Breaking Bad and Buzzing

AMC’s BREAKING BAD video contest kept me up and buzzing til late last night… or EARLY this morning… JJ and I had about a 10 hour editing session til about 2:30AM. We were working on cutting together a couple of entries….

TEN HOURS! To cut two separate ONE-MINUTE videos.

Just for fun, shits, giggles… whatever…. Just to shoot something for the sake of shooting something…. last weekend, I rounded up a small crew and a few actors and we gave the whole BREAKING BAD thing a go.

THE CONTEST>>>

AMCtv.com is seeking submissions for its You Could Be On Breaking Bad contest. Entrants submit a short audition video using one of three Breaking Bad monologues provided on the contest website. AMCtv.com members will vote for and comment on their favorite entries to determine the 20 finalists and 10 first prize winners; one winner receives the opportunity for a walk-on role in a Season 3 Breaking Bad episode on AMC. Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad creator-exec. prod. Finalists will be announced May 4; winners will be announced on or before June 1.

Visit http://blogs.amctv.com/breaking-bad-contest. Submission deadline is May 1. No fees or purchases required. Possible pay provided; Grand Prize includes $1,000 cash prize and the chance for a walk-on role in a Season 3 episode of Breaking Bad.


Seems simple enough… right? So after shooting til the wee hours of the morning last week, and editing til the wee hours of the morning THIS week…. We completed two entries… cutting footage together…then viciously chopping it all down to fit the time requirements. JJ and I had our 1 minute, 75 MB submissions ready to go… and they look almost identical… not only is the look and feel similar (we used the same lighting scheme.), but the approach to the material is the same… I think we both tried WAY too hard to deliver a poignant and moving performance… of you look at some of the other contest entries… many of the entries are just bobbing heads…somebody starting into their web cam…reciting…or trying to act… some better than others.... you can see that there are a handful of clips that get creative with the assignment… and thus are enjoyable to watch… I might be getting too critical of myself… which I usually am…. but I feel like we took ourselves too seriously… I mean they look cool… dark, edgy…kind of film noir-ish…. But we also had to cut a few lines from the monologues to keep the clip under a minute….. You’ll see… whenever they get posted… we submitted last night at like 3AM.

What’s funny is that there will be two practically identical videos… one featuring actor JJ HUCKIN…and one featuring actor JAMES HUFFMAN…

That’s going to be confusing…. Not to mention we sort of look alike… two white dudes with short brown choppy hair… the only difference is that JJ is 6 ft 6… I’m only 6 ft 1… but you can’t really tell that from the video.

We probably should have thought about that when we were shooting, but we just didn’t have the time and a big enough crew to whip up a totally different scheme for each actor.

The one thing we noticed after we submitted our videos was that you can only get official votes from people who are REGISTERED with AMCTV.COM… so if I’m going to hit up all my friends and ask everyone to vote for me in this contest… they will all be required to sign up with AMCTV.COM… and most people I now will be like “F%$@ that.”

I will ask anyway… of course

I will let you know when the video’s are up.


www.jamescliftonhuffman.com


(The indie city entertainment site is currently down. Apparently I unknowingly let the domain registration expire and now I'm trying to get a handle on how to fix the situation. I'm working on it)