On the second day of Random Action Extras weekend I present to you first a rap song written and performed by our actor and sound guy, Nic Belmonte.
Isn’t that amazing? Our composer was none to pleased about getting the Puff Daddy treatment but it’s something I’ll always have over Nic.
Finally we’ve got the Random Action collection Trailer that aired before the showing of Without Troy. My good friend Matt O’Neal cut it together for us. He’s a talented guy and really captured the series well.
It’s Random Action Extras Weekend so let’s get nuts. This was one of the original promised extras for the RAEP5 DVD that never got finished at the time. I finally got around to it this week. ENJOY!
Ah, but this isn’t the first fight choreography video I made. The last one was just a slideshow which just doesn’t earn the love that the above video deserves.
At this point in my life I get as much joy out of watching the choreography as I do the fight in the finished film.
I wrote the first and second appearances of Crazy Weezy but this one I took a really hands off approach. The reason for that? I wasn’t in Random Acts at the time. I had moved on to new projects but I kept getting pulled back in for guest spots. I don’t have a lot to say about this. Un-fun fact: I dented my car by slamming myself against it in one scene. Yeop.
It’s Crazy Weezy Week here and that means starting here. This was the first sketch to use my character of Crazy Weezy and our first sketch to use all of RA on set. Turns out that makes it the most error prone sketch ever. You can assume the reason that booms are in all the shots, crew are in reflections, shots are overblown, and every other problem is because we wanted it to look like a bad used car commercial. Too bad that ain’t true. Coolest feature? That car was in the 2 Fast 2 Furious. That’s what makes this the most requested video Random Acts ever did.
I just got a new computer and as such I’ve been able to do a lot more with video compression and finally put my old videos online in HQ. As such I’m going to upload them here with commentary. These certainly don’t exemplify what I’m capable of today, but it should be fun to see what crazy crap I made going back all the way to high school. We’ll start off with my baby the Random Action series.
A loose history of the Random Action series is this: In January of 2006 I read Penny Arcade’s Official NERF Rules of Engagement. The middle panel, which takes the absurdity of NERF guns and mashes it up with overdramatic noir style stayed with me. The April before, Sin City, hit theaters and as a big comic nerd I was hooked. That led to the Sin City style open for the 2nd season of Random Acts. Random Acts was a sketch comedy group that I was a founding member of at Butler University. Tired of doing just comedy my friend and oft-times business partner, Tom Otero, and I decided to do an action piece. I remembered an idea I had come up with the year before that would have featured future Without Troy star Kent Livingston. Kent was out and our new friend Jeff Brown was in. The title, naturally, would be a pun based off of our parent series.
The shooting of the first episode took about an hour. Right behind the camera people were walking to class so all of the voices were re-recorded later. Eric Weiher made his sole appearance as our ninja kidnapper. He’s a much better actor than what you see here. My co-director Tom makes an appearance at the end as the eventually named, Marlowe. Marlowe would grow to be possibly the most compelling character in the series due in no small part to Tom’s performance.
Music is by the amazing Tomas Diablo. He kindly gave us permission to use his music and I can’t thank him enough for that.
The Random Action series grew out a lot from here. It’s incredible how much it’s changed.