Monkey Business

Our first epic!
One thing I used to pride myself (and not as much anymore with my desire for scripted material) was my ability to pull an idea out of nowhere. My brother was over one day, as was Glenn and our friend Mack, and I wanted to make a video. Being myself, I wanted to do something that I couldn't really do well, which was a film-noir mystery. This video has the benefit of coming after "Phantom of the Office", so I had a few things to work off. I knew I could use Dog as a detective, having introduced that idea in the former video and that the comedy would come from Dog as a character. But, wanting my friends in it, I made Glenn a detective as well.
This would be the first time I ever filmed anybody else outside of one video. For the most part, I hadn't used other people in any other videos. It was also going to be the first time I used Dog in a video with others. I felt rather silly at first, holding the camera, while puppeteering Dog and doing his voice. Luckily, Glenn just went with it. He never looked at me, or the camera (he's able to act as if it weren't there) and he acted with Dog like a pro.
The thing with this video is that it was all improve. We had a basic outline for the order of scenes; interrogation, fight, bar, ect. But, we didn't have any dialog. So, as the scenes were filmed, Glenn had to keep up improving with a stuffed Dog. He did great! The fact that he and Dog have any charisma is all due to him. It was so much fun to film this and see Glenn talk to Dog as if he were a real actor, and to see Glenn react to Dog's improve. Glenn's actions were also improves at times. When Dog said "pound it", Glenn did. The scene near the end, with Dog and Glenn hiding from the gunfire, Glenn outdid himself reacting to Dog's passion, and explained that magic created the gun. Brilliant.
I didn't really want the mystery to be a big deal, since I couldn't do a real one any justice, so I made the interrogation scenes rather obvious. My brother would play the villain, Mr. Naughty, and that was it. Give him a cinnamon stick as a cigar and a fez as a hat and Jordan was the antagonist. Jordan has some trouble with lines. During the scene in which he tells our heroes he's going to get rid of them and all the evidence, the poor kid could only say "elephants". We took more than enough takes of him getting rid of pachyderms. Jordan was still young then, and had trouble not looking at the camera, but he has gotten much better.
For the fight scene, I knew we would need more than one person attacking Glenn and Dog, but we only had us four (and Monkey was dead). So, I made the decision that Mack would play quintuplets. I did my best to try and get that idea across, but I'm not sure it worked. It made staging the fight scene tricky, and that part worked, but I think it might look like Mack is just really fast. Either way, the fight was the first time I was Dog and not holing the camera, and it's strange to see myself doing Dog's voice on screen.
I should also mention that the scene with Dog explaining he had to get his magic stick took many takes, only so we could get one with out Glenn cracking up. This happened again when Dog and Glenn were at the bar. Let's forget for a second that Mack plays a one-armed bartender and wipes down a stereo with only his hand. Lets forget that Glenn is wearing a sombrero, signifying he's drinking. Let's forget that we never explain Mr. Naughty as Glenn, Dog, and Monkey's mystery killer. When Dog said he lost his uncle to a 2X4 launcher, Glenn lost it. We had about 3 minutes of laughter filmed, because when he lost it, we all lost it. It was a lot of fun, I can tell you.
Yes, Dog and Glenn get the dialog wrong when figuring out that Mr. Naughty is the killer, but they do figure it out and this takes us to our climax. With no guns to use, we took some marshmallow shooters and called it a day. I never figured Dog would die, but when we came to the end, it just made sense to me. When I was young and played Jurassic Park with my action figures, I always killed the survivors. Why? I don't know. But, I did. So, somehow, that has carried on and now Dog dies at the end of the movie. At first, if I recall, we were going to play "Baker Street" for his death, but "Space Lion" from Cowboy Bebop won me over. It had a much more sorrowful sound to it, and the connotation from it's episode of the show worked for me too. The slow-motion pull back was a bit too long, but I loved the song during the credits.
Yes, this video has its faults. It should be shorter, have better dialog, and less interrogation scenes, but it had some really fun stuff. The dialog made me happy at times, with Dog telling Mr. Naughty that, "I know you'd kill your mom for a nickle and a lollipop." For a video thought up and filmed in a few hours, and with no budget or script, we made up for it with acting and passion. Let no one ever say we don't have the passion.