Boring Old Raphael.TUMBLR

∞ The Exquisite Corpse Project on Last Call with Carson Daly

adamconover:

Our movie was profiled on NBC’s Last Call with Carson Daly last week! Incredible.

Ungentle reminder: If you still haven’t seen The Exquisite Corpse Project, it can be yours for just five bucks!

For real, though, what are you waiting for?

“Standing Ovations are now de rigeur in the theater. They used to be rare, awarded only to extraordinary performances. In straight (non-musical) plays, especially, the highest compliment audiences could pay would be to sit pinned in their seats by the power of the experience they’d had. I can remember a number of occasions when not only did I not want to get out of my seat, I didn’t want to talk to anyone until I had shaken off the effect of what I had seen. No longer — you don’t get the chance. The audience is on its feet even before the first bow, no matter how limp or shallow the piece. They are, of course, giving the ovation to themselves for having been part of a participatory experience rather than a passive one, and for having spent their time and money on it. They’re reminding themselves that they’re alive. Which is not a bad thing, but which makes the extraordinary ordinary.

— Stephen Sondheim, not a bad thing

Look,

there is a lot to like about the wikipedia entry for the Infinite Monkey Theorem, including the long explanation of the mathematical definition of “almost surely”  and the random text generator that, after “2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey-years,” spat out the partial Henry IV, Part 2 line:

RUMOUR. Open your ears; 9r”5j5&?OWTY Z0d

But my favorite part of all has to be this:

In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes Crested Macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon in England for a month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website.

Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it. Phillips said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned “an awful lot” from it.

doigsong asked: Just to say that I'm a massive fan and your ending to the film was beautiful- you tied it up so well! Was there an idea behind Adam in the space suit besides the "adventure-temptation"?

Nope, you pretty much got it.

(MILD SPOILERS AHEAD)

I wanted to explore how real people would be affected by living in this very unreal world. I think it turned out pretty cool — as if the characters from Chioke’s section somehow wound up in Dave’s section and didn’t know how to get out of it, but of course I didn’t know anything about what Chioke wrote at the time.

I got the character list like everybody else, but we didn’t get the character’s relationships to each other, their ages, or their genders (for the characters with gender-neutral or foreign-sounding names like Adayit, Yustus, or Police Officer 2). I had to take some real stabs in the dark, and luckily I guessed a lot of things right. I don’t think my section would have landed nearly as well if it didn’t have Chioke’s section as a foundation, but then again, if Chioke’s section had been different, everything else would have been different — who knows what kind of pages I would have gotten? As open-ended as this process was (or maybe because of that), it’s weirdly hard to imagine any other possible version of this movie.

Also, thanks! Glad you liked it!

ASK ME ABOUT THE EXQUISITE CORPSE PROJECT, OR OLDE ENGLISH.
SEE OUR MOVIE, LOS ANGELES.
SEE OUR MOVIE, CHICAGO.
SEE OUR MOVIE, ANYWHERE.

Also, PS, for everybody who’s getting sick of all these answer posts clogging up your feed all day, I’m only planning on doing this today, and maybe answering a few leftover questions tomorrow, and then this blog will return to its regular semi-weekly schedule. SO HANG IN THERE, THANKS.

kevinanton asked: The music in this film is great! What was the composition process like?

That’s a question for Jesse Novak!

But I agree!

ASK ME ABOUT THE EXQUISITE CORPSE PROJECT, OR OLDE ENGLISH.
SEE OUR MOVIE, LOS ANGELES.
SEE OUR MOVIE, CHICAGO.
SEE OUR MOVIE, ANYWHERE.

robotgod asked: also, i am probably going to buy the download of the exquisite corpse project because i was a huge OE fan back in the day and it looks good but i'm a bit hesitant because i'm a poor college student and for $5 i could get 80 oz. of OE instead so try and push me off the fence

Oh man, I totally remember being in college and five dollars being a lot of money. I think you’re going to like this movie, though, and I think you’re going to be glad you spent five dollars on it, because the money is going to cool people who want to make more stuff that you will like (us and Splitsider), as opposed to just, you know, wherever.

In addition to the entertainment of watching our movie, and the ability to watch it over and over again as many times as you like and share it with all your friends, you also get to feel like you’re part of something. The same way you felt when you used to watch our online videos, that you knew about something cool that not everyone knew about, that’s how you’re going to feel when you watch our movie. When Caleb Bark is a big star, you get to say, I bought his first movie for five dollars before anyone knew who he was.

Still, though, five dollars, man. I get it.

SO, here’s what I’m going to offer you. I want you to buy our movie for five dollars. It’s super easy; you can do it right here. If, after you watch the movie, you think, “Man, I really would have preferred the two forties,” let me know and I will paypal you ten dollars. That’s twice your money back, enough to buy four forties.

I am dead serious about this offer and it is open to everyone (let’s say, for the next week). If you buy our movie for five dollars and then after you watch it, wish you hadn’t, let me know, and I will give you ten dollars. I’m happy to make that offer if it gets you off that fence, and I’m happy to pay that money to anyone who doesn’t like it, because I appreciate people trying things outside their comfort zones.

That being said, I think you’re going to like it.

I think it’s worth five dollars.

ASK ME ABOUT THE EXQUISITE CORPSE PROJECT, OR OLDE ENGLISH.
SEE OUR MOVIE, LOS ANGELES.
SEE OUR MOVIE, CHICAGO.
SEE OUR MOVIE, ANYWHERE.

robotgod asked: what are your favorite olde english sketches looking back, also which one do you think you contributed the most to?

Um, I guess the sketches I contributed the most to were Peanut Butter’s Birthday and the two Boxer vs. Raptor sketches, where I literally did everything, without even telling the other guys I was making a sketch.

Those sketches aren’t very good though. Pretty much everything I think of as a “good” Raphael-written, Raphael-starring sketch (for example, Totally Crazy, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Michel Gondry) was done through an incredible amount of collaboration with the other OE-members and outside collaborators (like Jesse Novak, who contributed immensely to all three and who also scored our movie), as most of our best sketches were.

The other time I really worked on my own was for Olde English: Rules, a major forerunner to The Exquisite Corpse Project where we put on a show filled with sketches based on assignments and challenges we had given each other. (The one sketch from that show that makes any sense out of the context of that show is Blind Date, which went on to gain some popularity on youtube.)

You can watch a reel we put together based on the show here, and some of the full sketches here. In our Splitsider interview, Ben talked about that show:

What he wrote was terrible, cause how could it not be, but an interesting phenomenon we discovered is that, the audience loved it, even though it was terrible. And from a comedy perspective, that’s fascinating, because usually if you write something bad, it will bomb. If they were to just see the sketch that he wrote, they would hate it. Why wouldn’t they? They would say, why did I just watch that piece of shit? But with the added context of knowing why it was terrible, they could find it funny. They were in on the joke and they liked it. And that was really interesting to us. So this feature was basically an attempt to explore the format, and what effect it has on the audience to share the creative context with them.

As for which sketches are my favorite, I talked about that a little here.

ASK ME ABOUT THE EXQUISITE CORPSE PROJECT, OR OLDE ENGLISH.
SEE OUR MOVIE, LOS ANGELES.
SEE OUR MOVIE, CHICAGO.
SEE OUR MOVIE, ANYWHERE.