Alphonse Nguyen

Well, I mentioned in an earlier post that I was working on something this weekend, and I am surprised but relieved that it’s completed. There were many instances when I thought it wouldn’t work out at all (so many roadblocks!), but I’m very glad it did in the end.

This all started with Guitar Hero and Rock Band, more specifically, when my brother got Rock Band for his birthday last month. Now, I am not a huge fan of these types of games (or of the music). Sure, they can be entertaining at times, but nothing beats playing on real instruments. But this got me thinking about a way to make a parody of it all. So I pitched my idea to Jimmy and he decided to write out a screenplay.

The first roadblock was figuring out the best way to convey our message, but in a matter of days he was able to triumph with a script we all liked. Unfortunately, we could not enlist the aid of his brother (who is quite talented with camera angles), so we grabbed his sister (role of supporting actress) and just went ahead with it.

Filming was tricky! We only prepared our props on the day of, we messed up lines, and we had a difficult time with the freezing-cold outdoor scenes. There were also scenes where we were lying on the ground off-camera simply to help with the angles and positioning. Not to mention the camera didn’t always want to cooperate.

Originally, the script called for us to use Bach’s music (I was leaning towards his Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D), but we decided not to because of copyright problems. So what could we do instead for music? Well, why not write something original? And that’s exactly what I did. I came up with a 15-second piece while Jimmy worked on the video editing. Of course, we had many problems with the video and audio and syncing them up, but I won’t get into details.

Anyways, that’s all part of the fun. And by the end of the day (we wanted to finish everything in one day), we were all very satisfied with the finished product. Hope you enjoy it too!

The Jam Session