Righto, so sometimes my mate Prudence Vindin and I like to dress up as old blokes and have a yarn. Today’s vid was shot last time I was in Australia over the new year down at my local RSL’s Bowlo. Keith and Kev, two old buggers originally discovered while shooting Wookie Error, had such a warm reception among our mates that we decided to give it another burl.
I finally got time to edit it between a multitude of social and less-social engagements and my newly acquired gainful employment which involved a hell of a trip to Canada to get my visa (hurricanes, cancelled flights, lost passports, evacuations, the circus that is Niagara Falls…) but I made it. So the content’s coming out a little slower now that I’m ‘getting that cash’ as an architectural designer, but on the horizon lurks yet another mural, more illustration, and a ton of videos.
Writing my last post I got a real feeling of ‘I’ve done this before…?‘. Linking out examples of things to demonstrate a point… Having awesome stuff happen in the wake of awful stuff. Then I realised where it was coming from.
A few years back, after a few life-changing and frankly rubbish personal events occurred, I left my friends and family in Sydney and took a scholarship to go to film school in LA. About a month into it, I put my first ever video on YouTube. It was called Sebring feat. Danny Trejo.
My creative partner, Anna Bennett and I had managed to woo Danny ‘Machete’ Trejo (while he was visiting his pals Mister Cartoon and Estevan Oriol to wish them a merry Christmas) into being in our ‘music video’ that we were shooting on my grandma’s mini DV – standard def.
His bodyguard, Mario, was our cameraman. We shot under the 6th bridge in downtown Los Angeles. Danny choreographed some synchronised dance moves to a recording of us doing karaoke to our own version of ‘Pony’ by Ginuwine. We jumped into a Cypress Hill/Antrhax photo shoot, photographed by Tyler Clinton, to whom Danny proclaimed “I’m rolling with these chicas ‘cos they’ve got f**king balls”. Then he bought us dinner at 2am from The Pantry. Most unexpected and excellent sequence of events? Absolutely.
Anyway, jazzed on this video as we were for its complete absurdity, we went to In Fidelity Recording Studios and recorded the music properly, edited it and threw it up on YouTube and our Facebook walls for all to see.
Mum saw it. Thought it was legit. A little too legit. I received a very concerned phone call.
To which I responded via email, as spoken words were not enough to demonstrate my point:
Hi mooooomie!
ok, hear me out. i have not become a gangster rapper since moving to LA. here’s the thing about that video that i think you didn’t pick up… (simply because these types of music videos are something very closely associated with my generation)…
it is a parody video clip. a comedy. a social comment. we are taking the mickey out of all the the rubbish video clips that are out there (as you know, there are many). the song in our clip is an existing (very famous) 90’s RnB song with re-written lyrics to take the mickey out of the ‘hot cars, thugs and fast women’ lifestyle of the R’n’B/Rap scene.
… can you understand why we chose this genre to make fun of? it is immediately apparent to people of our ‘music video generation’ that what we’ve done is a parody… we have drawn on tattoos, we have fake thick gold jewellery, we’re two WHITE girls, i have a gold grill in my mouth, we’re wearing tourist Rap shirts, the video is acting as though the Sebring is a hot car when the lyrics clearly state that its a heap of junk… all dead giveaways.
this isn’t the first time someone’s done this… we’re really not breaking any new ground here. there is a very long running TV show called Saturday Night Live (SNL) that have been doing parodies like ours for years.. and many other people, e.g. jim carey. There is a comedian named weird al yankovic who did this parody of ‘Ridin’ Dirty’: the original videovs the parody video
… okay so are we on the same page now? we’re making a social comment. for example with the bit in our video where we sing that we’re living the ‘american dream’ while the images are depicting the poverty, homeless ex-veterans in wheelchairs, skid row, trolley-pushing bag people. (skip forward in our video to 2:42).
so i hope that’s cleared that up for you so you don’t have to be quite so disappointed. please take the time to watch all of the videos that i have listed above so that you have a good understanding of what i’m talking about here.
Give my love to Baba and the animals and a very special kissy to Boblabous.I love you!
xxxxxxxxxxclaud
Yep. Had to do it.
To be honest, I love that song Candy Shop. Always have. Probably why it was one of the first songs that came to mind to reference. But I know hoochie dancing when I see it. And Pony by Ginuwine? If we ever have the good fortune of spending a night of karaoke together, you will know that this is my number one jam. In retrospect, I feel like I should have given The Lonely Island a bit more of a mention in the references. Time for the offending footage?
The video that ramped up my street cred in my family home:
When I got back to Australia a couple of months later, mum still hadn’t clicked my links for reference. Oh how my blood did boil. But by then she had physical proof that I didn’t have the tattoos or any kind of drug addiction… So we were cool.
The last three years of my writing work just culminated a little over a month ago in shooting Winning Formula, my feature film with LFL Entertainment. There was such a wild flurry of writing for so long that when we went into production, the physical doing of filmmaking was such a welcome change.
Last night I hit the cinema to watch This Is The End which was so massively entertaining (although it did beat me to the punch on a Backstreet Boys reference and cameo which gave me the irits a bit) and it was a real call to action to get back to writing, something I’ve been contemplating over the past few weeks but pushing aside to draw chickens.
I feel like drawing for me is so instantly satisfying. You think of an idea, draw, and then you have a picture. And it’s done. Not like filmmaking. That takes a long ass time. You think of an idea, you refine it, you plan it out, you write it, you revise it, you – anyway trust me there’s a ton of steps before you have a picture. As you can imagine, the product and the emotional payoff from working on a project that’s at the scale of a film is proportional. And by that I mean huge.
So I’ve got 3 different film concepts in mind. All very different, but all comedy… I think. And there’s one concept that has the potential to be the complete celebrity orgy that This Is The Endwas… if I get lucky. And as Get Lucky is apparently the song of the summer, I reckon I’m in with a chance. I dig good omens, no matter how much they are not specifically directed at me. So keep ’em peeled! In the meantime, Winning Formula is in post production so there’ll be a ton of content pouring through the facebook page as we move towards release. Frothing.
Guys. Relax. There’ll be more poultry. Probably even as soon as tomorrow. You might just get clucky.
Right, so just to familiarize you, my vast fan base (which at last count of the followers of this blog are numbering a total of zero but I have high expectations) with the other leading lady in Winning Formula… I’ve cracked open the vault to reveal treasures from waaaay back in December 2012. So not very long ago. Prudence Vindin and I got together under the banner of Heaps Funny Shorts and improv’d some characters. There are a few more unedited to come, like the boys in the image above, but here’s the link to the current 6 vids of the Wookie Error webseries.
A feature film? Yeah, I did one. It’s called ‘Winning Formula’, it’s a comedy, I wrote it, my mother doesn’t like the script but you win some and you lose some, I like the script, and we wrapped production on it last month in Los Angeles under LFL Entertainment. I will probably become very wealthy and well known in exclusive circles as a result of this film. Specifically, wealthy in knowledge and the exclusive circle being the cast and crew – but I’m open to expansion if you’re interested.
Anyway, here’s the synopsis:
While backpacking around America, two Aussie girls find themselves deep in turtle racing debt to a notorious gangster. Constantly validating each other’s bad decisions, they devise crafty plans to keep their heads above water, earning money any way they can while unwittingly become tangled in a dark mystery surrounding their family’s past. Through the hardest of times, they learn to embrace what is right on their caravan doorstep: romance, friends and family – with a side order of juice.
Yep. Sounds like a hoot, hey.
Well you can expect more updates on this little gem as the year (and post-production) progresses. This space shall clog up like the proverbial crapper with trailers, posters and links to high-profile premiers. ‘High-profile’ is of course an exaggeration but there will certainly be opportunities to catch a screening here and there.
THEDARCLAUD■ 