Category: Blog

The Emergency 411 keeps showing up in more places! This time, it’s part of Crackle’s Wet Paint contest, featured alongside many fine (and some familiar) animated shorts currently gracing the web. If you’ve been stuck circling the block and haven’t gotten a chance, check out Emergency 411: Finding Parking — it’s on Crackle right now!

And while you’re there, the shouting talking half of Penn & Teller has something to say on Penn Says, with one of my favorites being his thoughts on fame. And just because I’m linking to Penn doesn’t mean I’m trying to convert you into an internet libertarian.

I had a great time in Toronto at this year’s Mobifest. Toronto’s a wonderful city and I would definitely go back. Sorry it took me roughly three weeks to say that. I met some great people, made some connections and got to see some fun videos and animation, but more than that, I learned one important thing: that guy running karaoke at the Holiday Inn was a huge asshole.

I enjoyed the Mobifest show itself (up until the awards part anyway) and I could see in each short what made it stand out to the judges. And it’s true, you do learn a bit about what works and what doesn’t from watching your video with an audience… like sometimes you can be too clever for your own good. I’m not saying that to sound arrogant, I mean that trying too hard to reinvent a tired story, or abstracting something to the point of obscurity, or just having too many things going on at once, you may just trip over your own feet. From that, here are a few things I learned about producing mobile content:

1. Be iconic. Have a solid, easily-recognizable style, color palette, design.
2. Don’t rely too heavily on audio; cellphones aren’t known for their sound quality. They’re known for having tiny, tinny speakers.
3. You’re on a small screen, so don’t rely on a lot of subtle detail. A whole joke can be lost by a compression artifact or dropped frame.
4. Don’t rush every joke — there’s this thing called ‘pacing’; you don’t have to write like your viewers have ADD.
5. That guy running karaoke at the Holiday Inn can go suck a dick.

At least that was the news over at What Would Tyler Durden Do?.

And you know what? This just makes my latest Emergency 411: Finding Parking that much more topical. Sure, it’s ostensibly about parking or something, but the eagle-eyed viewer may notice a reference to a certain starlet with a pathological need to let her south mouth breathe. At the time it was a joke about looking up Britney Spears’ skirt, or Lindsey Lohan’s or some chick named Paris Hilton (hadn’t heard of her), but now we can thankfully throw Christina into the mix.

Ah, thank heaven for easy celebri-vag gags.

And speaking of how classy my integrity is, when giving an interview for last week’s Mobifest Toronto, I got to talk about girls who don’t wear panties when I was interviewed for Canadian TV’s Much More Music channel. Here’s a pic of me going for the high road:

I would’ve included a link to the video, but for the life of me I can’t find it. I’ll just have to trust someone is watching me talk about panties somewhere in the great white north.

Before anyone realized you shouldn’t put me in front of a camera, I was one of the Mobifest filmmakers interviewed by Bite TV (again, you’re going to have to take my word for it).

In my own charmingly stilted, sweating way, I filled them in on how annoying finding parking is in LA — because no one’s talked about that before — until I remembered I had a much more interesting story about when I got beaned in the head by karma.

All this and more on a Betacam tape that’s being put through a bulk eraser somewhere in Toronto’s Entertainment District right now.

Finally, before you think this is just a scattershot way to gather more hits with free cash, C1AL1$ and debt relief, nude celebs, let me bring it all back and share with you my first encounter with the beguiling Ms. Aguilera, on a video salute to the most Inconsequential Women of the 20th Century.

It’s important to note that people hate this video. At least it went over better than the one about Mother Teresa.

I’ve been really busy with another E411 the last few weeks and forgot to post this, but The Animation Show continues to be completely awesome and gave me an interview on their site!

Tim Heiderich informs on “Emergency 411”!

So if you want to know more about the boundless genius who thought of animating monochromatic stick figures, check it out! They’re actually really good questions (and if not for me, read the rest of the interviews to find out how the pros do it). And while we’re at it, the cartoon that was inspired by the worst opening act in music’s history:

There’s more on the Emergency 411 MySpace my YouTube page.