OLDIEO #4 - REGULATORS
Hey sports fans, welcome back to the crap.
Today’s post is a goofy project I did for an editing course at BU. REGULATORS was a music video project quickly pieced together in a few hours - the “thugs” were alerted last minute and champs for participating, the costume is obviously a raid on extra junk lying around the dorm (especially the trash bag garment), hell the song wasn’t even determined until the day of shooting.
In fact, hours before filming I asked Jay if he wanted to lip sync to any song of his desire, and being a lifelong fan of Warren G, he chose Regulators. I think it’s a great song and threw together some funny elements in the nick of time, however I am not familiar with the words outside the chorus and it’s glaringly obvious that Nate Dogg in the video doesn’t know what the hell he’s singing about. But then again, at this point that’s half the comedy - J-Raff is incredibly accurate and sells the performance, I clumsily get in the way like an Ox that dies on the Oregon Trail.
Besides another J-Gem performance, there are a few quirky things I still get a kick out of when watching this goofy parody of a music video:
1) The two groups that knife fight in a back alley (in Allston) are somehow thug cronies during the other half of the video as Jay narrates the events. How did that happen? Did they kiss and makeup? Is the alley scrap a LOST flash-forward?
2) There’s a sequence of Nate Dogg bumping a line of coke in a kitchen as the door magically blows open to call upon his aid in the alley fight. I think I just wanted to sneak in a shot of someone bumping a line of coke, then having to confront his actions immediately after. I love those moments in cheesy cop movies when the bad guy does something terrible like drugs or eff a hooker, then addresses it head-on when someone walks in on the situation. That aside, I think I’m more mystified by the magical wind that blows the kitchen door open.
3) The “thugies” - Mikey Walsh, John Longino (who I ran into at the State reunion show at UCB Saturday- will post about that separately) and “Soggy” Dave round out the all-white terror gang. Mikey is funny in this as he never makes a face and changes poses every 45 seconds. John-Long looks hysterical with wife beater, bowtie, cummerbund and duct taped “Fuck You” glasses (which he couldn’t see out of). Soggy is just along for the ride, and agreed to wear nothing but a trash bag (a visual gag of mine finally realized). You can tell he almost breaks when accidentally taking a real swig of Listerine. All good fellas for playing along and suffering through the track about 10 times on loop.
Well, like I said, conceptually 20 minutes, photography 3 hours, and talking Nolan into cutting it about 4 minutes - this thing was thrown together faster than a Barbie doll manufactured in Korea, but still a fun shoot and another brilliant J-Raff performance.
I’ve been trying to get him to perform in another music video since shooting this years ago, but we’ve never come up with a great song to slug a grand slam with. Hopefully we’ll shoot the follow-up to REGULATORS for this website sometime in the next few weeks…
Speaking of shooting new stuff, we started filming a bit for THE SURVIVAL - this site’s first new webseries. At this rate, the pilot’s going to to be about 48 minutes long (oh, what, don’t have the attention span??!?!?) and my acting is horrendous, but it’s just fun to carelessly throw something together without worrying about the final product, and it’s good QT with Big Daddy and Kenny B. If it doesn’t translate as funny to you, I don’t really care because you don’t make me laugh either, so I don’t owe you shit.
And on that note, do enjoy the old J-Raff classic REGULATOR(S). In a day or two, I’ll post the blooper reel for your senseless viewing pleasure* (see Welcome to RAC video)
…and to buy precious time.
Ma’halo,
Brent Christo
March 20th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Wow…I feel officially regulated.