Au Privave

A standard of the highest jazz order, this was one of the first Real Book tunes I memorized. Transcription is from the Omnibook.

Animations can be pretty demanding on the transcoding of internet videos. Last year I uploaded a version of Giant Steps to Vimeo, but under their encode every note seemed to drag a frame or two behind the audio. Video streaming just isn’t built for this kind of exacting sync. HD has helped.

Both sites handled Bloomdido pretty damn well, but for this Youtube just can’t seem to interpret the keyframes correctly. Vimeo has taken the lead in my personal standings.

CODEC NERD UPDATE: You can set youtube embeds to default to HD (&hd=1), and that solves this display problem. Youtube back at the head of the pack!

Giant Steps Hits 7 Digits

This is by far the most popular video I have ever made.  I feel like I blinked and missed it crossing the million view threshold.  Pretty crazy for a experiment in jazz sheet music animation.  Here are some sweet graphs that describe the response over the past 3 years:

And there’s this neat comment cloud that summarizes the words people use to react in the youtube comments section:

In context, almost all of this praise belongs to Mr. Coltrane, but I’m glad people like the video.  I should really make a follow up.

The Man

Youtube has been forced to take down my “Shame on a Simpson” video because of alleged copyright infringement. Fine.

At its time of death, my video had:
42,783 views
53 comments
and 4.5 stars

It was a good piece of fair use art, in my opinion. Luckily, some other people on youtube liked the video enough to download it and host it themselves:

Maybe we’ll keep handing this off like it’s the Watergate story. That would be fun.

Groucho vs. Weirdo

Groucho vs. Weirdo

If you love Groucho, this is a very classic 5 minutes from his old show “You Bet Your Life”

PS: You happy Kurt? Non ECW content.

ECW goes YouTube

Shot 2 videos today. That was my minimum. “Alcoholics Ruin Parties” and “PSAs”

already given an honor: #82 most viewed comedian today

ECW channel

Peaches en Regalia
What to Wear?
Nouns
Emerson Cosby Workshop
The Cat Video
Little Drummer Boy
Pizza Wars
What’s Up, Talking Bicycle?
Waiting to Ex-HALO
Milk
First Temptation of Christ

the list.

To give you a general idea of what we’re looking at making this semester:

• Dr. Vag M.D.
• Brain Eating Aliens
• Do You Massabate?
• Nerds Picking up Chicks
• The Shit Whisperer
• Kitty Litter
• Barfight
• Jew Christmas
• Make a Wish
• Dead Chick

And these are just the old sketches. New Stuff:

• Mike Tyson
• Officially Funny
• No One Listens to Jesse
• PSAs
• Infomercial
• Alcoholics Ruin Parties
• Subtext
• Don’t. Encourage. Fink.
• Kurt Runs
• Kurt and Jesse cut-scene sketch.

A completely unreasonable wish list? or a bag of tricks to reach into? It’s a pipe-dream to get all these made. I can’t wait.

http://www.daniel-cohen.com

videos, more.

What I thought would be a big deal has met with great enthusiasm from the members of the troop I’ve talked to. Meeting’s tomorrow, where I’ll pitch shooting a video every Friday for the rest of this semester. That’s a lot of videos.

Not just new stuff either. That’ll take priority of course, but because we’ve focused so much on stage sketches, we have this massive catalogue of good old sketches that we want to make videos out of. This is a great and exciting new policy for the troop, I think. Instead of picking one option, we’ll embrace both. Perform the live sketch, then post the video. I feel a little bad for the 50-100 people who have come to our shows and will already know all the jokes for these sketches. But there are plenty more people out there that would enjoy them, as offensive and disgusting as some of them are.

We’ll see how the whole troop reacts at the general meeting tomorrow. It’s a lot more work, especially for the better actors. Not to mention me. Shit.

http://www.daniel-cohen.com

More videos.

There is a war of ideologies going on in Emerson Comedy Workshop. Okay, not really, but a mild argument. A mild argument of ideologies. Video sketches vs. live sketches.

I am of the opinion that ECW needs to make more videos. We have costume changes to get through in these damn shows, and it looks unprofessional to have 15 minutes of black time in a one hour show. Videos can solve this problem.

You put a sketch up on stage and it’s good for 2 maybe 3 nights. Then it’s gone and, even if it’s a great sketch, that boat has sailed. Everyone wants to move on with their lives- new show, new sketches.

Videos don’t get as many laughs as live sketches. That’s annoying, but a video is immortal. If it’s halfway decent, that’s gonna end up being more total laughs. Look on youtube for ECW sketches, and the representation is there, but it’s not good enough. There are a lot of comedy troops that market themselves pretty well on youtube. Derrick and Zebro are good examples.

ECW has no such organized user base. Videos have been posted by random former and current members, sort of all over the place. I created a group, Emerson Comedy Workshop, to help rectify this, but I doubt anyone finds it. Add to this the pathetic, 5 year old website on Emerson’s main servers that I can barely bring myself to link to… here. I like the slogan “we put the ‘orksho‘ in workshop” though. We should keep that.

Anyway, it’s a hell of a lot harder to get these god damn actors to organize well enough to shoot a video. 1st show of last semester we did 1 video. 2nd show we did zero. Good shows, but that amount of video content is pathetic.

So I’m trying to do something drastic. I’ve written 6 sketch ideas that I think are worth filming. We have a little less than two months before our next show. 4 of these sketches have to be videos to work at all, 1 of which will be hard as hell to organize. We’ll see how many of these get done. But, what’s relevant to this blog entry are the 2 sketches that sort of could be stage sketches, that I want to get made as videos. I’ve been trying to organize a shoot for these for the last couple weeks with no success, and sort of taking flack from some of the other members for wasting my time (and theirs) trying to get them filmed.

The first show date is March 23rd. It’ll be interesting to see just how many of these sketches we can do in time. (If any. We have to do at least 2. HAVE to.)

http://www.daniel-cohen.com