A Brief History in Video Form
A couple of years ago, when my friends and I all lived in the Garden of Eden, we had tons of spare time on our hands. We spent this time doing lots of hard drugs, and also making short films. Focused on comedy, we made a few video blogs, a couple of one offs, and a pair of video game related videos that garnished a bit of recognition.
“Good Morning, iPhone” was something we came up with and shot in a few hours one weekend. We thought it was silly and a pretty good example of us Apple fanatics. A keen eyed observer will see some of the original jailbreaking in action with ApolloIM and Customize.app. This video was featured in The New York Times’ comedy section and got a quaint amount of views.
“Rock Band: One Man’s Journey” was our tour de force. As gamers, we were looking forward to the dethroner of Guitar Hero, and from that a concept of a pathetic loser character who’s way too overconfident, with way too high of expectations (and a bit mentally troubled) was born. Rock Band was shot over the course of two or three days with a 3 man crew. We did some guerilla filming inside and outside a GameStop and got some really fun material. RB was really well received and got on the front page of Joystiq (thanks to the great taste of Alexander Sliwinksi), and featured in the comedy section of The New York Times. This got us over 100,000 views and kinda blew us away.
“Wii Fit: One Man’s Journey” was the final story of our troubled “One man”. Being quite a bit overweight, he obviously got excited about Wii Fit and its ability to help him instantly shed pounds. Obviously this isn’t the case, and he reacts as you’d guess. Wii Fit wasn’t as popular as Rock Band, getting a little less than half the views, but still at nearly 55,000, which is still pretty cool! I’m much fonder of the WiiFit short myself. I think we really honed in on the comedy & characters. It’s a great sequel. At this point, viewers were really ceasing to see the line between realism and comedy, and plenty of them sounded off via comments that this wasn’t all you had to do to lose weight. That made me/us laugh.
A flurry of location changes, new jobs and life evolutions kinda swayed us out of filmmaking range, but we still have the passion and still want to make comedy for people to enjoy. We have scripts and everything. And since we’re all in the same state now (albeit different cities), we have faith we’ll be able to (hopefully) make you laugh again.
On a personal note, rewatching these videos 2-3 years later is kinda crazy. I’ve lost more than 50lbs since my weight in these videos, and this is the first time I’ve really seen a direct comparison to how I look now, and it’s pretty crazy.
Also, we’re pretty sure “Friend” is dead. If he isn’t dead, he must be pretty crippled.
Hope you enjoy!
M
