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.

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.

One thing that seems to go unappreciated by a large number of people is that this is a continuation of geek-soaked fantasy. None of this is real, which should be accentuated by the regular return to reality in those long shots where all we see are a couple of nerds hacking away at each other with sticks.

Thus the question, or rather the statement “I thought he was dead!” becomes a moot point. Although it’s funny that I’ve heard people refer to Brian as “the demon” in this video. That makes some sense at least since he’s wearing the devil’s cloak from Satan’s Seat. I guess I should leave this to speculation; here I go ruining the whole idea of interpretation. So go ahead, interpret.

In fact, I may have just made all that up to throw you off the trail of the truth.

To answer another commonly asked question: no, that girl had no idea what was going on. I hurried us up so that we wouldn’t miss the opportunity to run past her. Partly because I was hoping for a good reaction from her (which we really didn’t get) but also because having random bystanders adds a good element to the atmosphere of the video.

I spent about 22 hours on the lightsabers in this one, which at the time I thought was an obscene amount of my precious life. This was the largest contributing factor to the length of time between this video and iSaber 4. Believe me, an hour of rotoscoping light sabers will discourage anyone from choosing to do so again for a while. (Also, you may have noticed I struggle with spelling light sabers, not sure if it’s one word or not still).

The Batman-esque titles covering the punches were a simple necessity because we never bothered to mask them properly. Our fight instructor at Eastern’s Theater Department, Mac, wouldn’t be too proud of that. I also had to deal with a couple of errant sticks here and there which you can pick up if you’re paying attention. All in all I could have spent more time perfecting this video, but at the time I wasn’t ready to sit in front of my computer any longer.

We had intended to finish the fight then and there, but I had to teach a class at 3PM and we started filming at something like 2:30PM so we didn’t have time.Thus the “To Be Continued…” Not bad for really cranking this one out though eh?

Interesting fact: Frank (Caleb) screams “My Mommy bought me an iPhone!” when he joins the fray with his new iSaber.

Slightly less interesting fact: I made the “sneaky” music deaf. In other words I couldn’t hear it when I was making it because I was pumping it into my computer to be recorded, and it works for how poorly it should have turned out.

VASTLY less interesting fact: Jonathan and Caleb are brothers in real life… I warned you when I said it was vastly less interesting.

Of course I’m haunted by a few editing choices, and some bad rotoscoping, but it was my first round with light sabers. All in all I think I spent 15 hours on them, and it panned out pretty well.

Yes there is a Zippo lighter app, and no it doesn’t light anything on fire. That would be cool, but it doesn’t do that.

The song is Phantom, by Justice, and yes it is that cool. This (as well as iSaber 3) was filmed by my buddy Andrew Taylor, whose name I messed up in the credits: “Taylor Andrews.”

It was thanks to his skateboard that we could attempt the vertigo effect and almost pull it off. Brian’s looks better than mine, but it’s possible that it’s because he’s that much cooler than I am.

Someone corrected me once on saying “2G Networks” when I should have said Edge, but I recently discovered that 2G networks do exist so take that… er, I mean I knew that when I said it.

In case you were wondering why we had the closeup shot mid fight where all you see is either Brian or me with just our light sabers, it’s because that type of shot comprised about half of the lightsaber fights in the original trilogy. Funny… joke…

Caleb broke two of those fluorescent lamps over my back, leaving shards of glass in my sweatshirt both times. It hurt a lot, but was well worth it in the end. Especially the second shot which I used because a huge portion of the tube bounced directly over the camera.

Why “Frank?” No idea, it just worked well in the moment. To be honest Caleb’s “Frank” is probably my favorite character in any of our skits, he makes the iSaber series what it is.

This is a fairly disjointed conglomeration of thoughts, but if you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments below and I’ll answer them!

Interesting fact: We use sticks to fight, wooden dowels to be exact, which makes it possible to add the lightsabers in later with the proper angles and blur.

Slightly less interesting fact: That epic archway Brian stands in at the beginning is part of the science department at Eastern.

VASTLY less interesting fact: Well, more an embarrassing fact, I didn’t make the saber mark on the wall in other shots after the first one. And the mark I made wasn’t quite as good as it could have been… in fact one could say it sucked.

If you got here because of the facebook blitz, sorry to spam you but we’re so bad at promoting our videos half of our friends don’t even know they exist. You can become a fan of us on Facebook though if you feel so inclined, just click on the facebook link in the “find me on” section on the sidebar (to the right).

Leave a comment here (no account necessary) or on YouTube after you SUBSCRIBE! Plenty more details to come.

But I’m back, and got some work done on iSaber 4 while at my grandparents. Just because you don’t have the internet doesn’t mean you can’t do something useful with your computer; I had forgotten this. It was weird not having the webz at my beck and call, however. Especially when rendering previews; I ended up staring at my computer wondering what on earth I was supposed to be doing.

We got some sweet Spite and Malice time in though, and it was a great relaxing time with my family.

Hope to have the new video up soon, but in the mean time go check out our latest 140 Second Chances on YouTube. I’ll post it in blog format here when it comes up chronologically… I think. I’m not really sure how to go about all this. Bah, I’ll just post it now. But you should still go to our YouTube page and subscribe.

Seriously, we didn’t even make it in the dang contest. Go subscribe.

Of course he’s like the nicest guy you’ve ever met, thus the statement that if his name doesn’t scare you nothing else about him is likely to. I really wanted to play around with After Effects and what better way to do that than to throw up as many explosions on the screen at once as possible?

But obviously (at least we hope it’s obvious despite how I’m about to make this sentence slightly self-contradictory) there’s a lot more subtlety to the skit than just making an action movie trailer. I’m not gonna explain myself on that one though because I’d ruin half of it in doing so.

I still think the turkey is the best part personally, although the exploding stick of death usually gets some laughs. What’s your favorite part? Let us know by leaving a comment!

Interesting fact: Marshall Cain doesn’t kick babies, that’s an old Chuck Norris joke that nobody seems to know.

Slightly less interesting fact: This video was Caleb’s debut, for all of 6 seconds or so.

VASTLY less interesting fact: Brandon Fraser really is the worst action hero of all time, although we love the Mummy and generally enjoy his performances.

NOW GO LEAVE A COMMENT!!!

The theme, rules, whatever was: “A day through your lens in 140 seconds or less.” Most of the entries are pretty artsy (or just ridiculously non sequitur) which makes me wonder what kind of a chance I have. Of course I went for more of a narrative/comedy, which for all I know puts us out of the running too.

But I wanted to be true to who we are if the goal is to get our name out there. That’s really what entering contests is about for me right now, but I’m still waiting for it to be approved so we’ll see if we even manage that. Of course winning would be AWESOME, but I won’t hold my breath. And if I do I’ll cheat by silently breathing through my nose.

I figure my chances at winning this competition are much like my chances at winning in Fantasy Football this week. I had a slow start to the season but cranked it up and took four weeks or so by storm. After propelling myself to an impressive 3rd place from last (impressive because Miller stacked his team in the draft and hasn’t looked back since) I’ve been struggling to maintain 4th and get into the playoffs. This is largely due to a few major injuries sustained on my team (Owen Daniels anyone) but also due to a lack of luck and/or general skill.

This week I’m going up against one of the league’s worst teams, “Holy Crip it’s a Crapple!” One would think losing to him impossible, but unfortunately for me I’m the worst team in the league now and have been operating mostly off luck for a while now.

As you can see, things don’t look too good for the ol’ Jayster. If I win this I’m in the playoffs, if the guy in 5th place (Urine Trouble) loses I’m in the playoffs. However if he wins and I lose this week it’s all over for me.

Unfortunately (things just keep getting worse don’t they?) he’s been on a killer streak for a few weeks and is projected to win while I’ve been struggling along and am projected to lose. Granted projections don’t mean jack when it comes down to Sunday, but it doesn’t look good.

Similarly my chances at winning the Nikon Festival could be construed as decent, if you’re a blind squirrel, but I have this horrible tendency to get strong armed out of competition. Note the Oreo Competition and Nesquik Competition videos. Neither ever made it in to competition due to some ‘technical error’ on their end.

This, my friends, is frustrating. And we all know the true reason they weren’t accepted: they… well actually I have no conspiracy for this. However I’m sure it was a conspiracy aimed at destroying my hopes and dreams! Or a technical error somewhere along the line. I’d rather think it wasn’t my fault either way.

I’m rambling. The point is I’ve entered us in the Nikon Festival and when it’s up I’ll post a link on here. So please, for the love of squirrels everywhere, go comment on it if and when it goes up, and vote for it if it makes it that far. I’ll love you forever, or at least 30 seconds. Whichever comes first.