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"Movie/tv scene re-create"
On the bright side Rich, those 995 guys who aren't buying your videos or contributing to them financially are, at the very least, offering their personal critiques of what you do and nudging you to make all your videos to cater specifically to them.
You've always got that going for you.
You've always got that going for you.
Rich certainly speaks from many years of experience at doing parody scenes, and Lenny has done numerous pie parodies cos I help him shoot many of them (his Monica versus Hillary pie parody is a classic).Leon has made an entire series of excellent gunge videos based on the YCDTOTV series. We made our first wet and messy parody scenes in 1992 based on the comedy skits created in the classic 1980's Japanese tv shows with Ken Shimura, and by 1994 we did our "Basic Instinct" Sharon Stone style pie parody too.
Having worked with Rob Blaine, Lenny, Hurley Coward and others, I can say that it is extremely time consuming to do a parody scene as skillfully as The 3 Stooges skits....their comedic timing and choreography were flawless, and none of us could do scenes the way they do them in the movies. We used to reherase our tit for tat pie scenes 3-4 time with dry cloth rags in place of the pies, to make sure the girls knew what pie to throw to whom and make sure the camera guy knew where the pie was going to hit (nothing is more frustrating when you coach the model to throw a pie to the crotch, and that is where your camera is pointing, and then the model wanders off script and decides to add-lib and throw the pie to the face instead, meaning you totally missed capturing the shot on camera).
As for the production costs versus the sales, Rich raises a good point, cos just look at the fancy set's that Leon's builds at his studio for his productions, and the number of the girls, and you can see that these scenes are not cheap to produce and making enough sales to cover costs is a real struggle these days. Things were much easier in my and Lenny's hey day (the 1990's) because there was no Youtube in those days and so more people supported the videos you made.
Lenny and I used to get some pretty outlandish custom video requests in the past where the script writers would write all kinds of insane things into the script that made you scratch you head...I remember one custom video request that had me scratching my head...it started out...."25 cheerleaders are on a schoolbus that runs off the side of a mountain and starts to sink in quicksand"....and I am thinking ...OK...we can do that, it will cost 10 grand for the talent, 10 grand for a used school bus, 10 grand for a crane to recover the schoolbus and dispose of the wreckage, ...and with permits, liability insurance, a honey wagon for catering, a film crew, a safety crew et al....this will cost around 50 grand to shoot this scene, and the custom sponsor only sent a check for $300.....hmmm......either send me another 49 grand or please change your script and keep it simple.
I just had an insane custom video request last month, for a wetlook/underwater shoot to be done, and the guy wanted us to re-create the 10 minute underwater scuba finale scene from the 1965 James Bond film "Thunderball"...only he wanted us to shoot it in our small swimming pool for $300. I had to explain to him that that 10 minute scene took 3 months of filming in the Bahamas with a crew of 200 cast and divers and in today's dollars that scene would cost at least 5 million dollars to shoot. Hotels cost $250 per night in the Bahamas...so work the math how much it would cost just to spend 2-3 months on location with a large crew of people and 100+ hotel rooms. We shot our cheesy video Agent H20 & the Vampires video in the Bahamas in 1995 with a cast and crew of 18 people for 10 days, and the bills I had to pay for that shoot were over 35 grand, so that one video alone cost over 35 grand and most of the Artscene/Aquantics and Messy Fun videos made in the 1990's needed budgets of 15-20 grand per video too, and in those days of VHS tape sales and no Youtube you still had red ink for 2-3 years before you recovered your costs. This is why we can't make videos with larger budgets today, cos if I spent today what I spent to make the Vampires video in 1995....I would surely be pushing up daises before we made enough sales to recover our costs.
Anyway....there are lots of talented wam producers on this forum who have the skills and abilities to do great parodies....i.e. Rich, Leon, Lenny etc, but the real problem would be trying to fund those parodies if you wanted them done well.
MK
ps...some trivia for you....the last project Rob Blaine was in process of working on before he passed away in 2000....was his dream to do a messy version of Star Trek, and he was in the planning stages to build the sets and he had the script and everything mapped out but then he passed away and sadly his dream to do a full feature length Star Trek wam film never got made.
Having worked with Rob Blaine, Lenny, Hurley Coward and others, I can say that it is extremely time consuming to do a parody scene as skillfully as The 3 Stooges skits....their comedic timing and choreography were flawless, and none of us could do scenes the way they do them in the movies. We used to reherase our tit for tat pie scenes 3-4 time with dry cloth rags in place of the pies, to make sure the girls knew what pie to throw to whom and make sure the camera guy knew where the pie was going to hit (nothing is more frustrating when you coach the model to throw a pie to the crotch, and that is where your camera is pointing, and then the model wanders off script and decides to add-lib and throw the pie to the face instead, meaning you totally missed capturing the shot on camera).
As for the production costs versus the sales, Rich raises a good point, cos just look at the fancy set's that Leon's builds at his studio for his productions, and the number of the girls, and you can see that these scenes are not cheap to produce and making enough sales to cover costs is a real struggle these days. Things were much easier in my and Lenny's hey day (the 1990's) because there was no Youtube in those days and so more people supported the videos you made.
Lenny and I used to get some pretty outlandish custom video requests in the past where the script writers would write all kinds of insane things into the script that made you scratch you head...I remember one custom video request that had me scratching my head...it started out...."25 cheerleaders are on a schoolbus that runs off the side of a mountain and starts to sink in quicksand"....and I am thinking ...OK...we can do that, it will cost 10 grand for the talent, 10 grand for a used school bus, 10 grand for a crane to recover the schoolbus and dispose of the wreckage, ...and with permits, liability insurance, a honey wagon for catering, a film crew, a safety crew et al....this will cost around 50 grand to shoot this scene, and the custom sponsor only sent a check for $300.....hmmm......either send me another 49 grand or please change your script and keep it simple.
I just had an insane custom video request last month, for a wetlook/underwater shoot to be done, and the guy wanted us to re-create the 10 minute underwater scuba finale scene from the 1965 James Bond film "Thunderball"...only he wanted us to shoot it in our small swimming pool for $300. I had to explain to him that that 10 minute scene took 3 months of filming in the Bahamas with a crew of 200 cast and divers and in today's dollars that scene would cost at least 5 million dollars to shoot. Hotels cost $250 per night in the Bahamas...so work the math how much it would cost just to spend 2-3 months on location with a large crew of people and 100+ hotel rooms. We shot our cheesy video Agent H20 & the Vampires video in the Bahamas in 1995 with a cast and crew of 18 people for 10 days, and the bills I had to pay for that shoot were over 35 grand, so that one video alone cost over 35 grand and most of the Artscene/Aquantics and Messy Fun videos made in the 1990's needed budgets of 15-20 grand per video too, and in those days of VHS tape sales and no Youtube you still had red ink for 2-3 years before you recovered your costs. This is why we can't make videos with larger budgets today, cos if I spent today what I spent to make the Vampires video in 1995....I would surely be pushing up daises before we made enough sales to recover our costs.
Anyway....there are lots of talented wam producers on this forum who have the skills and abilities to do great parodies....i.e. Rich, Leon, Lenny etc, but the real problem would be trying to fund those parodies if you wanted them done well.
MK
ps...some trivia for you....the last project Rob Blaine was in process of working on before he passed away in 2000....was his dream to do a messy version of Star Trek, and he was in the planning stages to build the sets and he had the script and everything mapped out but then he passed away and sadly his dream to do a full feature length Star Trek wam film never got made.
Do unto others, then run
Well said, Mark.
I've always shot everything on a shoestring. I've never paid a single crew member or assistant... Just the talent (AKA the models). It's probably the only reason I still turn a profit.
I had some GREAT ideas for a YCDTOTV parody years ago... But it was just too hard to work out from a budget standpoint. I still hope to pull it off one day... We'll see....
I've always shot everything on a shoestring. I've never paid a single crew member or assistant... Just the talent (AKA the models). It's probably the only reason I still turn a profit.
I had some GREAT ideas for a YCDTOTV parody years ago... But it was just too hard to work out from a budget standpoint. I still hope to pull it off one day... We'll see....
Trying to parody a famous wam scene from a tv series or movies is hard to do when they have million dollar budgets and big studio facilities and loads of crew helpers to wrangle the pies. One of the things I am lousy at doing is directing while holding a camera at the same time. Leon is skillfully ambidextrous cos he can hold a stills camera in one hand and a video camera in the other hand and shoot video and stills and direct everything all at the same time. I can't walk and chew gum at the same time so I prefer to have a separate director like Lenny or Tracie direct the action, so I can focus on framing the shots better.
My partner Tracie's husband works in the Miami Film industry and works on many music videos and tv commercials as well as mainstream film, and he often works on 30 second commercials that take 4 days to get those 30 seconds of shots they want. When we did our Basic Instinct pie parody in 1993 that was only a 4 minute scene (after editing) but we spent over 4 hours to stage and rehearse and shoot that scene. I generally worked quite fast in shooting scenes....like the B movie director Ed Wood...who made Plan 9 from Outer Space and many more bad movies...he was known as "one take Eddie"....and unless something goes dramatically wrong...I would just keep on going even if we screwed things up at times.
Actually...I think it is more fun to make wam scenes out of non-wam scenes from movies and tv....e.g. like your "Saw" pie parody.....cos there is no point in trying to re-make a classic scene like the "Three's Company" pie scene...cos nobody can emulate the comedic talent of John Ritter and company.
There are some pie skits that I can watch 100+ times and no matter how many times I see it again, it still makes me laugh every time...e.g. the Johnny Carson "Ring around the collar" skit or the The 3 Stooges scene where the pie is stuck to the ceiling....and I would never try to copy those classic scenes because those scenes had comedic "timing" and wam producers like us are not professional comics and our girls are not professionally trained actresses, and everything we do is rather stilted.
Even Rob Blaine had a style of staging and directing his scenes that was like "stop motion" video like a claymation film....like the stop motion film process used to make the 1933 film King Kong....i.e. Rob would take many many hours just to shoot a pie scenes that Lenny and I would knock off in 20 minutes, because Lenny and I just went with the flow and kept the action going, but Rob was a perfectionist for staging things so he would only roll cameras for a quick 10 seconds and then cut and reposition the girls for the next 10 second shot, so the magic of his scenes was all done in the editing room...just like the King Kong movie was edited.
MK
My partner Tracie's husband works in the Miami Film industry and works on many music videos and tv commercials as well as mainstream film, and he often works on 30 second commercials that take 4 days to get those 30 seconds of shots they want. When we did our Basic Instinct pie parody in 1993 that was only a 4 minute scene (after editing) but we spent over 4 hours to stage and rehearse and shoot that scene. I generally worked quite fast in shooting scenes....like the B movie director Ed Wood...who made Plan 9 from Outer Space and many more bad movies...he was known as "one take Eddie"....and unless something goes dramatically wrong...I would just keep on going even if we screwed things up at times.
Actually...I think it is more fun to make wam scenes out of non-wam scenes from movies and tv....e.g. like your "Saw" pie parody.....cos there is no point in trying to re-make a classic scene like the "Three's Company" pie scene...cos nobody can emulate the comedic talent of John Ritter and company.
There are some pie skits that I can watch 100+ times and no matter how many times I see it again, it still makes me laugh every time...e.g. the Johnny Carson "Ring around the collar" skit or the The 3 Stooges scene where the pie is stuck to the ceiling....and I would never try to copy those classic scenes because those scenes had comedic "timing" and wam producers like us are not professional comics and our girls are not professionally trained actresses, and everything we do is rather stilted.
Even Rob Blaine had a style of staging and directing his scenes that was like "stop motion" video like a claymation film....like the stop motion film process used to make the 1933 film King Kong....i.e. Rob would take many many hours just to shoot a pie scenes that Lenny and I would knock off in 20 minutes, because Lenny and I just went with the flow and kept the action going, but Rob was a perfectionist for staging things so he would only roll cameras for a quick 10 seconds and then cut and reposition the girls for the next 10 second shot, so the magic of his scenes was all done in the editing room...just like the King Kong movie was edited.
MK
Do unto others, then run
SStuff said:"But back then it was like you, Neil, Phoebe, and some dinosaurs..." 
Cool! Dinosaur wam!
And I thought watch wam was a niche market!
Norman
wamtec said: ...some trivia for you....the last project Rob Blaine was in process of working on before he passed away in 2000....was his dream to do a messy version of Star Trek, and he was in the planning stages to build the sets and he had the script and everything mapped out but then he passed away and sadly his dream to do a full feature length Star Trek wam film never got made.
Hi Mark
I don't suppose the script survived or that you had sight of it. I always loved Rob's ideas, and it would be fascinating to know what he had in mind.
Rev
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I never saw any script from Rob about his Star Trek messy feature plans. I only know it was not a last minute idea and it was something he was working on for several years because we often chatted about ideas and future plans we were working on, and we would sometimes "leak" info to each other so that we knew what each of us were working on, so we could avoid stepping on each others toes or doing similar concepts etc. Rob was not only a computer whiz who worked for Cray Industries and their supercomputers he was also a qualified aircraft pilot and instructor and he was a diehard Trekkie and so he asked me to avoid doing any scenes related to Star Trek because this was his pet project that he was working on and he had plans to shoot a feature length Star Trek wam video himself. So I did not do any Star Trek wam shoots in the 1990's because Rob had asked me to avoid that subject as he was working on his own project for that subject. I did not start to do Star Trek stuff until 6 years after Rob had passed away....i.e...these shoots..
http://sexyflexi.com/cgi/autogal.pl?vidnum=tws-191-0056
http://sexyflexi.com/cgi/autogal.pl?vidnum=tws-191-0175
MK
http://sexyflexi.com/cgi/autogal.pl?vidnum=tws-191-0056
http://sexyflexi.com/cgi/autogal.pl?vidnum=tws-191-0175
MK
Do unto others, then run
reverendsl said:
Hi Mark
I don't suppose the script survived or that you had sight of it. I always loved Rob's ideas, and it would be fascinating to know what he had in mind.
Rev
wamtec said: ...some trivia for you....the last project Rob Blaine was in process of working on before he passed away in 2000....was his dream to do a messy version of Star Trek, and he was in the planning stages to build the sets and he had the script and everything mapped out but then he passed away and sadly his dream to do a full feature length Star Trek wam film never got made.
Hi Mark
I don't suppose the script survived or that you had sight of it. I always loved Rob's ideas, and it would be fascinating to know what he had in mind.
Rev
Mr Spock, set phasers to gunge!!
I've got custard and I'm not afraid to use it!
I'm fairly sure every video we made was a parody of SOMETHING at least conceptually.
And I STILL have my one and only recreation idea that I MAY get to someday that is part parody, part re-creation and part editing nightmare.
I have said this a few times and Rich is right...the competition was far less back when I still had meniscus in both knees. But the reason we sold a lot of videos back then and the reason we still sell videos now even after not releasing a new one for eight years is because I understood the psychological aspects of WAM very early on and tapped into what I used to call "WAM triggers." Those triggers existed 15 years ago...10 years ago...5 years ago, now and in the future. Meaning videos with those "triggers" will always sell.
Ivy still laughs when she gets her "pie residuals" as she calls them.
Ok, this is like trying to explain why a joke is funny....it never works.
Of course I never work either so it's kind of thematic.
And Rich...don't think I didn't see the dinosaur reference. Barney WILL be notified. And no I don't mean Fife.
Robby
WAMma Lamma Pie
www.wammalamapie.com
www.shepiestheguy.com
And I STILL have my one and only recreation idea that I MAY get to someday that is part parody, part re-creation and part editing nightmare.
I have said this a few times and Rich is right...the competition was far less back when I still had meniscus in both knees. But the reason we sold a lot of videos back then and the reason we still sell videos now even after not releasing a new one for eight years is because I understood the psychological aspects of WAM very early on and tapped into what I used to call "WAM triggers." Those triggers existed 15 years ago...10 years ago...5 years ago, now and in the future. Meaning videos with those "triggers" will always sell.
Ivy still laughs when she gets her "pie residuals" as she calls them.
Ok, this is like trying to explain why a joke is funny....it never works.
Of course I never work either so it's kind of thematic.
And Rich...don't think I didn't see the dinosaur reference. Barney WILL be notified. And no I don't mean Fife.
Robby
WAMma Lamma Pie
www.wammalamapie.com
www.shepiestheguy.com
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