Break a Leg

Hey, everyone. Remember in the third episode, when Jennifer delivers news to Sebastian that Amber's kidnapped, and Pogo #2 tells him that, "a Pogo lives a life alone?" That Pogo is our good friend Michael Goode -- a fantastic filmmaker who worked on LIFE NOIR with us (that feature film we made that's still in post production) and who helps out on Break a Leg sometimes.

Right now, Mike has branched out into social activism and documentary-style work, and he recently went to Africa and shot a short documentary on a small community center there that helps combat rape in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya.

We're big fans of supporting friends and bigger fans of supporting important causes, so, I wanted to share his video with you -- it's well-made and has an important message.

Check it out:

Have a good weekend, guys!
-Yuri

I just celebrated my birthday last week. Celebrate may be too strong a word, one should say the birthday happened and I was awake for most of it.

There came a time over a decade or so ago that I just stopped caring about my birthday, it had lost its charm when I stopped collecting GI Joes and Transformers. Once I no longer obsessed over colorful little trinkets and doodads then the day itself, which has classically been structured around gift-receiving, ceased to have any real meaning for me.

Crap, I just remembered that my Mom's birthday is four days after mine, and I forgot to send her present. Stand by a sec.

There, I think that ought to do it.

There's some country, somewhere (I have a highly paid research staff) where on your birthday you actually give gifts to your friends and family, not the other way around. I think it might be Bakersfield, but the place isn't relevant. The point is, I want to inject some real purpose, some meaning back into not just my own birthdays, but my son's and wife's and family members' as well.

You could say giving gifts on your birthday instead of receiving is the way to go, problem solved. I say, don't let's be hasty now. That not only sounds expensive, but I have enough trouble trying to figure out what to get everyone once a year around Arbor Day. Maybe in Bakersfield where money flows like sweet nectar from the horse's teat they can buy the neighborhood a round of Eee PCs (thanks honey!) annually, but until Break A Leg hits the big time I need to come up with a Plan B.

Here are a few of the ideas I was tossing around:

• Strip poker party. Not too original, most of you probably jumped straight to the comments and offered this after the first paragraph. We'll call this a definite maybe.
  
• Origami. This way I can give a gift to everyone that's customized, personal, and cheap. I used to know a lot of the models, now I just remember the hat and one paper airplane. Since I finally know more than two people, we'll have to shelve this one for now.
  
• Just do the cake thing without the gifts. How does this even work? You blow out the candles then stand around just... eating cake? Maybe if it's a stripper cake or something, but Bachelor Party and Very Bad Things pretty much turned me off of those for good.
  
• Hooperman marathon. This is currently the front-runner.
  

So I still have a ways to go yet, but at least I have a little less than a year to come up with something.

Wait, one more:

• Learn an extreme sport. No, this just seems like begging to die. Every year. On the day you were born. Karma does not ignore such strong irony.
  

Happy Jenday, everybody, although a bit late I admit...

  Been a while.  Lot going on.  The hotel shoot you guys have heard so much about was pretty cool.  Well, more accurately, it was very interesting.  It was actually quite warm.  Without giving away any spoilers I'll just say that some of our costumes well not well ventilated.  It was pretty creepy being in a "real" haunted hotel.  The bartender there told us the following story:

On several occasions male patrons of the hotel would go up to their room on the Fourth Floor: room 408 or 407.  You see, they used to be all one room, but some time back they made it two rooms in an effort to stave off "occurrences".  Well, these guests would go up to their room and walk down the short hallway into the bedroom area.  Here they would find a woman with a look of absolute scorn and hatred on her face.  The men would generally immediately apologize and back out of the room.  They would go down to the concierge and complain that there was already somebody in the room.  The concierge would claim that they certainly had nobody else checked into the room.  And when the guest would go back up...there would be nobody there.

 

It was after hearing this story that solo sojourns into the room became less frequent.

 

But the building was pretty neat, if somewhat antiquated.  The floor squeaked in certain places and there was this really annoying high pitched squeal that went off whenever you crossed the threshold of the elevator doorway...which was really bad when we tried to shoot in the elevator and kept setting the sensor off.  And there were faces everywhere: busts of smiling women that made you feel like any moment they were going to turn their heads and wink at you.

 

We showed up around 8 and got pretty much immediately to work.  To my surprised delight, everything went pretty smoothly.  There were no forgotten P2 cards or XLR cables, no cops showing up to tell us we couldn't shoot there without a permit, and most importantly: free ghosts no ghosts.  We shot until 5:30am, at which point I was surprised to find myself not nearly as tired as I should have been.  I guess the energy drinks really did work.  Which sucked because when I got home it took me two hours to fall asleep.
  My manager had graciously allowed me to come in late to work, but I still only got about 3 hours of sleep.

 

And this happened 2 Tuesdays in a row.  For me.  For Yuri, Justin, Dashiel, Dustin, and usually Hilary, they do this all the time.

 

Anyway, you'll see how worth it it was soon enough.

 

This past weekend I went down to San Diego for my friend's wedding.  First off, has anybody flown on Virgin Airline lately?  They have tvs in the back of every seat so you can watch tv, watch movies, play games, chat, order stuff, order food, order Jack Daniels on the rocks which they will bring right to your seat.  And the arm of your chair flips open and you can pull a remote control/text pad/game controller thingie out of.  I was impressed.

 

The wedding was held outdoors on a grassy embankment near a marina.  The groom and all the groomsmen were wearing kilts, which was pretty friggin awesome.  To be part of the spirit of things, I wore mine too because hey! any excuse to wear a kilt.  The fun all started when two very small and very adorable little flower girls made it halfway down the isle...and then bolted back the other way.  It was a nice short ceremony made slightly less short by the most rambling priest I have ever seen.  I'm an ordained minister (Thanks Universal Life Church!) and I've done a few weddings in my time.  You don't stand up there and babble all day.  You get to the point, you get a couple of silly kids hitched up, and then you book it to the reception where somebody else has paid for the booze.  And there was lots of laughter and merriment and the flexing of the knees and the flying of the kilts (that's dancing).  All in all a text book wedding.  I spent most of the rest of the day in the pool.  My friend has a saline pool, which means instead of water it uses a sodium compound that is pretty much like swimming in tears.  Which means no eye irritation, which means I could do my impression of a spawning dolphin all day long.

 

I hate coming back from vacation.  So, when I got dropped off at the airport on Sunday, I was wearing a shirt that reads "Tomorrow's gonna suck."  You can order them at cafepress.com.  Almost every airport personnel I had to interact with to get to my plane agreed that yes, tomorrow probably was going to suck.  One woman offered to trade me shirts, but the fake rhinestone really didn't go with my shoes.  And I love it when the pilot shows a little personality, a little humanity.  We are trusting this guy with our lives and it's nice to know that it's somebody I would want to put my trust in.  Before we left the gate the intercom came on and the pilot said "Thank you and Welcome about Flight 878 with non-stop service to Chicago."  Several people actually gasped.  Even I was started because I hadn't really been paying attention and was reading my book.  "Now that I've got everybody's attention," he carried on, "just kidding."  We all had a good chuckle, I ordered my JD and the rest of the flight went smoothly.  I happened to be in one of the emergency exit seats which has tons of leg room, which is nice for a certain 6'1" tall individual who usually spends his flights with his knees in somebody's back.

 

And then last night Justin calls me up and asks me if I have any renaissance style clothing.  Silly Justin, he should know better than to ask me questions like that.  He should have just jumped right to "Can we borrow some of your ren gear."  So the lads came over (but forgot my hat) and borrowed some of my stuff for a shoot.  And I know you might be thinking "Wait...why isn't Jennifer wearing the silly costume?"  Well, as a wise man once said "sometimes you get the bar, and sometimes, well...the bar, he gets you."  So you can start placing bets on who will be wearing a frilly shirt and breeches.  And I guess I do this kind of thing too often because the lads started asking me questions about period fashions and I was able to answer them...correctly.  Which means I think we can add dramaturge (or at least assistant costumer) to my titles for this show. 

 

I only say that because I often feel that I don't always carry as much weight as the other guys around here and more titles means I'm contributing something.  Doesn't it?

Hey, old fans and, we hope, new fans.

Why do I say new fans? Because we're getting significant traffic from a fantastic article written about Break a Leg in none other than the San Francisco Chronicle. The article is great, the paper calls us, "ahead of its time" and Reyhan Harmanci, the writer (who went with us on our big cowboy shoot) really does a great job talking about the world of Internet Video.

So, welcome new fans and old fans!

Hope you enjoy our Season Finale featurette, which not only talks about the new episodes coming up, but also talks about the release date (July 7th) our upcoming sponsorship deal, and you should expect for the next, oh, say, 4 months.

So, as per usual watch, enjoy and comment on our featurette either here, on our website, or on our YouTube page -- where we ask to comment, rate, subscribe and favorite -- you know the drift.

Thanks Reyhan and the Chronicle for a wonderful article -- and we hope you stay around and take the time to watch our show, new visitors, take it from our fans -- we're funny and talented and sometimes we'll give you hugs in exchange for support.

And we're great friggin' huggers (especially the guy who plays Jennifer, 'cause he hugs with swords._

Thanks, guys!

-Yuri

Editor's note: Sorry, Drew! I completely forgot to publish this yesterday...

Here we go!

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Debates rage constantly on the effects of violence on children's perception and behavior, especially violence from television, movies, and video games.

Just the other day I acquired a DVD of classic Bugs Bunny cartoons, and wanted to start introducing my son to some real cartoons, the kind I used to watch when I grew up. I mentioned that to my wife and she demurred, saying "It's so violent; Caillou isn't violent at all." Caillou is a Canadian import, need I say more?

I realized with shock how absolutely right she was: cartoons today are terrible. I started watching my Bugs Bunny DVD alone (picture me on the couch in the dark, huddled up to the laptop chuckling madly), and wondered how I could improve today's children's programming.

Let's take a few examples:

Caillou: about a little bald boy with a strange name that is just trying to cope as a four-year-old in a grown-up world.

Typical problem: Gilbert, his cat, has stepped on the Sunday funnies and torn the paper, making it difficult for Caillou to look at the pictures.

Caillou's solution: his father helps him tape it up, making it "good as new". Yay!

Bugs Bunny's solution: whack the cat with the rolled-up paper, causing his head to flatten into the floor and his tail and hind legs to shoot bolt upright. Bugs then mutters some pithy political quote apropos of the 1950s and digs a hole through the kitchen floor.

Bob the Builder: about a general contractor named Bob who has a fleet of talking, yet seemingly incompetent, construction vehicles. The vehicles also have genders, though what implies I'm not too sure.

Typical problem: Spud, the local scarecrow, is giving all of the decorative food from the snowmen in the local snowman competition to some seemingly hungry rabbits, rendering the snowmen big featureless piles of snow.

Bob's Solution: explain to Spud why what he did was wrong, and drive around with him to fix the snowmen. Mind you, Spud is a scarecrow, and as such has no brain, making it likely he will repeat the entire sequence of events within seconds.

Elmer Fudd's solution: blow Spud's head off.

Thomas and Friends: a delightful adaptation of the Rev. W. Awdry's series of children's books about a cheeky little engine and its companions. Notable for trains that are completely self-aware, can talk, think, reason, and drive themselves, yet need an engineer in the cab all the time anyway. Sir Topham Hat is a self-righteous asshole.

Typical problem: Thomas is trying to avoid Diesel, 'Arry, and Bert because Diesel said that Thomas is the "stinkiest engine" on Sodor. Or something. This causes Thomas to not pay attention and crash into another train, spilling all of the "stinky cheese" and requiring him to go back to the dairy for another batch.

Thomas's solution: he gets the second batch of stinky cheese and a firm talking-to by Sir Topham Hat, who never seems to learn that his engines have the emotional mentality of a fourth-grader.

Daffy Duck's solution: Paint a fake tunnel on a stone wall and drive through as if it were real, leaving Diesel and his cohorts to crash into the wall. Because after all it is just a painted-on tunnel, right?

Yeah, cartoons in my day had some real kick, didn't they? I watch kids programming today and just shake my head sadly. Don't even get me started with The Wiggles.