Project Roles: Writer / Producer / Editor
Location: Written and edited in Chicago, shot in Kansas City
Ok, story time.
As I've mentioned in this blog before, Brian and I have resumed our work creating video releases for our comedy channel Friend Dog Studios. We've renewed ourselves for a season and committed to releasing something every two weeks at least through August, probably September.
There are a number of reasons why we've decided to do this, but I won't go into that now.
There's a big, production-heavy concept we really want to do here in Chicago. Unfortunately, we keep having to push that back because of the challenges involved in getting the necessary cast and crew.
A little over a week ago, it became clear to us that this bigger idea wasn't going to happen in time to keep with our release schedule. So we pushed it back. Now we needed something new to take its place. Something that could be shot by Thursday at the latest. And hopefully something, yanno, funny.
I had personally become fascinated with the current news stories involving "TV personality" and foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic Alex Jones. His legal cases, his de-platforming by just about every major company, all of that. And I remembered that our good friend Michael Foster had - maybe a year ago - mentioned that he thought it would be funny if he played Jones for us at some point.
I talked it through with Brian for a while. We formulated a concept. One big hurdle was that Foster was in KC, and we had to stay in Chicago. I'd have to produce this thing remotely and assemble a crew in a totally different state.
I am blown away to tell you that not only did that happen, but I actually ended up with more volunteers than we even needed. On Sunday and Monday I waded through a flurry of emails to get all the arrangements made.
On set-shot.
On Tuesday I wrote the first draft of the script. Brian made revisions.
On Wednesday I finished the script, created a shot list, and had a phone call with the director.
On Thursday, our incredible production team shot the whole thing in KC, then sent me the footage via Google Drive.
Friday and Saturday, I edited. For like, 20 hours.
And now, this thing exists.
The point of this story is that my mouth is kind of on the floor. I'm proud of myself for all the work I put in, but more importantly, I'm b l o w n a w a y by the amazing artists who stepped up and made this happen in such a high-quality way, so quickly, knowing all along that we could afford to pay them little to nothing for their time.
Having friends like this is amazing.
Knowing artists like this is spectacular.
I am a lucky, lucky man.
Hope you enjoy the vid.
"ALEX JONES' NEW SHOW"
Michael Foster............Alex Jones
Directed by Jamie Campbell
Director of Photography Cory Vetter
Hair & Wardrobe by Nancy Robinson
Lead Production Assistant Dalyn Le Grand
Production Assistants / Audio Engineers Corbin Eaton & Drew McCall
Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart.