Best Buddies is a non-profit organization that provides job placement for individuals with intellectual disabilities. Best Buddies was started by Anthony Kennedy Shriver and every year they put on a bike race fundraiser where hundreds of riders make a 100 mile trek for charity from the JFK Library in Boston to the Kennedy Compound in Hyannisport on Cape Cod. This year a dozen Plymouth Rock Studios employees participated in the race while the rest of our production team, including myself, filmed the event for Best Buddies.
This was one of several episodes of The Series that we did about the event. We shot this on the night before the race at the Best Buddies gala at the World Trade Center in Boston. Warning! This video contains Tom Brady.
UPDATE: As of May 2010 this clip is unavailable online. In the meantime, enjoy this episode of The Series that featured some of Brady’s New England Patriots teammates.
One of the strangest, yet amusing, parts of working with Neil, Kevin and Ryan, aka the New Kids on the Rock, is that you get asked to appear in random parts in their videos. You don’t really think much of it at the time, especially since half the time you have no frame of reference for how your part will fit in the rest of the piece, but then you see it online and realize that you’re actually being watched by thousands and thousands of people from around the world on their YouTube channels. This really struck me with this video, “Ryan Murphy: Psychic Friend,” when my little cousin sent me a message out of nowhere saying that I was now forever ‘cool’ in her eyes because I was in a video created by her ‘idols.’
I recently traveled to Taunton, Massachusetts for the first time to tape an episode of The Series where I visited two local businesses who were featured in the Motion Picture Association of America’s annual economic impact report because of the uptick in business they experienced due to Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio’s new movie Shutter Island filming in their neighborhood. This is my first appearance as a hard hitting investigative journalist. Please forgive the long winded opening monologue, I improvised it on the spot.
Besides my day job working at Plymouth Rock Studios, I also have a night gig. One night a week I teach a course in the Film and Television Department at Boston University. The course is called “Three Screens” and it focuses on the impact of new media platforms (particulary the web and mobile) and interactive television on traditional linear television. Recently I invited Neil Cicierega, creator of the hugely popular “Potter Puppet Pals” video series and winner of the 2007 YouTube Best Comedy Award (and as it so happens, a key member of our Hollywood East TV production team) to come speak to my class and give some insight into how he became a viral sensation on the web and attracted millons and millions of viewers to his amateur work. We taped for an episode of “The Series,” which you can view above.
One of the main challenges of trying to make a compelling web documentary about the development of a movie studio is taking footage from an endless number of mundane (but extremely important and necessary, mind you) meetings with the various boards and organizations for planning and development in the town and condensing it into bite-sized chunks of entertaining video. So naturally we resorted to spoofs. Here is one of our favorites, a send up of the infamous opening to the 1980’s television show “The A-Team” featuring voiceover work by yours truly.
UPDATE: As of May 2010, this clip is currently unavailable online, sorry!
