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At some point, I’m going to tire of making these things. Unfortunately for the general public, I still have at least three more titles queued up and ready to hit the production line. In the meantime, here’s Dane Cook Gets Sicked Up On By A Little Girl With Demonic Possession. It was mostly thrown together while I was filming, rather than being planned out in detail beforehand. The vomit effect could have been better but I think it turned out ok otherwise.

Those who forget the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat them. Similarly, those who forget to pepper their standup sets with funny bits are doomed to suffer endless indignities at the hands of amateur animators.

Dane Cook, from what I’ve seen of his work, belongs to the shout-something-obvious school of stand up comedy. Not really my cup of tea but he’s become very popular off the back of it, so I suppose someone must like that sort of thing.

Anyway, a few days ago, Youtube user and close personal friend SpastikChuwawa made a short film celebrating Mr Cook’s achievements, Dane Cook Gets Slapped By A Hobo With A Fish. I was so moved by this film that I felt I ought to somehow try to convey my own complex feelings about the man through the medium of film. And that is what I have done in Dane Cook Gets Goosed By a Pirate With a Hook for a Hand.

If you have feelings of your own about Mr Cook, please don’t be afraid to share them in the comments.

The announcement of the results for the Video Wars competition was put back a week so that Adam and Joe could swan off to Leicester to do a show from the Summer Sundae festival, so I won’t find out how my video did until the 16th August.

In the meantime, I’ve put up a proper page for the film with higher quality downloadable versions of the video here and some juicy behind-the-scenes nuggets here. If you follow my Youtube stuff, you’ll have seen most of it already but there’s a nice new wallpaper available there. For certain less well-known definitions of the word “nice”.

Another year, another competition.

This is my entry for Adam & Joe’s Video Wars competition. They do the Saturday morning radio show on BBC 6 Music and one of the more popular features on the show (out of a grand total of two) is Song Wars, where Adam and Joe create a song each based on a theme suggested by a listener. Other listeners then vote for the best song, and then Joe wins.

In a spirit of openness and inclusiveness, the boys launched the Video Wars competition to allow listeners to battle it out amongst themselves by creating a music video for one of two Song Wars songs. I chose Adam’s song, Jane’s Brain because it was shorter and it was the first one I came up with an idea for. The idea, like pretty much everyone else who entered with that song, was to interpret the lyrics literally.

This is my entry: Jane’s Brain

It’s only thirty seconds long, so it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Adam has a ton of stuff on youtube as well. You can watch that as well, if you like.

I won! The competition results were announced today and Bowling for Sandercoe came out on top. I now get a load of cool guitar stuff to distract me from making more films.

The film has also made it onto the front page of YouTube, generating over 400,000 views and a ton of comments at the time of writing. Fame and fortune can’t be far away now.

In other news, I got around to putting a page up for the film here and a page of fascinating and informative special features to enjoy. See? I haven’t forgotten about the little people now that I’m a minor internet celebrity.

I think this one needs a bit of explaining…

As part of my fledgling midlife crisis, I’m trying to teach myself to play the guitar. Justin Sandercoe is a very nice man with a website devoted to teaching people to play the guitar. It’s like we’re made for each other. Speaking as a complete guitar noob, I can say that his beginner lessons do actually seem to work. And he does it all for free, which is nice.

He posts tutorial videos on Youtube, which was how I first found out about him, and he recently put up a competition there to win a bunch of guitar stuff, with the prize going to the video demonstrating the most innovative use of a guitar.

This is my entry: Bowling for Sandercoe

The music is by my fine internet chum, Loïc Desjardins, who wrote, performed and mixed the score. That’s probably him whistling on it too. He managed to do this all in the space of about a week, despite me giving him nothing in the way of a useable brief and changing around the edit of the film while he was still working on it. Visit his site and tell him how cool he is.

There will be the usual smorgasbord of downloadable versions and behind-the-scenes photos sometime in the near future.

Waiting for the music for this exciting new film has given me time to take stock and cast a critical eye over the version that I’d edited together. It turns out this is a good thing, because I spotted a few problems with it and I’m now in the process of reshooting a couple of bits that didn’t work quite as well as I wanted.

It’s also given me time to throw together a deeply misleading trailer that makes the film look a lot more interesting than it will probably end up being. Kind of like any other trailer, really…

Quicktime trailer
DivX trailer

I’ll post a youtube version once the film is out. The reasons for that will become apparent.