ECNY Awards Video

For the last few months I've been working with Alex Goldberg (Fearsome), Alex Zalben (Elephant Larry), Jon Friedman (The Rejection Show), and Nate (The Apiary) on reviving the ECNY Awards, New York's original comedy awards show. I was particularly excited when I was asked to be a part of the production team, not just because I love big, pompous awards shows (though I do), but because it's one of the few ways we have of forcing press and industry to take a look at the talented, but less known performers we work with everyday in small comedy rooms all over the city. Sure, a lot of the bigger names carried away the awards on Monday, but I thought the nominees represented a strong spectrum of the varied talent in the city. I'm hoping that in subsequent years we can bring in more comics who are firmly entrenched in the club scene as well.

The ECNYs also became a great artistic endeavor for me as I got to produce our opening video featuring as many of the nominees as we could wrangle. With the assistance of the other producers as well as my fellow DAW nominee Sean, I shot this over two days at Ochi's Lounge (downstairs at Comix) with my Panasonic DVX 101B, Sennheiser shotgun mic, Tram lav mic, and Lowell DV light kit. With a few more lights and slightly larger space I could have done this without requiring too much post-production fussing in Final Cut, but I did the best I could with what I already had. Ultimately, I'm really happy with the way this turned out and I'm especially thankful to everyone who helped and stopped by for the interview.

For the geeks: the Garbage Filter saved my life on several of these takes as getting the perfect white background was difficult with larger groups. For Olde English's takes especially, I used about 4 different garbage mattes. It's not perfect, but it did the job well enough.