[…continued from Monday]

The Road of Trails: Editing and Audio

Personally, I remember the early days of the TTT to be a lot of fun. I don’t remember how long it was after the first three sketches that we were able to shoot the fourth, Absent Minded Camera Man, but I’m guessing it was the first available free time we had, which would have been in June after school let out for the summer. We started off pretty quickly and—for better or worse, I can’t say—Absent Minded Camera Man turned out really well. If I recall correctly, at this point I was feeling pretty confident about this whole video production thing. The TTT seemed to be jelling, and it’s not like that was even my first time with a camera. I knew what I was doing. We had it all.

Except editing. I knew about editing systems, certainly. I knew they existed for video as well as film. I was even vaguely familiar with some sort of newfangled digital editing technology. I remember thinking back in middle school that if I were lucky—if I somehow got a really great job doing video production (yeah right, like anyone would pay me to do that)—sometime in my 20’s or 30’s I might be able to play around with a computer editor. I’m happy to announce that that has come to pass.

But back in 1997 that was still five or six years away. We had to work with what we had, and what we had was a camera. And that was it.

In video and film production, the camera catches quite a bit more than it needs. The director’s cliché, “lights, camera, action,” is actually how it’s done. The electrician hits the lights, the camera is brought up to speed, and then on action, the actors do their thing. But “action”—along with sound syncro and sometimes other calls, like “background” to get the extras milling around—is called after the camera is rolling. Normally this is not a problem. Normally, the this stuff ends up on the cutting room floor.

Not being able to edit restricted us in a few ways. One: we couldn’t yell action at anyone to tell them to start the scene. Instead, we developed a point system. When the camera is ready to go, the cameraman points at whoever goes first. In a sense, this is what’s done during live video production, such as newscasts. You can’t talk during the three second pre-roll, so some production assistant counts down and points to the talent on cue. It’s just like Wayne’s World, but less theatrical.

The problem with this is that, unlike a newscast, the person who needed to start the shot often wasn’t looking at the camera. Sometimes a giant arm-wave would be enough for them to see out of the corner of their eye. This would also shake the camera if it was being held, or it would be reflected in some object. In the case of Dr. Niemkawitz’s interview in WIOA: Special Edition, you can clearly see me on camera signaling Dave, reflected by a picture frame. By the time we shot Hydro, the “cameraman reflected in something” had happened so many times that we just decided to make fun of it ourselves. During the mexican stand-off, the camera is showing close-ups of everybodys’ eyes. I don’t remember which character it was, but someone was wearing large, reflective sunglasses. We got a nice tight shot, rolled the camera, and then got every single person on set to stand behind the camera and wave.

But I digress. Sometimes the actor kicking off a scene wouldn’t be facing the camera. This necessitated a chained point setup, where the cameraman would signal to someone else, who would be in a position that the first actor could see him and start the scene on cue.

I don’t recall the most elaborate of these pointing motions, but there is one that is most memorable to me. (It may also have been the most elaborate, come to think of it.) It’s the scene in Trek Wars where the crew of the Entersurprise is studying footage from Star Wars to see what tactics they should use to fight the battle with the Evil Guy. It’s cut in such a way as to appear that we’re stealing the space battles in Star Wars and shamelessly passing them off as our own space battles. The joke is when a Star Wars actor appears on the screen, at which point the camera zooms out to reveal the Trek Wars crew watching the movie and Captain Retard declares, “Alright. That’s what we have to do.”

Simple enough—except everyone was looking at the TV and away from the camera. Because the gag relied on the timing with the zoom of the camera, Dave, as Retard, couldn’t deliver his line until he was sure the camera had him on screen. But he obviously couldn’t turn to look at the camera to get the signal from Aaron, who was shooting. Even worse, the TV was in Dave’s living room, which was long, but skinny. There wasn’t enough room on either side to position someone where Dave could have seen them. This was a puzzler.

Well, Graham, as Chief Security Adviser Word, was wearing sunglasses. This meant he could be positioned in such a way as to be mostly facing the screen, but enough that he could turn his eyes and look back toward the camera. Almost. But not quite enough. We worked out a system where Aaron, on camera, would signal Kathie who was off the screen opposite Graham, just in his field of view. She would signal him. Graham was standing holding a gun, and so his signal to Dave to speak was to move the gun slightly. We figured it would be dark enough in the room that you wouldn’t really notice the gun moving, but it was enough for Dave to see. When Dave saw the gun move—line. Altogether now: play Star Wars tape. Roll camera. Wait until Wedge Antilles appears on screen. Slow zoom out. Aaron points to Kathie. Kathie points to Graham. Graham wiggles the gun. Dave delivers the line. Cut.

It worked beautifully. The only snag was that you actually can see the gun moving. Even more annoying: almost everyone who watches the scene notices it, too! So much for subtlety. However, it’s a testament to our amazing chain-signaling skills that we pulled the timing off without any problems. By the time we got to the point where we actually were editing, we had this pointing thing down to a science.

The second thing a lack of editing ability forced us to do was to minimize cuts. It was extremely difficult get the scene started at the right time. In one way, this made us much more creative than we otherwise would have. Very many of our shots are designed with some stalling action at the beginning or end of the shot so that if the timing got messed up, it wouldn’t be so noticeable. Off the top of my head: Yoachum’s army squad dispatch scene in WIOA: Special Edition, The Prosecutor pacing in his office before the trial in Fatal Killings, and General Lee’s dramatic entrance in Trek Wars. (Any scene that starts on an entrance, as a matter of fact.) In each of these instances, if there was an extra second more or a second or two less at the beginning of the shot, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. In effect, it was a very sloppy way of blocking, which we used to disguise the sloppy way the camera recorded.

We learned early on, of course, that when you hit the record button, there’s a two to three second delay before the camera actually starts to record. Absent Minded Camera Man worked out so well because it’s one shot, one take. When Inanimate Objects Attack was a great idea, but poor execution. WIOA was where we learned all about the difficulty of cutting in-camera. Our disappointment with how difficult it was to shoot and how poor the resulting footage turned out eventually contributed to us reshooting it later after we had figured out the timing. Again, by the time we got editing capability, we had this down to a science, also, and could probably have “felt” within a tenth of a second when the camera we were using would start to record.

The third thing we had to do to work around a lack of editing capability was to shoot everything in order. This would occasionally lead to situations like we had during Hydro where we all hiked out to the woods, only to have the camera battery die in like fifteen minutes. The rest of the movie was shot in Dave’s back yard—after we hiked the mile and a half back to his house carrying the camera, water guns, and dressed in fatigues. In 98 degree heat with 100% humidity. Because of these sorts of minor inconveniences, we eventually learned to condense everything into as few shots and locations as possible.

Finally, since it was such a pain to rewind the camera and cue it up to the end of the previous scene if we screwed up, we made extensive use of run-throughs. Run throughs are done on real sets, too, but usually for technical reasons, like lighting. We would run through a scene until we got it right—then run through it like three more times to make sure we really got it right. Then when we rolled camera, we screwed it up anyway.

I was notorious for not being able to memorize lines quickly, and so there are a few scenes where I’ve got the script right in front of me, and I’m reading off of it. Some courtroom scenes in Fatal Killings come to mind. But it was so much more of a hassle to have me keep screwing up my lines and recue the tape that we collectively said, “whatever” and I got to act, script in hand. Aside from this, we actually got pretty good at nailing the take we needed. Graham estimated—and I agree with him—that we got it right more than 75% of the time.

For a while, we also tried to keep dialogue to a minimum. Being the no-budget, no-experience, no-mic-input-on-the-camera kids that we were, we never shot with an external mic. Never. None of the TTT sketches were ever shot with an external mic. We had decent audio in a number of our sketches, but a few—such as Godzilla, some lines from Trek Wars, and lines from WIOA and Special Edition—had dialogue that was flat-out impossible to hear. It was always a disappointment when some joke we had was ruined due to bad audio—as opposed to being ruined for some other reason, such as our poor delivery. Over the years, we began working around this, also. Either we would project our voice more than normal, in some cases, or just block the scene so that whoever is talking is standing near or at least facing the camera.

I had often mentioned that if I had the money, the first upgrade I would have bought was a microphone. I believe Dave’s full-sized VHS cam had a mic-in jack, but none of the other cameras we used did. It didn’t matter; we weren’t able to afford a mic, anyway. But even at this early stage I was realizing that the video can be total crap, but if the audio is lousy, people won’t put up with it. When it comes to video production, audio quality is much more important than video quality.

These were trials that we endured all the way through the editing era. Even after we were able to edit, the first system we had access to was a linear editing deck that was so difficult to use, it was often easier for us to continue shooting the way we had, and stitch entire scenes together rather than trying to get each individual shot. Audio was a constant problem, also. All these things contributed to the terribleness of the production value.

But sometimes—for a while, at least—the productions themselves were terrible, as well.

The Belly of the Whale: Our Dark Ages

The name “Terrible Travesty Trio” was a joke that wasn’t. By that I mean, we knew anything we did would be terrible. The lack of equipment alone guaranteed this. But we didn’t care. We were terrible, we knew it, and there you go.

“Travesty” was suggested by Graham as a synonym for “parody”. We knew we were going to do parodies from the beginning, but we didn’t want to just say “parody” because that seemed obvious. Travesty was a good word. A good, not common but known, kind-of-funny but also serious word. It also started with a “T”. (The trio part was obvious because there were three main troupers at the time. Later, “team” was the obvious upgrade.) Strictly speaking, we don’t really do travesties—at least we didn’t in the 90’s.

The closest thing we did to a travesty, in my opinion, was Fatal Killings. Even for all its amateurishness, I think there’s some really poignant social satire going on in there. A New Oddity is a somewhat surreal travesty of everyday life and and a travesty of independent film, so I’d say that fits the bill, too. I believe a case could also be made for One Minute, Mincemeat!, A Public Service Announcement, and Trademark. In other words, as we went on and matured, our work actually grew toward that which we intended to be in the first place. More on that on Friday.

In any case, the “terrible” in Terrible Travesty Team was supposed to represent the overall “backyard” feel of what we did. It wasn’t really supposed to be an accurate description of the productions we put out. Unfortunately, it does describe some of the sketches we put out in 1998.

The year started off innocently enough with Pringles. There’s nothing revolutionary here. As I wrote in my Failed Jokes Explained column, New Musical Line, we basically just created a regular Pringles commercial. Not bad, but no Purple Stuff.

I suppose the title of our Gap commercial parody—Fall Into the Crap—should have been a warning that we would soon be falling into the crap. The Fancy Restaurant was shot in the afternoon but I had to leave Sean’s house for reasons unknown to me today. I found out later that after I left, they had shot Fall Into the Crap—making it the only TTT sketch that I was not present for. Fancy Restaurant turned out decent enough, but I always hated the ending. The Crappy Restaurant sketch (part two to Fancy’s part one) wasn’t as good as Fancy, but aside from the clock gag which just didn’t work no matter how you sliced it, it wasn’t that bad, either. Bomb Squad Sketch was a classic—funny enough while you were watching it, I think, but again with the weak ending. And finally there was Pennsylvania Chainsaw Massacre which, for a while, was our magnum opus that we weren’t afraid to show other people.

Arguably, PA Chainsaw Massacre was the most successful sketch of this era—and one of our more successful sketches of all time. It has some great parody elements, it flows pretty well and although we had some technical difficulties (the end of Graham’s “action” can be heard at the start of the second shot), it’s just par for the TTT course. I think we were bolstered by the success of this sketch, and felt we were on our way up from Crappy Restaurant, which was generally considered to be the worst thing to date (not counting Got Mac).

It was about this time that we started to become popular with some of our friends’ friends. The problem with this wasn’t that they enjoyed watching the sketches (I honestly don’t know if they did or not). The problem was that they wanted to be in them. The problem we had with this was that we had no process. Essentially, we’d go to the set and end up yelling at each other for a day, trying to hash out things like blocking and dialogue which we only had a hazy idea of before we got to the set. Most of the time we didn’t even have a script.

I’m not sure how the Metallica Sketch came about. It is pretty much a word for word rip-off of Wayne’s World. I think the original idea was just us pretending to play as Metallica, and we felt like we needed some sort of post-playing scene to finish it off. I guess the Wayne’s World thing just fit, and so that was adopted. Anyway, it’s generally considered to be the worst thing we’ve ever done—again, not counting Got Mac, because by the time we got to Metallica we should have known better.

The Godzilla Sketch I may have blocked from my memory. I honestly have no idea how this came about, except that we had gotten the idea to do a parody of Godzilla movies. I’m fairly certain we ad libbed it and it may have been that this was supposed to be part of the joke. That is, we were supposed to make jokes up as we went along. We can’t even make up jokes when we have time to think about them, so you can imagine how that turned out.

The few planned jokes we had didn’t work out, either. One was David Neimkawitz who, ever since his debut in Inanimate, just showed up in every sketch for any reason we could possibly come up with. He was the only guy who wasn’t overdubbed, so you couldn’t hear him at all. (I talked about this in another Failed Jokes Explained column, Characteristic Roar.) The main joke/climax was that throughout the whole thing, Godzilla is a five inch tall model, and the military eventually defeats him by picking him up and kicking him.

The shoot was awkward because we had a few people on set who were there for no other reason other than they wanted to be in a TTT sketch and we didn’t know enough to say no. At least we learned that from the shoot. One issue was that if these people aren’t your friends—if they’re not willing to put up with your crap the way other friends are—they’re going to be miserable because they’re still going to get stuck in the middle of tiffs between other people. It just messed with the dynamic of the group. Our best and worst aspect was that we all were friends—best because we got a lot done by working together. Worst because we rarely worked together in harmony. True friends can deal with each others’ crap. Everyone else just gets in the way.

Following these two most-terrible sketches was the third worst sketch: The X-files: An Official TTT Parody. Here is a short so vague in its parody-ness that we felt the need to inform the audience what it was about in the title, just in case nobody got it. The problem here wasn’t relationship politics, however—and that was good, because it meant we were recovering, however little.

X-files came about because Dave got a new camera as a birthday present. (I’m actually not positive this is the case, but I do believe it’s right.) It seemed like a crime to receive a camera as a gift and not shoot anything with it, so this had to be rectified ASAP. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any ideas at the time—nothing. Additionally, fall was coming fast, and once we hit winter, there wouldn’t be much outdoor shooting until the spring. Something had to be done.

The X-files seemed to be ripe for parody material, but I couldn’t contribute much since I wasn’t familiar with the show. I remember working pretty hard on this project, though, and I was feeling pretty confident about it. A huge change for us was that we wrote and used an actual script. The only other sketch up to this point that had any sort of scripted dialogue was Inanimate, but it wasn’t an entire script—just snippets that we knew we wanted each character to say. [Edit: Dave mentioned that prior to X-Files, any script we did have would have been scribbled on a tablet or scrap of paper. I’m not sure that any of the older productions were scripted in their entirity, but we did have things jotted down. With that in mind, however, X-files was the first production that had a typed script, which was all professional-looking on the print-out.] I was convinced that having a script would eliminate future disaster-areas like Godzilla. It didn’t guarantee this, of course, but there’s no denying that it was a step in the right direction. So X-files, for all that it’s lacking, was the first TTT production to be scripted.

I had a good feeling about it when we were shooting. It was a small crew; we did well together. It was a lot of fun, the way the old TTT had been fun. I actually remember X-files as being one of the most fun shoots we did. In terms of process, I couldn’t have asked for it better. The problem with the sketch wasn’t so much that it is bad. It had plenty of jokes and a great opening scene and title sequence. There was a lot going for it.

The problem is that it’s just not memorable. It is absolutely mediocre. Moldy is pretty much a 1-dimensional, one joke character. Sculler doesn’t really do anything. Actually, nobody really does anything. In retrospect, I think Moldy was my least favorite character to play out of everyone I’ve done, just because he has no personality. I was always disappointed with the performance. Moldy is my Captain Retard, if you will. Dave once told me that “Captain Retard is the character I play when I’m not playing a character”. For me, that’s Moldy. Part of it had to do with my unfamiliarity to The X-files and Duchovny’s mannerisms, but part of it had to do with the fact that nothing really interesting happens. It’s just a collection of gags—and not very good ones at that. It probably would have benefited from a few more rewrites—which it may very well had gotten if not for the approaching winter. It’s interesting to conclude that one of our “worst” sketches is that way because it’s not weird enough. It’s totally, 100% average.

So X-files is third and Godzilla is a close second to Metallica’s worst sketch designation. These three sketches represent the lowest point in TTT history. It was a combination of things that led to this: overconfidence is part of it. Our popularity and subsequent taking on a larger number of people than usual, but not being sure who those people should be. Also, it was a series of just terrible ideas that probably didn’t go through the usual lunch-table discussion process—and/or we didn’t have any better ideas at the time, but still wanted to shoot stuff.

It was a bummer, really, because I remember putting a lot of work into those three sketches, but only seeing disaster result. During this time I seriously considered quitting the TTT. We had lost our way. We were floundering. I felt we were working toward something, but nobody knew what. Frankly, I wanted to get back to basics: the original members, plus one or two people to help as crew—and I wanted to get back to doing shorter things. The Godzilla sketch ran somewhere around five minutes, and Metallica was closer to seven; X-files was five. These were all longer than PA Chainsaw Massacre but only a fraction of the quality. It was clear to me that we needed to go shorter. Back to the good ol’ days. Back to Purple Stuff.

That’s not what happened. Instead we got ourselves a princess—and set off for space.

I’m glad no one listened to me.

[To be continued on Friday…]