First you get the money. Then you get the power. Then you get the press credentials! Once a year, hip hop gets a red carpet and this time around, the Internets Celebrities felt the need to grace it with their presence. In this video, we cover every square inch of the VH1 Hip Hop Honors Awards show: From the stairways to the press room, from the free cold snacks to the free hot food, from backstage to the main stage, get your total fucking access pass with the Internets Celebrities and go deep on a great night for Hip Hop.
Internets Celebrities: Dallas Penn and Rafi Kam
Director: Casimir Nozkowski
Camera/Editing: Terrence Elenteny
Original Music: Jon Davis
Cereal Is Dope was definitely a fun movie to make on my end. Casimir (and Terrence) typically do all the hard work like culling together clips from the hours of footage that we shoot. For Rafi and me the hardest part of the project is pitching the idea to Cas. We have to find a way to endear him or excite him on the subject before he will even consider shooting the movie. For Cas the editing process begins before the tape has even started rolling. The real question is… Why would anyone even want to watch this shit?
The following clips were my pitch to the i.C. in the attempt to have our cereal movie produced. Now if you had seen these first would you have wanted to go ahead and shoot the movie?
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.
White hip-hop fans may be funny looking but they support Wu-Tang, share their weed and provide great entertainment in the form of mud-wrestling. And black guys do like Rage Against the Machine.
On June 29, 2007 the Internets Celebrities visited the amazing Rock the Bells festival on Randall’s Island in New York.
Dallas and Rafi mix it up with the crowd, check the scene by the port-a-potties and catch a performance from the god mc Rakim.
The Internets Celebrities are first and foremost bringers of knowledge. Having braved the unforgiving sun, the entrapping police and the paranoia-inducing contact highs of the Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival, The ICs here go through the DOs and the DON’Ts of successful outdoor concert going. Taped at the Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival in mid-June, this video speaks to all genres of outdoor summer concerts. Take the knowledge supplied here and apply it to an Incubus show in upstate New York, a Boston Philharmonic music festival on Cape Cod, a Cypress Hill summerstage show or any outdoor event where the food is overpriced and the undercovers are trying to get you to buy weed from them.
DO: Watch this video and learn from it.
DON’T: Hold your deuce in.
The Internets Celebrities are Dallas Penn and Rafi Kam
Directed by Casimir Nozkowski
Cinematography/Audio by Ian Savage
Edited by Terrence Elenteny
The Internets Celebrities Mixtape is a new feature we’re going to be rolling out at InternetsCelebrities.com. Think of it as a video sampler, a pu pu platter of visuality, a cultural collage for viewing.
Essentially, we wanted to be able to make videos that offered a more raw look at cultural events the Internets Celebrities were attending while not worrying so much about unifying themes. In other words, we shot a lot of footage worth seeing at the Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival and just wanted to get it out there posthaste.
In the true Mixtape aesthetic, what it lacks in polish and nuance, it makes up for in timeliness and gruff enthusiasm. Look out for other IC Mixtapes coming soon. We’re going to be attending a lot of summer events and the Mixtapes will help us do them justice.
At the Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival, we chop it up with Saigon, Sean Price, Emily King and catch performances from Dres, Price, Jeru and Ghostface.
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.
“Wisecracking social critics who deconstruct the worlds of check-cashing outlets, street vendors and even sugar-laden breakfast cereal.” Read the rest.
