Invention - a Second City 7 Day Shorts project

Here's a one-minute short Bryan and I shot last week with Chelsea Devantez, as part of Second City's 7 Day Shorts program. To keep things nice and meta, here's the blog post Bryan wrote about it.

Invention was screened last night at the DeMaat Theater but none of us were there to see if people laughed at it, a situation we may try to remedy. (One problem - the shorts are screened at 10:30 on Tuesdays, and my show Chicago Underground Comedy is at 9:30 on Tuesdays. Boo.)

Before you ask, the sound effect used for the "invention" is my bikini shaver. Believe it or not, it's almost impossible to find a good vibrator sound effect anywhere online. And yes, casting actresses to play my boyfriend's wife or girlfriend is meta and very fun.



Bonus: here's a photo I took of Chelsea during last season's Impress These Apes. Perhaps in homage to Marge Simpson, she pulled that ray gun out of her hair in the middle of her song. It was pretty great.

Short Comedy Film 1 of 12

Hop on over to the Bucket of Nerds blog for the first of our planned twelve short comedy films. We shot this yesterday in about 90 minutes and then I spent a few hours downloading the footage, editing it, and writing the music. (After a night out celebrating my boyfriend's birthday...and organizing a writing workshop for fellow comedy writers...followed by an evening with stand-up friends at Schubas...yes, I'm tired.)

It's called "Breakfast With Teresa," and it's 3.5 minutes with another 1 minute of bloopers. Teresa has her own in-house morning chat show but doesn't seem realize no one is watching, and isn't willing to be too flexible on the rules, even when Elizabeth is too scared to report live from the basement. Nellie suggests that they get around Teresa's iron fist by playing with time traveling text messages and sketch editing in the future. Guest appearance by Morgan Freeman. Sort of.

(Bonus points if you can catch the scene where a highlighted script is in plain sight. Ha!)

I am so thrilled that actors opened their mouths and my words came out. Nerdy words like "Would you please stop crapping on the boundary between magical realism and science fiction?" (Thank you, Teresa.)

I learned a lot. I already know things I'll do differently next time and I feel even surer now that I should be behind the camera more than in front of it, so maybe we'll experiment with inviting guest stars to play with us on our Sunday afternoon comedy jaunts.

Finding friends to play with shouldn't be tough - lots of people have put their name in the hat for future efforts, and my increasingly awesome boyfriend has organized a stand-up comics' weekly writing workshop (a feat in itself), and at our first gathering this weekend, there was more indication that roping more fun friends into this project won't be a challenge.

So go watch my first short comedy film! And please share opinions. We're putting it out there and we want to get better, so be honest (but gentle).

P.S. I'm not too proud a geek to admit that I hope people will notice that the music I wrote for the end of the clip is a remixed, sped up, Latin disco version of the opening clip.