At the end of Checkmate, Dallas and Rafi make it rain:
I’d originally wanted to make a movie where people pay for everyday things by making it rain (a mother and child buying groceries, adding to the collection plate at church, the tooth fairy, etc) but in the end, I really just thought it’d be funny to make it rain on a sunday afternoon on a street corner. It wasn’t clear that this scene would make it into Checkmate when we did it. But when I saw video of Dallas chasing that one single down a storm drain, it seemed metaphorically appropriate. I still think a movie about people who make it rain with coins would be a hit.
I like to be prepared before we shoot. The night before we met up, I decided to test out the act of making it rain. Without a handy stripclub, I gathered my singles and attempted to rain dollar bills in my living room. I was trying to answer these hard questions: Do you throw the bills straight up in the air? Do you want to fan them out before you throw them? Should they go all at once or do you save some for a follow-up toss? Do you say the words “make it rain” in a sinister voice when you throw the dollar bills in the air? Or is it better to stay silent and let the cascade of 1s speak for your player status? The answer to these questions is unique to every rainmaker (I like to say “Make it Rain” in a sinister voice and keep my hands extended after throwing the dollar bills straight up in one blast).
But my primary observation about the act of making it rain is that it’s over very quickly. Sure, you might feel fresh for a few seconds. But then gravity asserts itself, leaving you with a hard choice: walk away or scramble on the ground for your flung currency.
The Internets Celebrities choose the latter - as you can see in the extended, uncut, unrated, Make it Rain scene.
When you hear a song as funny as “Always” by the Hazzards, you know it needs a video.
True story, I was not super amped to begin with on this project - if only because I was so used to the more lo-fi, documentary productions I’d been doing here with the ICs. I’m not saying it’s easier but working on a set demands more precision and timely execution than shooting the hell out of documentary shooting ratio. I could not have done it without a lot of excellent people: Matt Elkind, Kayla Graffam, Oliver Butler, Sigal Inbar, Sydney Maresca, Anne Harris, Simon Astor, Hannah Bos - to name just a very few.
But I think it came out great. And I’m really glad I directed it.
I like to think Urine Nation succeeds as a guide for the bathroom challenged. But let’s face it - we’re a little low on actual facts and numbers. It’s all well and good to say find a hotel, find a Starbucks, find a phonebooth. But if I’m on corner A in neighborhood B, where the fuck is that actual fine hotel with the fancy handsoaps? We speak in generalities because it’d be more like a feature film, a decalogue even, to cinematically render ALL the locations deserving and accepting of your piss in Manhattan.
We keep it short video style because there are people out there like Tommy Mintz - an old high school chum of Rafi and I - who will go that extra mile. Ladies and Gentlemen, witness…
They say good writing is all about ruthless editing. You could argue that the same is true of any creative art. There’s always the impulse to include everything and the kitchen sink. By nature we are creatures of ego, possessive of every fragment of thought, every image we put out there. But it is the ability to pare down — to take out the distractions and the self-indulgences in order to focus on the heart of the story — that separates the amateur from the artist.
I used to write a lot of poetry back in college. The best editor I ever had was a fellow student who made me re-write one poem at least a half-dozen times, always with the mantra “if you don’t need it - get rid of it”.
Eventually the real poem emerged from the original masturbatory pages I had submitted. The work had transformed and what remained was just the essence: the unfocused language had become crisp, the lines consistently short, the unnecessary ideas removed.
Ironically, this editor had great difficulty following his own advice. Instead of keeping his own poetry tight, he was forever filling notebooks with epic verse about factory workers - their drug habits and trashy women, their fucked up relationships with their fathers and so on. It was colorful stuff for sure but it was impossible not to lose the plot.
Discerning what works from what doesn’t in the context of your own project is a tricky task. It’s one thing to say “if you don’t need it, get rid of it” and quite another to realize what it means for your finished project to need or not need something, let alone having the balls to cut up your work.
Editing video
As with poetry, video moves according to a rhythm and has to be economical to be effective. There is no way to skim a video so if one begins to amble, most people would simply turn it off… If your video becomes monotonous or unfocused — it is doomed.
The video editing workflow pretty much goes like this:
Can this video be cut shorter?
If yes, shorten.
If not (really?), you’re done!
Is shortened cut worse than previous cut?
If not, go back to Question 1.
If yes (unlikely), go back to previous cut.
An example of this would be the 4-minute cut of Bodega that ran on The Daily Reel originally. The pacing may have been nicer for short attention spans but too much was lost which would have been enjoyed by those who had committed their attention. Our preferred 6 and a half minute cut may have broken a rule of viral media by being over five minutes but this version of the video has been a slow-burner for us, with a cult following that has grown and now perhaps tipped with accolades at film festivals and an appearance last week on Digg’s homepage.
There’s a certain zen aspect to it all… Your video should be as short as it can be - but not a second shorter!
Editing may be the most important step in a video’s creation. And I am just beginning to understand that I need to approach video the same way I learned to approach writing years back.
Which baby to kill and which to save!
That’s why when Cas sent us the clip reels for Cereal is Dope — nearly 40 minutes of us improvising about breakfast cereal — I wondered how he’d get this thing down to 5 minutes when about half of it seemed really funny to me. It took Cas a while to find his path but he really didn’t have much of a choice after all. He needed everything he could get with us setting up why we love cereal, to provide the video with structure so it wasn’t a bunch of floating jokes.
One fan told me he could have watched 30 minutes of us talking smack about cereal. As someone who did watch that much and enjoyed it, I get what he’s saying… But the fact is it wouldn’t have been nearly as good an end-result. A great video is more than a string of disconnected jokes - a great video tells a story.
After we posted Cereal is Dope, I was looking through the original clip reels to pick the best of the outtakes. Like my college editor, unable to cut down his own work even though he knew better, I wanted to run it all! Any little segment that gave me a chuckle was worth running .. Before I knew it, I had cut up nearly 20 clips.
The thing is most of them were just so-so. For most of them there was a good reason they were nowhere near the final cut of Cereal is Dope. Cas and then Dallas talked some sense into me. It doesn’t matter if a few fans think they want to see all your footage… You have to know better.
Not everything has to be perfect but if a good chunk of what you’re broadcasting to the world sucks then “you’re doing bad shit” like Kellogg’s.
So with that in mind we dare instead to pick just the best of the unused clips. We end up with six in total for your enjoyment. Only a half-dozen that want to be calling you “cousin”.
When the Internets Celebrities cover an event, that event GETS covered. In the fourth video culled from our one-day shoot at the Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival, the Internets Celebrities put everyone from the weed carriers to the label owners on tape.
Damn you Rock The Bells press pass! You fucked up! You got the Internets Celebrites close enough to shoot a visually dope video of Rakim performing My Melody at Rock the Bells 2007 but ensured our audio would be absolutely unusable. The bass literally eats our camera mic, leaving in its wake a horrifyingly distorted audio track and us with half of something great.
So this is the Internets Celebrities solution: Take the great Kid Capri intro, the great streaky video of Rakim on stage and mash it together with the original audio from My Melody off Paid in Full. This sync will not fool you but the moments when it matches up are very satisfying.
Note the guy at the one minute mark who says “Fuck You” when we turn and film the crowd. He is now an Internets Celebrity.
There were a few long interviews we did at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival that were filled with good stuff but just didn’t fit the 4 minute video a day format that we’d agreed to with The Daily Reel. So the Internets Celebs site is the perfect place to unveil them. We already showed you our interview with independent filmmakers and savvy web marketers Four Eyed Monsters. Today we cover our interview with rap’s first crossover superstar, MC Hammer. Hopefully we can also put together something soon from the talk we had with Sopranos actor turned Sundance filmmaker Louis Lombardi. Stay tuned…
Probably the greatest celebrity opening in the entire Sundance series is MC Hammer’s exhilarating and unprompted “It’s Hammer Time!” that kicks off The Filmmakers episode. Our unexpected meeting with Hammer was a definite highlight of the whole trip.
As the only peron on our team without a laptop, I was doing my usual early morning Internets addiction thing at the AOL Cyber Lounge across the street from our hotel. Suddenly I heard a gruff, familiar voice talking to some of the staff people there. I approached Hammer, told him what we were all about and asked if he’d be willing to do an Internets Celebrities interview. He was willing so I called Cas and Dallas, both of whom were sleeping as this all went down about 8am, and had them rush over to shoot an unscripted, unplanned chat with Hammer.
We discussed the repercussions of the RIAA raid on DJ Drama that had happened that week and what it revealed about the music industry. Hammer also clued us in on his long-time involvement in the spheres of film (from the 2 Legit days to financing the debut film of director Justin Lin) and Internet media. Hammer was an extremely generous interview subject - open and intelligent - and I must say we were uniquely suited to join him in a discussion of any of these channels from hip-hop to film to internets. We are the impresarios of improvising. We bring the right words to ad libs like a book of Mad Libs. And all that….
But just to show it doesn’t always come so naturally (in case watching me in this interview fidget around wishing I had a chair doesn’t reveal that), let me take you inside my head for a minute. When we were just getting set to start the interview I asked myself “what would my OhWord audience want me to ask?” The reply: “Ask him about the story MC Serch has been telling that Hammer had a hit out on him back in the day!” And I’m holding on to that question, with the White Rapper show popping off at the time I have a good enough segue to use. But as the interview goes on I get this feeling about what a genuine guy we’re chopping it up with. I start to feel like I would be a total creep to betray Hammer’s trust and breech a negative topic that may or may not have happened nearly twenty years earlier and has nothing to do with the moment.
I’m glad I didn’t go there and I’m glad I met the legendary MC Hammer, a self-made man who has been the brunt of many disses and jokes and yet radiates goodwill and extreme focus.
By the way you can check out Hammer’s blog which gives you a glimpse into his life but also touches on music, politics and technology.
One of the highlights of our trip to Sundance was having a chance to talk with Susan and Arin who together comprise the film-making team Four Eyed Monsters. The duo had a movie at Slamdance a few years earlier but were shocked at how little that was helping the film get distributed. So they created a video blog via ITunes and MySpace and developed a following in that way.
Four Eyed Monsters are trailblazers in that they showed how indie filmmakers can create their own distribution channels and have great success cultivating their own audience. Their success online led to audience-demanded screenings across the country. Most recently Susan and Arin partnered up with YouTube and their movie became the first feature length video at YouTube.
But when we first found them they were in a jacuzzi surrounded by a crew of similarly pale indie filmmakers. This was no standard Hollywood hot tub party. This was Utah - there was frost on the deck of the pool! Instead of snorting lines and discussing Scientology, these guys were having a panel about how new media is changing filmmaking and film distribution. Arin with his voice recorder stood in the center of the hot tub leaning over people or passing the device around to capture the forum for posterity.
Immediately afterwards we had a chance to do a rare serious unscripted interview with Four Eyed Monsters. Ian was with us that evening and he was already a big fan of their work so he quickly got us familiar.
We hope you enjoy this interview with two bright, passionate evangelists of the Internets.
For more on Slamdance, check out Internets Celebrities at Sundance episode 5 - the Filmmakers
For a glimpse of the jacuzzi party, check out Internets Celebrities at Sundance episode 6 - the Parties
