The original footage was for our Nesquik contest entry, one that never even made it into the contest. Bah. I hope you enjoy Daddy Burglar going at it with the camera!

The only down side was that the State software, which allows you to make the videos on your own computer, encrypted the exported video file so I couldn’t edit it myself and add titles. Of course I figured this out after spending 30 minutes creating HD titles for it. Bah… humbug!

Anyways, hope you enjoy these!

Jean Claude on how to strike up a conversation while waiting for the bus:

Jean Claude on how to handle the situation wherein the girl of your dreams (hot little number) catches you in the act of murdering someone:

Grumpy Mustache Man vs. Emo Girl

It may be a bit extreme, but it works. Let us know in the comments below how this technique works out for you.

Hopefully this works for you in the field. Let us know and feel free to ask us questions if you have any, we’ll pass them on to Jean Claude, Lewis, and Dan The Man in no time.

Ah young love. Lewis the Womanizer at his best

Anyways, Lewis is back with some advice on a technique he likes to call the “Hair Caress.” Guaranteed to prevent or mend those awkward silences we all hate so much.

We’ll get to the pickup lines soon enough. We filmed about 7 Lewis-oriented shorts on Sunday so be checking back regularly for more in the very near future.

Although I still like the video a lot personally. In fact, at the time I uploaded it I figured it was one of our best to date. That was probably affected by the fact that I spent something like 8-9 hours on the effects. Probably more but I can’t remember now. I need to write these things down.

The video itself was for the Nikon Film Festival, which we didn’t make it into. I mean, we made it INTO the contest, but so did two minutes of footage at the public pool taken by some obese lady on a lawn chair. Half of the video consisted of some guy in cut off jeans’ butt as he paced back and forth watching kids swim. Weird.

Anyways, we had fun making it, mostly just Caleb and I taking turns filming, or a random table/chair doing the cinematography (which might explain why we didn’t make it into the contest). Miller, our roommate helped film some too and it was his Impreza that owned me consistently.

Now as to how I did that you can thank Video Copilot for their excellent tutorials. Basically I took footage of myself walking into an empty street, super imposed that on footage of Miller’s car whizzing by, matted out all the footage surrounding me so that I’m standing in the street, and then animated/warped myself along with his car.

The particle effects come with After Effects out of the box, and after some tweaking look like glass. The hood animation was made from a photo of a crushed car that I color corrected to look like (or close to) Miller’s car. That too is courtesy to the guys at Video Copilot. I tried finding my own photo to use but none looked quite as good.

The hazy after-worldly glow was made by duplicating a mask of Caleb a few times, blurring it directionally and messing with blending modes depending on the angle.

Unfortunately the “Bank of Americarp” sign didn’t make it into the final cut. Editing down to 140 seconds was rough, and making decisions like that are part of the deal.

I’ve owned that sign for a long time and never put it to any good use. We had to ‘modify’ it so as to keep branding out of the video. I think the “unnamed” bank should take my marketing scheme into consideration, however. I mean, what’s more patriotic than a red white and blue carp?

Either way, I spend time (like 5 minutes!) on the modifications to that sign so it HAD to make it in somewhere. Not that this blog is anywhere. And the most disappointing part of all of this? This is a side note more than anything connected to the sign, but despite all of the publicity we pushed to get this thing in the contest we have nothing to show for it because it wasn’t originally hosted on Youtube. The view count? Ridiculously low.

Oh well.

The song was Dremples by Sasha, I asked for permission and took his silence as such. I hope he’s ok with that if he ever discovers this on some random internet search binge.

Any other questions? Shoot.

Interesting fact: I didn’t really get shot twice, in case you were worried.

Slightly less interesting fact: I really did win that science champions shirt when I was in 5th grade, and it still (sort of) fits me. Of course, I think every kid that attended won that shirt, but still! I won it.

VASTLY less interesting fact: It’s REALLY cold standing in sub-freezing weather wearing nothing but jeans and a T-Shirt.

It is though, as it turns out. The kids are cute at least. We had a great location to shoot, well lit, nice acoustics, great background elements, the works. Then a band started blasting at the restaurant next door and we were forced to head back to the toddler room, where we could still hear the band… but just barely.

The lighting and acoustics weren’t so great. Well, to be honest, they stank, but the background elements were still good.

The kids were pretty good to film with, though we made sure to get all their lines out of the way first so they could go play. Of course this video only served to make the other kids jealous and now I have ‘casting requests’ in for about 20 kids. Not sure how that will work out unless I need a band of roving, disillusioned munchkins looking for revenge or something along those lines.

Some of the questions, in case you couldn’t make them out:

Mason: “What is your favorite color?”

Sam: “Have you ever lied?”

Mason: “How many times have you lied?”

Abby: “Do you have any formal training in hermeneutics?”

Jack: “Would you consider yourself as a pre dispensationalist?”

Jack: “Can you give us a synopsis of David and Goliath story?”

Sam also corrects me by saying “David didn’t have a bow and arrow!” further displaying my ignorance and ineptitude to the world. As if my previous answers didn’t achieve this well enough. I debated putting subtitles in but we figured people would get it well enough without them. And if you didn’t, know you have.

Interesting fact: That giant jug of wine only costs like $12 at Safeway. The cheap price only understates the cheap taste.

Slightly less interesting fact: The tiny chair I sat in hugged my hips so badly I had to pop it off every time I stood up.

VASTLY less interesting fact: I didn’t mean to have my earbuds in there, makes me look like some cheap iTunes ad with my black shirt and all.

We needed some way to kill Cody off because, at this point, we thought he would be in the Navy before we could film anything else off. Kind of like how we “killed” Dalbey off in Satan’s Seat with his idle hands. No one wants to be around a guy with the devil’s playthings for hands.

This is all in all the most disturbing skit we’ve ever made, the licorice alone is enough to make you gag if you aren’t careful. Olivia made her final appearance here before she moved back to Boston, which was sad enough as it is. We wanted to ‘kill’ her character off too by having her break up with me in iSaber 4, but didn’t get to it in time.

What’s funny is we had a really scary, Edgar-like person approach us with his dog while we were filming in the park. He was dirty and mildly perverted, hitting on the girls we had with us and suggesting we put our videos on YouTube. His dog went about smelling our shoes as we awkwardly tried to get him to leave.

What angered me most, however, was that he was ignorant to the fact that we were already on YouTube. Apparently nobody knows. Not even dirty vagrant perverts.

Unfortunately we couldn’t find a van for the skit, which pretty much ruins the whole thing in a sense. It turns out we don’t know anyone with vans, least of all the creepy mafia/chimo vans we had in mind. I guess we have to have some sort of flagrant error or misstep in every video, that might as well be it.

OR the fact that we ended up recording in mono again… gosh dang it all to heck in a hamper. Actually in watching this again for the first time in a long while I did a terrible job editing it. It didn’t help we were trying to film as fast as we could before we ran out of daylight, but dang. Tons – of – errors.

Interesting fact: Dirty vagrant perverts are particularly attracted to anything being shot on camera.

Slightly less interesting fact: Budge (Edgar) covered himself with mustard to look extra dirty.

VASTLY less interesting fact: if you eat enough licorice while filming the same shots over and over again you’ll get sick.

This one was a lot of fun to film, we actually had lights set up and just had a good time standing around shooting for a few hours. There were, of course, a couple of errors, like recording in mono the entire time, but such is life.

Rainee Palmer made her debut in this one, the deaf hottie. Hot girls that are willing to be around us are hard to come by so we definitely try to treat them right when they do. Her sister, Rubie, one of our old roommates (from our 9-bedroom house featured in most of our early videos) can be seen on the couch in the background along with her boyfriend of the time, Harry.

This was where the pythons came from originally, I’d written this before the “Louis’ Love Corner” sketch and so it absolutely had to make it in. I definitely didn’t pull it off as well as Josh does, probably why it didn’t work…

The whole thing is delightfully ridiculous, IMHO, and we had fun fighting and yelling and pretending we knew what we were doing. The concoction of liquor Cody poured was incredibly strange and fruity, but ended up being pretty good in the end. Kind of like cough syrup minus the mediciney taste.

Another unfortunate oversight was that in the opening shot I wasn’t backed out of the frame completely, my arm is just hanging on the fence while they talk like I can’t hear them… I’m a tool. Should have noticed that in the editing process at least. Or maybe I did and just didn’t have a better take. Either way, suck.

Interesting fact: Cody plays the bartender as well as himself.

Slightly less interesting fact: I may have broken my bluetooth headset when tossing it on the ground.

VASTLY less interesting fact: The skull’s name is Frank, he was like a house mascot for a while. The crazy part was I named him about 30 minutes before seeing that episode of Lost where the skeleton falls out of the van and his name (according to the badge stitched into his jump suit) is Frank. We got a little weirded out by that for a while.