Thursday, September 08, 2005
Hurricanes and the Ha-Ha...
Interesting process, this topical short video production.
Had to admit, last Thursday when we had our Idea Generation meeting we all thought it was too soon to do anything on the hurricane as it was too traic and also we had no idea what the story was. Two days later we knew it was the slow response by the government and sent around the take (editorial point of view) we wanted people to concentrate their efforts on - and no one came in with that take...
So we had to brainstorm the whole thing over again in the Script Meeting Tuesday and finally ended up cannibalizing a script Ms. Suzi Barrett had written last Friday when GWB finally surfaced from vacationing and took a quick fly-over from his leather recliner in Air Force One. Funny script that we worked into something we could all be happy with, but wow - what a bunch of frustrated, angry comedy writers. No one likes their hard work to be dropped in the crapper even though that is part of the definition of this gig; though rarely are everyone's ideas scrapped - never a popular decision...
Angry comedy writing is great if it is aimed at the subject matter, but not the process (and by process, I mean me, Andrew and Pep!). In the end it turned out well - a good script, but better yet, Pep & I kibbutzed and came up with a better plan for generating scripts
So look for our hi-larious take on disaster response (?) in the next day or two...
On a less frustrating note - last week's animation of Princess Amalia's report to her new little sister on Summer 2005 went swimmingly well. As compared to the Iran Nuclear Song on which production dragged out too long for feedback from the producers (and while good, suffered from lack of notes/criticism before release), this one I pretty much did on my own with Amber Ruffin and a fantastic script inspired by Rachel Miller's original story & concept based in child-like drawings by Amalia on the royal family.
Pretty cool process - it was something we recognized right away as a format we'd like to try and with a main character we'd like to give voice to - and have in the past in Pep & Greg's two-man show from 2003...
Had to admit, last Thursday when we had our Idea Generation meeting we all thought it was too soon to do anything on the hurricane as it was too traic and also we had no idea what the story was. Two days later we knew it was the slow response by the government and sent around the take (editorial point of view) we wanted people to concentrate their efforts on - and no one came in with that take...
So we had to brainstorm the whole thing over again in the Script Meeting Tuesday and finally ended up cannibalizing a script Ms. Suzi Barrett had written last Friday when GWB finally surfaced from vacationing and took a quick fly-over from his leather recliner in Air Force One. Funny script that we worked into something we could all be happy with, but wow - what a bunch of frustrated, angry comedy writers. No one likes their hard work to be dropped in the crapper even though that is part of the definition of this gig; though rarely are everyone's ideas scrapped - never a popular decision...
Angry comedy writing is great if it is aimed at the subject matter, but not the process (and by process, I mean me, Andrew and Pep!). In the end it turned out well - a good script, but better yet, Pep & I kibbutzed and came up with a better plan for generating scripts
So look for our hi-larious take on disaster response (?) in the next day or two...
On a less frustrating note - last week's animation of Princess Amalia's report to her new little sister on Summer 2005 went swimmingly well. As compared to the Iran Nuclear Song on which production dragged out too long for feedback from the producers (and while good, suffered from lack of notes/criticism before release), this one I pretty much did on my own with Amber Ruffin and a fantastic script inspired by Rachel Miller's original story & concept based in child-like drawings by Amalia on the royal family.
Pretty cool process - it was something we recognized right away as a format we'd like to try and with a main character we'd like to give voice to - and have in the past in Pep & Greg's two-man show from 2003...
