Hey all,

Instead of a normal weekly episode of my sitcom Buddy Jackson, we decided this week to do a parody of the show "24." Take a look and let me know what you think:

http://www.buddyjackson.com/

This was shot using two Canon XH-A1 cameras. Kevin Good was the DP, and he did a great job on it. He also did some pretty slick post. It was edited in FCP, with the motion graphics created in After Effects. We scored it together using CueBase (sp?).

All of our episodes starting with 14, "The Agony of Defeat," have been shot with the Canons. I really love them.

Thanks.

LOL loved it..

the 3 hole punch line was the killer...loved the pen eye torture... hahahahaha

Thanks Peter, I'm glad you liked it. I love those also :).

Barry,

I thought it was great! Now I have a whole bunch of other movies to watch too!

Mike

That's been forwarded to everyone I know :) really funny stuff...too familiar for we corporate world folks.

Nice parody. I sent it off to my wife who is all over 24..... Really enjoyed this one !!

Sweet 24-ness!

I laughed all the way through it. Very well done.

Thanks guys, I really glad you liked it. We had so much fun making it that I wasn't sure if it was just us who would like it or not :).

Very good parody. And very nice production value, too. Loved it.

Thanks!
Brian Brown

Great work and nice story/parody.

The lighting was very nice... and it looks like you pulled off a lot of setups with a small crew.

2- Nice job with Angst barbie too.

Awesome dialog, great lighting and set design... It was hilarious too! This is by far the first good 24 parody I've ever seen.

lighting diagrams or descriptions?

I loved it! The 3 hole punch, the urgency, and the guy playing Alamida, he phrased his words perfectly.

I'm a big 24 fan and even have a few parody clips too. I'm just doing this for fun, so it's just me and a cat named Jack (link below).

http://www.satoauto.com/video/Interrogation_v2.wmv

I'd be interested in the number countdown sequence you did, what program produced the digital number effect?

Thanks all for the great feedback... I'm really glad you like it.

Glen - yeah, I didn't count the setups, but it was pretty much all in one day. Our crew was me, a DP, a B cam op, a sound opp and two PAs. The complicating factor is that the DP (Kevin Good) is also the actor who finds himself at the business end of a stapler. I ran his cam for the segments he was in. It may seem like a tight scedule, but it was light for us... we only shot one episode that day whereas for regular episodes we always shoot two. Glad you liked Barbie too...

Cole - For lighting we had two Kino Diva lights (one filled with daylight bulbs, the other tungsten), a couple Arris, and a few random things thrown in. If you have a particular scene you'd like a diagram off I can probably recreate it, though I may have to ask Kevin.

Colin - the countdown was done in After Effects. I think there was a stock 7-segment display font used as a mask, but I never actually saw the timelines for that. The guy playing Almeida, Danny Rouhier, is a fabulously talented stand-up comic who is also a huge fan of "24." Once I saw his impression in rehearsal I had to add a couple more lines for him. I hadn't written that character to be Almeida, Danny just threw it in. I wish I could have captured for posterity the impression of Chloe O'Brian he did also, because it was probably even better. Your cat thing was fun :).

Smart, Barry...very smart production.

I really enjoyed it...and sadly will now be wasting/investing more time on your other films!

And thanks too for the breakdown on the filming schedule and crewing - I would have guessed at longer, but I guess you've got a talented crew who know pretty much what they are doing.

In terms of workflow, how much time did you invest in writing/preparing and then editing? It would be good to get a feel for how much time you are investing in each shoot.

I'm usually very organised on a shoot - but that comes as a result of several weeks of part-time preparation.If anything, I'm maybe guilty of trying to get too much shot in a day. My biggest log-jam is editing - and clients changing their minds!

Wow, Sean, I'm honored to inspire your first post - welcome to the board. It is a great place. And certainly I'd love to be responsible for you wasting time :). Thanks so much for the positive feedback. Are you going to post anything?

Writing/preparing time is - frankly - too little. I probably banged this one out in 4 hours or so, and then did some minor tweaks but no real re-writing. Doing the show weekly is a big time-suck to be sure, and this particular shoot came a week earlier than I wanted it to because of actor scheduling, so I had to write and prep three scripts in the week leading up to it (episodes 17-19). We are going to take a break so that I can get ahead of that curve. I also need more general pre-production work in terms of shot-lists and such... we basically go in with nothing but a vague production outline in my brain. We do have one night of actor rehearsal for the four scripts of the weekend (though this time it was three).

Editing for a normal episodes is about eight hours, and one more for sound mix, maybe one more for color correction. For this one it was definitely longer, but I'm not sure how much because I wasn't there for all of it. Kevin Good did it... he also spent a lot of time on the intro graphics and others. We scored it out together in about four hours. We are still tweaking the color correction, because it is playing much darker on PCs than we'd like it to. Updates coming.

Yes, I do have a talented crew, and we've worked together a lot. We've shot 24 episodes of the show in seven different weekends. The crew varies a little, but we have a core group that has commincates very well and we know the space extremely well, which helps a lot. We also just work fast, because we have to. It helps that the actors are very talented and they are almost never a time-suck. They nail their lines in one or two takes and we go on.

Thanks again, and let me know if there's anything else... I can write about production all day long, lol.

Absolutely hilarious, I don't even watch the show and I could appreciate that. Great taste in comedy and very well done! Perhaps you should continue?

Barry,

I'm totally digging this show. I've started watching the episodes from the beginning now. I really like the 4 principal talent.

Question. If you don't mind me asking. Are you making money off of this yet? And if so, how? If not, then what is the marketing plan? I understand if you don't want to share the business aspect stuff.

Best parody I've seen. Well done! Also good to see the XH-A1 in action other than test clips!

One of the better shorts I've seen actually. Good style emulation and lighting.

Hey all,

Thanks again for the great feedback.

Just a note that we finally got a color-corrected version on-line, and it helps a lot. Also, it is playing double-sized on the Buddy Jackson MySpace page:

http://www.myspace.com/buddyjack

Note that this is stretched, not higher resolution - it still looks decent, except the text. We are working on a high-res quicktime to upload also.

The regular sized version plays on the web site:

http://www.buddyjackon.com

Note that the next two episodes are on-line also. "G. Stimpson Erdogan" is our most visually interesting episode so far. It is a celelbration of high-geekdom.