Here’s today’s bit o’ fun.

I am fairly happy with how it turned out. I was originally going to do subtitles instead of dubbing, but then I thought about it and concluded that comedy that you have to read off a YouTube window is comedy working against a mighty big hurdle, and one I could do without.

And let me tell you, it is a lot of work to do the dub comedy. The thing is around two minutes long but it took me two hours to complete it, largely, I suspect, because I was writing it as I went, plus it sometimes took a lot of takes to get the jokes to line up with when people are talking.

That’s part of what made it such a challenge. Because the premise is that this is an English dub of a foreign film, I don’t have to actually match mouth movements like Dayjob Orchestra or Bad Lip Reading, and that is a deliberate choice on my part. Not only am I not interested in going into competition with those guys (especially BLR because that operation is TIGHT), I don’t want to place such a severe limitation on the kind of gags I use.

That limitation is why those two groups’ comedy tends to be the “LOL SO RANDOM” variety. Writing actual jokes that happen to match the mouth movements of a piece of video would be insanely hard. I mean, I am pretty cocky about my comedy writing skills, and even I don’t think I could do it.

At least, not unless I was being paid a lot of money and given a lot of time.

Using foreign language films gets rid of any expectation that the lip movements will match. They rarely do in dubbed films. That makes my job as a writer much easier, although I still have to roughly match the amount of time the character is talking.

I could probably be a little looser with that and still get away with it, of course. But that whole “ha ha, isn’t it hilarious that this foreign person said thirty syllables of gobbledygook and it only translated into ‘Oh look, bandits!’ in English!” type humour is dead, dead, dead. It died with one of the Wayne’s World movies (the one where Wayne is dating Tia Carrere) and has stayed dead since then.

Plus, when it comes to comedy, my muse is very exacting. I am not normally someone who is any good at accuracy, but I have a highly trained comedy ear and I know when something is funnier or better quality than another thing quite easily.

Kind of the way an oenophile develops a sophisticated palate and perforce must become very picky about their wines, I have developed, via a lifelong rapacious hunger for comedy combined with the sort of analytical mind that must know why something is funny, a very sophisticated comedy palate, and that makes me very hard to please in terms of comedy.

And of course, to make good art, you must first please yourself.

I know the vid is not perfect. For one thing, I wish I had done a better and more consistent job of making the hero and the gas jockey sound unique and different.

And I apologize to my nerd brethren for the sort of nerd bashing tone of some of the comedy. For what it is worth, I don’t think any lesser of the hero of the piece for being so geeky.

It’s just that the only way I could think of to have my hero moving a limp and lifeless chick around and have it not seem completely creepy (as in, date rape creepy) was for her to be a RealDoll, and… well, let me put it this way.

You probably don’t get a lot of alpha males buying RealDolls. I might be wrong, but I am pretty sure the market demographic for said product skews pretty geeky.

In order to make today’s vid, I had to finally get around to finding a way to download video off of YouTube. I was a little reluctant to do so because I have already lost one YouTube account due to copyright violations, and I would hate to lose another.

But I know that sooner or later, I would exhaust my interest in stuff I could do just with the webcam and still photos, and playing with real video can be ever so much fun, so I knew I would give in eventually.

However, I will try to stick to stuff that I am fairly sure does not have active and litigious rights holders ready to jump me if I should go over the line.

Oh, and sorry for the somewhat uneven volume level on my overdubbing. I tried to keep the microphone the same distance from my mouth each time, but without a microphone stand, that is pretty darn tricky.

Overall. though, I am pretty pleased with how it turned out. I will no doubt give it another shot some time soon because it seems like a fairly effective form of comedy (and I love the name I came up with for it… Interpretive Dubbing, LOL) and it was fun (and hard) to do.

With more polish on the technique, it could even be my own little comedy niche… really funny fake dubbing. A good way to show off my talents that I can do on my own.

Although I would like other people to come along to do voices. I have never really tried to develop my voice acting talents, and who knows, I might get good at it, but it would still be much easier to have different voices with…. well, different people. With their own voices.

Who knows, this could turn into a “thing”. Certainly, it’s more viable than long rambling philosophical talks from a naked looking me.

Anyhow, that’s all from me today. Hope you enjoy the vid, and remember, I love comments, people, either here or on YouTube, so comment away!