As I detailed in a recent video blog, at any given time, I’m sitting on a few dozen ideas for various creative projects–films, songs, videos, articles, whatever. They can range from a few words tapped out quickly in an email or brainstormed notes in my phone to fully developed pitches and halfway finished screenplays. Sometimes they’ll linger for years unfinished or unrealized; other times, I manage to actually bring them to fruition, even if it takes much longer than expected.
“Pj+” was one of those ideas. It started out as a note on my phone that I must have tapped out maybe around the time of the Apple TV+ presentation (last year?). The idea was to make a video spoofing all of those new premium streaming services, which I thought would also make a good “For New Visitors” video on my YouTube channel. I expanded the note on my phone over a few months with some dialogue and direction, and then by early September, I turned it into a two-page script, which I finally shot in October, and finished editing in early November. All of this for a minute-and-a-half video that only garnered 57 views so far on YouTube:
So, another one of those ideas that was lingering in my phone for just as long (in a note titled “YouTube Ideas”) was a parody of those trailers for MasterClass — the series of online “lessons” taught by masters of their respective crafts (such as Neil Gaiman, Shonda Rhimes and Ron Howard). Even for people like comedians and musicians, the trailers are always so dramatic and self-serious, like it’s Shakespeare himself teaching you playwriting. And what craft am I uniquely qualified to teach? Well, it should be obvious, shouldn’t it?
I first started writing the script for this one, according to Google Docs, on May 3 of this year, and in appropriate procrastinator form, it took until December 20 to finally get the two-minute video finished and posted. Appropriately, it took me so long to get this done that MasterClass UPDATED ALL OF THEIR BRANDING in the interim, so the graphics style being parodied is no longer relevant.
(In all fairness, and this will lose some of my procrastination cred, I was out of commission from late May until late August dealing with family stuff previously blogged about here, but still, 6-to-9 months to write, shoot and edit quickie comedy videos (and I use “comedy” loosely here) is kinda ridiculous.)
I was torn on how to approach the style of the MasterClass spoof, though. With “Pj+,” I knew from the beginning that it would be very much in a polished TV commercial style, with a lot of graphics doing the heavy lifting. With the MasterClass video, I was going to go one of two ways: either super low production values, reinforcing the theme of the video (that I was so far behind I didn’t even have time to set up proper lighting, etc.), or go super high to exactly mimic the style of, say, the Neil Gaiman trailer–cinematic lighting, super shallow depth-of-field, impeccable set design.
What I ended up doing was somewhere in the middle, somewhat out of necessity. I ended up shooting the main footage in a Vegas hotel room on my last (?) filming trip for Parkway of Broken Dreams. (You might recognize the same set up in this video blog.) I didn’t the best gear with me, and only a tastefully decorated but kind of bland hotel room to work with, but I had some time to kill (thanks, pandemic!), and I had the script ready, so I figured I’d knock it out.
I think I captured the tone pretty well regardless, and I even went the extra mile to mimic the same transition-to-filmstrips at the end that MasterClass used a few times. I got some help from my friends on Facebook to fill out the rest of the fake lesson screenshots with their submitted photos, which honestly made the effort all the more worth it.
That’s probably the last new short of the year I’ll be posting, with 2020 finally coming to a close in less than two weeks. But I have plenty more visual entertainment on the way, even if it takes me longer than expected, so give that YouTube channel a subscribe if you want to stay tuned. And have a great holiday season, truly…while staying home and wearing masks. More time for you to drink spiked egg nog and not drive!