What Have You, Version 1.1!

What’s this? The first site upgrade in two years, and it’s not even a new release: just a point update!

Back in 2011, we started this site. Before then, we were just a bunch of kids with a camera and a YouTube account. Then we became a bunch of kids with a camera, a YouTube account and a .wordpress.com suffix!

With this site upgrade, we’ve finally got our own domain and a new host. This means we now have a lot more control over the site, and can start to bring you a better experience. So far you won’t notice a lot of difference, but more visible changes will be introduced gradually as and when we’re ready.

From now on, all WHY content can be found at the following address:

http://why-comedy.com

We’re keeping copies of our previous posts here for now, but everything’s been moved over to the new site and all new updates will be made there. Because they’re new, and it’s new, and do you see how it all works?

Be My Guest

An Englishman’s cupcake is his castle. Or something. Don’t look at me like that, it’s late and I’m tired.

Hello folks it’s me folks!

The shoot for Be My Guest was almost exactly the opposite of the previous one: while Without a Sound took a couple of hours – since the sound wasn’t important and we didn’t have to do many retakes – and ended up including almost all the footage we shot, this two-minute video took a good seven hours to film. I never realised it would be such a short sketch until we started filming, when I had to stop and think about just how much of each shot was going to make it into the finished product. In the end I had to make it even shorter by cutting one joke and a longer and funnier, but less technically sound, rant from Vikkie.

It was absolutely worth all the effort, though. I had SO MUCH FUNNNNNNNNN with this!

Ta-ta,

-M

Without a Sound

So you may have noticed we’ve been having some microphone problems recently…

HELLO! Hello, hello, hello. We are back after a short, mostly unplanned hiatus. For those of you who missed our explanatory Facebook posts, Alex’s laptop can no longer edit videos and my internet connection started playing up just as we were approaching our 23rd July deadline. Since Alex is away in Edinburgh for the entire Festival and I’m up there all of next week, we decided to take a break and get back up to speed with the next couple of videos.

…And then I finished the latest video two days late for entirely stupid reasons. Sorry about that. Not to worry, though; if I’m having difficulty getting the next video done in time I shall just hit myself repeatedly in the face with a table tennis bat and upload that instead.

More importantly, this video marks the writing debut of some bloke who once stood up a ladder. Leon’s a friend from my university days who’s similarly interested in writing and producing comedy but is much, much better at it than I am. Seriously. He wrote this sketch after work across just two evenings, and not only produced a coherent script* requiring exactly the three actors who were available for filming, but also managed to perfectly nail the style of classic WHY sketches like The League of TWFAP, Oh, I See! or The Final Cut. As soon as I read it, all I could think was how much it sounded like us.

So, yeah. Good job, Leon. I think you’re hired.

-M

*Weird, I grant you, but still coherent. It escalates nicely from start to finish.

WHY Podcast: Episode 9

In which Alex, Mike, and Jamie discuss videos, randomly-assigned superpowers, and the pathos of cubism.

WHY Podcast: Episode 9

Vikkie Come Home

It’s not easy being greenscreened.

So, this video was delayed, and then it was delayed, and then it was delayed, and then it was delayed. But now it’s out! So that’s kinda cool. Vikkie Come Home was supposed to be last autumn’s “Hey folks, Vikkie’s left town and won’t be around as much for a while” video. It was fun to deliver the announcement through a direct sequel to our first video and in theory separating out the shots needed for Vikkie and for Rest of World would make it easier to film, but it just proved impossible to get all the different bits done until recently. And then it took forever to join them all up without too many cracks.

Adobe Creative Suite is a weird thing. It seems you can either do a really efficient job of greenscreening but end up with pixellated edges (as seen at the end of the sketch in the intentionally not-so-convincing shot) or you can have smoother edges at the cost of turning anything too pale slightly transparent as well, regardless of colour (as seen in the earlier shots). What’s the deal with that, eh?

Thingy

You know the one.

This video came out of brainstorming possible movies for the next Dear God Why. I started thinking about what my favourite horror movie actually is (it’s The Thing), and  challenged myself to write the most complicated monologue I could about the film, while still remaining internally consistent.

We shot this at Jack’s house, before playing some of the greatest videogame in the world.

Seriously, if we can figure out a way to get that in a video, we will.

-Alex

Saralistairahs

In recent times (or, in one case, back in October) there have been appearances by all manner of Sarahs and Alistairs in our videos, so it seems appropriate to clear up which ones are which. And, perhaps more crucially, which ones aren’t.

 

The Sarah who appears in Dear God, WHY: Devour is Sarah Goodwin, author and cake maker extraordinaire. Books (with cover artwork by Vikkie) here, here, here and here, cake in our stomachs. Mmmmm, cake…

 

The Sarah in Dear God, WHY: Creep Van is Alex’s girlfriend Sarah Spradlin, who came all the way from Illinois to watch a film featuring a misty, romanticised flashback to an advert for off-brand Viagra. And then watch it all over again for the video. Pity her.

 

The Alistair who gave such a wonderfully eeeeeeevill performance at the end of The Other Side is Alistair Aitcheson, game dev and gentleman. Alistair specialises in multiplayer games playable on a single tablet in which you certainly aren’t encouraged to mess with your opponent’s side of the board, nudge nudge, wink wink and will be giving a talk on the subject at GDC Europe this year.

 

Finally, the Alistair from On Board, Broad Band, Narrow Mind and the very end of Brain Storm is Alistair Wright, one of our regular tabletop RPG/board gaming group. I haven’t actually seen him since his birthday, when I left him on a boat surrounded by alcohol,* but I’m sure he’s fine. Just fine.

For the sake of convenience, Mr Aitcheson is known as Ali, while Mr Wright goes by the soubriquet of Nerd. Sarahs are usually identified by context.

-M

*That is to say, he was sitting in a boat and his seat was surrounded by glasses containing a variety of alcoholic beverages. The boat wasn’t floating in alcohol. Just thought I’d make that clear.

Although that would be cool.

Broad Band, Narrow Mind

The problem with the Internet is… Well, mainly it’s this guy.

Like A Saur Point, this is a video of mine we started to film last year and only finished off recently. Largely because during the original shoot we decided to tweak the script a bit and upgrade the costume, which was originally just the helmet and a red T-shirt. It was definitely worth the wait to get the full impact of the finished outfit! Outlandish costumes and over-the-top characters are great fun, albeit a challenge.*

I was in two minds about how offensive to go with this script – and I had to be very careful to make it clear that the target of the big “You said WHAT?!” moment is the adult, Susie, and not her niece – but after all the sketch is about just how extreme the difference is between the online and offline versions of normal (or even socially acceptable) behaviour. In the end I came to the conclusion that without throwing a genuinely nasty line or two in there I was just undermining the rest of what I’d written.

Be nice to one another, kids.

-M

*Note to self: Please don’t create any more loud, grandiose characters that already require a lot of effort to portray and then give them a load of uncharacteristically nonchalant or uncertain lines. It’s too much like hard work.

Dear God, WHY: Creep Van

A new super-extra-long Dear God WHY! I’m not sure if we want to make them this long in future, but each DGY is different depending on the film and the reactions and there was a lot that felt worth keeping this time. Let us know what you think!

I wish I’d got my thoughts together a bit more while we were filming – most of what I said was expressed better by someone else. Watching Creep Van again now, I wonder if the story behind all the oddball characters (and there are many more than we had time to mention) is similar to how Nick Frost ended up in Spaced. He had no acting experience, but the character of Mike – invented purely to amuse his friends – was so good that Simon Pegg wrote him into the series. Most of the Creep Van roles seem to be well cast – given a better script and good direction I’m sure the comedic actors could be genuinely, intentionally funny – so I suspect the writers and/or producers made room in the film for the people they knew they could cast.

…Except Creep Van isn’t a sitcom. It’s a horror film, and all these larger-than-life characters just don’t belong there. Comedy horror isn’t the same as putting unrelated slapstick and bad puns in the same film as gory set pieces, and the horror and the jokes and the… “romance” just get in each other’s way. Truly a movie worthy of the DGY treatment.

-M

Technical Difficulties 5

Rainy days are an great opportunity to catch up on the important things in life. Or you could just write irate letters.

This sketch (by Alex) was shot way back in November in preparation for the next Pick N Mix, hence the three separate sections, but it’ll be a while before we’ve filmed enough Pick N Mix skits and we reckon this one’s strong enough to be a TechDiff.

It’s not actually a technical problem that’s delaying the next video – another Dear God WHY – just some non-video-related shenanigans. (Nothing nasty, nothing exciting, just life being busy.) It should be worth the wait, though, for fans of the Devour video. I’ve tried to take all the positive feedback from last time on board, and Jack in particular had a lot of interesting stuff to say about this film. I won’t spoil which film it is, but I’ll give you a clue: it was filmed in Detroit.*

-M

* Not a very good clue.