I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

That is the lot of we who tread on the shady side of the law—QI has been pulled from YouTube as a TOS violation.

You can still find almost all episodes (short of the very recent ones) here.

This is my first use of YouTube’s ‘Playlist’ feature. The idea is that if you click this link and then choose “Play All Videos” from the upper right (just below the banner at the top), all 5 sections will play with only a momentary pause between them.

Silvija will be disgusted to see her most hated Jimmy Carr (or squinty Michael Ian Black as I think of him) has returned. Can the merits of David “Peep Show/Unbelievable Truth/Mac vs. PC” Mitchell balance him out? (I say yes, but I also don’t have a problem with Jimmy Carr.) Also featuring Sniglets Hall in a Late Night with Conan O’Brien t-shirt rather than the cowboy shirts the stereotype-minded costumers dude him up in as the “token American.”

But I can’t embed it here (as far as I know), so for aesthetics I will also post the first of five here:

This is the finale for the year. I didn’t love F series… I thought E series and D series were on the whole much funnier. Still, completely bereft now that the season is over and there wasn’t a costumed theme episode in sight.

I have already watched every episode of Room 101, TV Heaven, Telly Hell, Comedy Connections, and post-1996 Have I Got News For You on YouTube, so I have to find a new show to seek out.

When people give me DVD screeners, I make with the Photoshop. No, it doesn’t make any sense.

The original untouched ad (for Dolly Madison, 1960)

I did it with last year’s, too.

Super big thanks to Mike Cagnazzi at AMC/Rainbow for the DVDs.

All true!

(This is not only a real commercial, it won a Clio in 1982)

Trying to find some technical explanation for this.

When exporting from Final Cut Pro (either through Compressor, Quicktime-Conversion, or just saving as Quicktime) it always massively desaturates the file. I only noticed this happening after I upgraded to FCP6.

‘Welcome to my Study" is full of rich forest greens and burgandies, but on export, it looks totally "nuh."

In this particular case (above), the green-screened figure was desaturated MORE than the background and covered in noise. It looks like something from MYST. Like a layer of gauze on top. (This layer has color-correction and chromakey filters on it.)

All the settings are correct. There’s no compression involved—they’re full-framed quicktimes. I have to uncheck the "make everything look like shit" button if I can ever find it.

On the plus side, some memory lane meanderings with old chum Emma Thompson*. On the minus, the facts are all kind of too obvious (but I am both an obsessive over film minutia and American, so may not be obvious to them) and not enough hilariousness.

Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Only one episode left this season (in 2 weeks), can you believe it?

*Will Hines didn’t know Emma Thompson used to be a sketch comic. He also didn’t know Hugh Laurie was too, and he was actually famous for it. Ha ha, Hinesy.

Since the number of people who read my blog (on the weekend, no less) is much smaller than, say, those who check YouTube, FunnyorDie or Facebook, I’m considering this a “soft opening.”

YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3OJCECgDFo
FunnyorDie link: http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/ab0d6aad0d

I am shooting a “spec pilot” for Marvel Comics’ website. Probably on Monday, with the aim of having it signed, sealed, and uploaded by mid-week. These are my expectations.

I did a silly, inconsequential commercial parody, you may recall, called SuperLawyers. Not an original, great idea, but something that was easy to write, easy to shoot, and easy to edit. I made it for Defenders of Stan’s finale.

There is an site editor at Funny or Die who loves Mitch. Mitch starred in SuperLawyers. SuperLawyers was on the front page of Funny or Die (where it was 2/3 “Die”).

The Editor-in-Chief of Marvel saw it there and put it on his Facebook page (presumably because he liked it, not that he was saying ‘look at this piece of shit’ but he is not my Facebook-friend so I don’t know 100% his intentions) so all his Marvelly Facebook-friends saw it.

At the same time, the content team of Marvel.com was looking to replace the video-team that had attempted to produce a “Marvel sketch comedy” show for the site and not actually produced anything funny. I know two Marvel employees through UCB and they provided a bridge between SuperLawyers and my contact info. They want a 3-5 minute “sketch” (as in, self-contained short which can be a traditional sketch or something else funny) every month for the site using characters from their universe but not any character currently being co-produced in a movie franchise by another studio.

I came in and chatted. I pitched a dozen ideas. I am not superhero fan, to be honest, but since my strength and my stumbling block in writing has always been “too much research,” I know an ungodly amount about Marvel (both in-book and in real life). But I think that might be to my advantage since the previous pilot was too fan-boyish and they want videos that will have appeal outside their core fans.

Having been burned once, the head of the site said make a spec. I don’t want to actually spend any of my own money, so I’m making the cheapest idea in the pack with Will Hines and two green screens.
The thing is when you don’t want to spend money on props, costumes, and prep, you end up spending double the amount of time on everything else. The script has to be funny enough to carry it which is a tall order. So, I have to spend the next two days making about 50 full screen graphics for the green screen.

Of course, this could still get killed by the higher-ups.

Inspired by First Lady Obama, I decided it was high time I took a new “official portrait.”

Mitch took these. My glasses are crooked in every one, even the ones I wasn’t wearing glasses in. I need to slip a shim in there.

Some people like to have desktop wallpapers with calendars in them. This is “March” from the real-world physical calendar (artwork previously posted) with the calendar all up in that.

continued in 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

This is a QI XL because it is both “xtra large” and 40 minutes long (XL = Roman numeral for 40). Even the title is nerdy.