As part of my birthday livestream, this year, my friend Russ and I did our own riffing of a movie about what a home would be like in the year 1999, that had been filmed in 1967. It has Wink Martindale in it, if that name means anything to you.
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/525299559
You can skip to the 1:17 mark for the start of the actual film. But, then you would miss my completely homemade, completely low-budget door sequence!
For the door sequence, I actually put all of my favorite toys from various stages in my life onto displays and shot them. Then I superimposed those shots with various “doors” as transitions in a video editor. And, I also tossed in a brief shot from a video game. The results are very shabby, but given how little time I spent on it, it’s actually rather good relative to it’s lack of effort!
The original film was 26 minutes long. I edited it down to 20 minutes for this riffing.
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That was awesome! Also, I think they overestimated how pervasive technology would be in 1999. We had the Internet, and thus online shopping, but we didn’t have the capabilities for virtual schooling or Zoom calls yet. I can still remember trying to find video before YouTube came along. Anyone else remember RealPlayer and how awful it was? Even on my T1 connection at college, it was still bad.
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That was a lot of fun, especially the bit with the wine glass.
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“Anyone else remember RealPlayer and how awful it was?”
I’m old enough to remember the early days when RealPlayer was actually GOOD. It sorta became bad after a short while, and got much worse with bloatware and crud like that. But, in the beginning, it really was the best player around, for its era.
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I’m glad you appreciate the wine glass! That one little stunt actually took quite a bit of planning and preparation! It was a crushable cup, of course, made by a company called SMASHProps. (Not real glass.) But it’s still rather hard to crush those things with your hands, you know! You will notice one of my gloves is padded more than the other. I also had hidden metal spikes in that glove to help with the crushing. And, out of several takes, the “best” one still wasn’t perfect. But, at least it came out well enough to wow some people.
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The very first time I watched that 1999 AD film, I noted to myself that the guy on the video phone, talking about golf, looked quite a bit like Carl Sagan. I should probably riff on that! But, for some reason, I completely forgot about that observation when I wrote up the script, and didn’t remember it until shortly after my virtual party was over.
Another potential “missed opportunity” for a riff was at the beginning, where the kid asks “Where daddy exercises and gets measured?” Perhaps that one is best left to your own imagination.
Well there was an episode of the “Mormon Science Theater 3000” fanvid series where they riffed a movie called “Measure of a Man”. Is that what you mean?
No, that’s not quite was I was implying. You’re thinking about clean content.