(56.8mb) Click play and then pause it to allow it to load a bit.

The newest Please Respond, Eight And Up. It runs pretty long.

What I Thought Would Happen:

This monologue isn’t in the original script. It was written based on a commission for another video that I was shooting at the same time. Danny Djeljosevic helped me pump it up a little bit after an initial draft. It seems like this is one of the few projects that collaboration on writing projects actually work.

I needed a few things for it to work the way I envisioned it in my head: a girl’s picture in a frame, acrylic paints, a canvas and an easel. The girl’s picture was easy, I went browsing around Facebook and ended up choosing a friend of mine, Sarah H’s picture without telling her. Well now she knows, I guess. Creepy!

The paints, canvas, and easel were a lot harder to come by.

What Actually Happened:

The original draft had the main character take up painting instead of drawing. There were a lot of fun gags that I had planned to go along with that, but when getting the paint and canvas fell through, I ended up giving the character a package of markers instead. Without the paint and canvas, I went into shooting it pretty clueless what to do with the markers and sketchpad, so besides the “words” in the script most of it (the visuals and the story arc) was made up on the spot.

I thought Ryan would be good for the part, but he ended up being phenomenal. Not only could he actually legitimately draw on the sketchpad I gave him (surprised him with is more accurate), he came up with pretty much all of the visual jokes. He was also a good enough artist to be able to fake drawing badly. The whole drawing about drawing progressively better versions of the girlfriend wasn’t written into the script, it just ended up happening.

He also added a lot to the script as far as improving. We only shot two masters, but he gave me a lot more to work with than was in the script.

The only-two-masters thing one of the big problems in editing. I had this idea where I wanted it to look like a video blog, but even though that idea fell through, I never decided to get more shots to choose from.

Overall:

I think this one is “funnier” than Hot Ebony, Hory Ivory but doesn’t have as many “big ideas” and isn’t as relevant. I expected it to be a bit better (more shot variety) and have more gags, but anything wrong with how it came out was my fault.