report and a sketch by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie (“Tony of Plymouth”).

Here’s a teaser for a project I’m working on. I had this idea and I wanted to materialize it some way.

And John Harlacher tipped me onto this video this week, Battle at Kruger. If you fear the worst for the calf, watch the whole video. It’s pretty nuts.

And here’s a collection of cover songs I found on YouTube.

I have an idea to pump up the Law & Order franchise with something new, something edgy, and something important.

Series Title:  Law & Order, Victimless Crime Unit

Premise:  Detectives Jack Murphy and Barbara Sipple are in New York City’s Victimless Crimes Unit, cleaning up the city from the crimes that might go unnoticed due to the lack of a victim.  With the mayor breathing down their neck and a city full of people ready to break laws that have no consequence, Sipple and Murphy are there to keep the system in check.

Episode Ideas: 

• Someone is in his own apartment doing things he shouldn’t but doesn’t affect others.  Following their hunches, Murphy and Sipple bust in.
• Someone parks their car in front of a no parking sign.  Murphy and Sipple have a stakeout, and catch the culprit in a deadly game of cat and mouse.
• Someone leaves a couch on their lawn despite violating the local laws on community aesthetics.  Enter the detectives!
• Someone takes out a library book for a little too long.  Time to bust some heads.
• A cancer patient is caught growing a pot plant in his or her dwelling.  If cancer can’t be arrested, the patient can!  Book ‘em.

My friend and colleague Wayne Henry asked me to help with an idea he had for his character Derek the Doozer to appear in a scene from Star Wars.  Wayne had the scene picked out as well as a script.  The challenge was to delete Princess Leia from the scene and insert Derek.  It looked like the editing of Star Wars would make this easy for us because of the  back and forth shots of Carrie Fisher and Mark Hammill.  Thanks to the Sage Theater, we shot Derek’s bits against a black background using wooden blocks to recreate the prison bench.

Using my DVD player, the TV hookup of my camcorder, and my Macbook I was able to get the Star Wars footage pretty easily.  I then chopped up the scene and inserteed Derek. 

But there were two problems:

1) Derek’s eyeline was off, it didn’t look like he was talking to Mark Hammill.  It looked like he was looking the other way.  I solved this problem by using a plugin in iMovie which let me flip the footage of Derek.  Now, he’s looking at Luke.

2) The sound was weird because the music wasn’t present in the scenes with Derek.  So I found what I thought was close enough to the music in the scene and just put it over the whole scene.  I thought this would sound weird over the music in the sclips of Luke, but I think it worked pretty good.

I also added my voice in the end over the Admiral.

And that’s how a youtube video is made!