A Message for America (About Blade)

Hey Patrons! Here's yet another new video!

Remember those days when we'd have mayyyybe one of these per month? Well, those days are a thing of the past! We've already got next week's video done, and we're hard at work on the videos for the rest of December. Including at least one new video essay, because those are something I obviously am going to make more of.

Anyway, this is the video I shot at YouTube NextUp. As you'll recall if you watched the video I made about that week, each of us had to make a video, and each group was assigned one of the studios there (they have a bunch of studios, all very cool). My group (CineTech 5000) got the Oval Office set, which I think has been dismantled by now, since it was just a temporary set up for a couple months around the election.

For this, I decided to take a script I'd already written and reconfigure it a bit for the setting. It was conceived as a PSA, as in the kind of "white background, static shots of people talking to the camera" kind of thing we did with our infamous Firefly video . But once I knew I was going to shoot a video in the Oval Office, with  limited time and not much of a cast available, I decided this was the best fit.

This video has gone through a few evolutions. It was originally written before the election with the assumption that Hillary Clinton would win. Then when that didn't happen, I rewrote it. And then when the setting changed, I rewrote it again.

We don't usually get explicitly political with these videos, but with that setting in the current political climate, it felt wrong to me to totally ignore politics. I almost went much harder politically, and backed off a bit at the last minute, not because I was afraid of offending people, but because it undercut the humor.

Also, we shot this on a RED Epic Dragon. The same camera people like David Fincher and Ridley Scott use. It's our first video in 4k. So if nothing else, it has the highest production values of anything I've ever made.

In totally unrelated news, I finally placed the order for our first official t-shirt yesterday! So if you're one of the people pledging $50 monthly, get ready for those shirts!