HU&W ep. 10 -- “Monkey Beat” -- Creating the Sketch!

Hey everyone! Sorry things have been so slow on this blog. We've been really busy as of late. I promise we are making more episodes! So for now I thought it would be fun to blog about some of our previous sketches from the last few episodes.

I was first approached by our producer, Ryan Omega to do a sketch for his series, Hurry Up & Wait. At that point, HU&W had several episodes under their belt and I’ve watched all of them. Ryan knew that my side hobby is Lolita fashion (a popular street fashion subculture in Japan). He didn’t know much about it, but we both wanted to do something with this. He came up with the idea of making a stutter skit that was quirky, cute, and randomly Japanese. (*_*);

Once we came up with a concept of what we both wanted then we started casting. I originally had the idea of either using two Asian girls OR one Asian and one Caucasian female singing + dancing to the tune of “Monkey Beat.” Immediately I found girl who was available and wanted to do this (Yay!). I originally had 2 other girls in mind for the second part, but in the end could not commit to this project due to scheduling conflicts. Adrianne Grady (one of our actresses from our HU&W group) lobbied really hard for a part in this. Now at first, I was reluctant to use her simply because she was used in a lot of previous sketches. I had originally preferred to use new faces to the show as opposed to using our regulars. But boy, did she prove me wrong! She brought an interesting and completely different side to the character that was so fun and so likeable that it was inspired for another skit (which I’ll talk about in another blog entry). Adrianne really is talented and her improv is hysterical!

Once we agreed on a day to shoot, I was able to help put a look together and style the actresses. Ryan really wanted both girls looking very similar (or in Lolita terms “twinning”). Fortunately, my friend Lee Zarate (our other actress on this) and I both owned Angelic Pretty’s Miracle Candy triple frill JSKs (that’s a mouthful)! Once both of our girls got dressed and had their hair + make up done we went to a local park near my home and shot our skit there. I got to do a lot on this skit--AD, Wardrobe, and PA. Ryan did directing and all the filming. Once we finished and went back to my place, Ryan, Adrianne, and Lee did all the remaining ADR work in my walk-in closet. In the end, it was a very fun shoot and I got inspired to create another skit with Adrianne and Lee which I'll save for another blog entry.

If you hadn't seen it already, please watch our skit here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxjxpq1xscY

Love & Peace! (^_^)V 

~Mary

Behind the mini-episode

So for this particular mini-episode, my sis, Tina, was in Los Angeles for Bat's Day in Disneyland so I wanted to take advantage of her presence here. (She comes from San Francisco, by the way). She did "You're vs. Your" which was a popular skit so I wanted to have her do the same idea with "There vs. Their." Now, I could have done "There vs. Their vs. They're" but that proved to be too complicated with this skit.

I actually wrote this skit in January and although I could have had anyone play this, I write skits for certain people in mind; this one was written with Tina in mind.

Now, it just so happened that Tina was staying over at Reiko's place so I thought to kill two birds with one stone and film them both. I was supposed to write something separate for Reiko but due to my busy schedule, I didn't have time... So I figured that we were going to improv something together. Between Tina and Reiko, they decided to split the lines and that actually worked out pretty well.

Reiko was self-conscious at first in front of the camera, which surprised me because she's always naturally funny. But some people are like that... they are put in front of the camera and they have a tendancy to freeze, no matter how naturally funny they are in front of friends.

The way we fixed this was pretty simple. We did several takes of the same lines. First, I wanted a schoolmarm delivering the lines. Then I wanted a take with attitude (basically, a ghettofabulous take). Then a "wild" take where they can do whatever they wanted. Tina, is already used to my type of directing and I look for different takes so I can edit the best takes all together for the final product.

For the wild take, I saw what Reiko was doing and she had this "effortless snobbish I'm better than everyone attitude" to her delivery. It reminded me of the Heathers from well... Heathers. When I mentioned "Heathers," everything gelled into place.

After that, Reiko suddenly grabbed the box of raisin bran and talked about "colon health." Tina and I died on the floor laughing. The take in the mini-episode was the second take because we just could not stop laughing immediately after her improv take.

Ultimately, if you have fun on camera, it shows and it's enjoyable to watch.

Prepping

A preview of things to come ...

Stay tuned! 

~Mary   =^_^=

Behind the scenes of Episode 11 - Not so Desperate Housewives.

So today, we launched Episode 11 "Instructional Sex Videos of the 1950s". So far, I've been told it is the funniest skit we've produced or at least it is of the caliber of previous skits like "Die Katze" and "Art School Nude Models."

This is one of those skits where we sort of knew where we wanted to go, but not completely. Kelsey and Claire thought it was a neat idea to do a parody of housewives in the 1950s. But there is so MUCH to parody that it was hard to figure out where exactly we wanted to go. The first hour of the shoot wasn't shooting; it was determining what to do. We just knew we wanted to something 1950s because Kelsey had a really neat dress and Claire had a kitchen that looked straight from the 1950s.

We thought of everything from grizzly "Turning your abusive husband into a meat pie" to stereotypical like "overdosing on cleaning products." It wasn't until I saw the phallic-shaped vase and the canisters that looked like nipples when I wanted to go into the direction. But Claire and Kelsey were really responsible for the great improv/dialogue.

By coincidence, Sebastian happened to be in the area and asked to come over. Originally, we were going to make him a husband but he only had a black shirt and jeans and cigarettes so it made more sense to use him as something else. It was decided to make him a "living prop."

The most interesting part is Sebastian contorting underneath the kitchen sink. People may think it was easy; but actually, there were pipes that he had to contort around so there was a lot less space. But Sebastian was insistent that he could do it. And he did it.

Kelsey pulled off the stilted acting that I wanted (and doesn't she look gorgeous?) and Claire was awesome as the more experienced housewife with great comedic timing. At the end of the shoot, she apologized to Sebastian for molesting him.

Trust me, he didn't mind one bit. ;)

The radio interview on Geek FM!

Last Tuesday, I was privileged to be able to be a subject of a radio interview with Geek FM (link: http://scarlet-rhapsody.com/geekfm/ ).

It's been years since I've done a radio interview. Listening to the interview, I was counting the times I went "um" and "like" as I do usually do in my speech, but it wasn't as bad as I thought.

Because I've never done an internet radio interview before, I did not know what to expect. Justin, one of the hosts was alongside me while Jared was in his house interviewing me through skype. Ah! The wonders of technology. Speaking of wondering about technology, I *still* need to figure out how to do skype one of these days. I think I have an innate fear of skype because it would be a secondhand version of chatroulette, even if it has been demonstrated to me several times that it's not the case.

Anyway, the first part was being a guest host on the show and I had no idea that they never had a guest before on the show. I was a guinea pig! But the people there: Justin, Andrea, Stan, Vic and Jared were great, they were easy to chat with AND we were all geeks! So we got to talk about anything and everything geeky.

I also didn't know that it was going to go for 2 hours. We got THAT carried away chatting :)

Then after all that, they conducted the interview with me where I got to talk about Hurry Up and Wait as well as some of my other projects like the Labyrinth of Jareth and LARP.

Andrea brought gluten-free brownies. I never have known they were gluten-free. They were quite nummy.

They said that I would be welcome back any time to guest host again. When my schedule settles down a bit, I may take them up on that...

~Ryan

First post! Behind the Announcement

So welcome to the "Hurry Up and Wait" production blog! The aim of this blog is to keep people posted on the various things that go on in our production: everything from thoughts, photos, sketch ideas, and whatever pops into our head.

Just so don't think this blog has a multiple personality disorder, this blog is accessed by the staff at Hurry Up and Wait so any of us can post at any time.

So the first order of business is to announce a format change. Josh, Sebastian and I decided to do this as a video:

You would be surprised how hard it is to stay passed out when someone is putting shaving cream on your face and it starts to get into your eye, so you have to shut it tighter. And I have no idea what they are filming while playing passed out.

THEN there's the time when Sebastian actually loses his balance while on the bed and I... feel "pressure" on my face. I still think Josh should have filmed me wiping shaving cream from the most delicate of places from Sebastian's pants.

Catch you all soon,

Ryan