I Challenge Finland’s Finest to Guitar Hero Combat

Later this month, the 31st of October, I will be flying to Helsinki Finland to challenge Finland’s greatest Guitar Hero player (they’re figuring out who that is right now in a nationwide promotion). I’ll be showing up at Digiexpo, which is kind of like Finland’s E3.

Here’s the announcement video:

This video is probably one of the first videos on my YouTube channel that took longer than one day to film. Thanks to:

Sam Gorski – Camera, lab scientist
Brian Firenzi – The Random Finnish Guy (Check out his site: http://5secondfilms.com)
Alicia Martinez – Producer
Matt Arnold – Additional Camera, Lab scientist
Brandon Laatsch – My trainer
Niko Pueringer – Another one of my trainers

The basic gist of this one was to parody the Rocky IV montage (or rather, the 3rd Rocky IV montage). It seemed a natural fit – American former champion goes to Russia to challenge their champion. In that montage, Rocky uses natural means to beat rigid scientific methods. Here, I wanted to contrast old school gaming with brute force practice (which is what a lot of the pro rhythm game types tend to fall into). It’s all about cross training for me, and I hope the humor comes through.

The arcade was at the Redondo Beach pier – they had a whole slew of great classic arcade games ( the Pong machine didn’t really work, but was totally cool regardless). Special thanks to Ashley Halle, who tipped us off to the location. We were worried that someone might stop us, given that it’s LA and you can barely walk around with a camera without a permit, let alone use it, but we were able to film pretty openly and nobody gave two shits.

The majority of this one was shot on the Sony EX1, a camera I am liking more and more, and if it weren’t for the blasted lame 4:2:0 thing, would be a kickin’ sweet camera. Also if it weren’t such a bitch to hand hold. Super slow mo guitar smashing was on the Sony V1U, which has an option to do slow mo at the expense of resolution.

I plan on bringing along a little camera and continuing this little narrative in Finland, so that should be a lot of fun. It’s been a long ass time between videos due to how busy I was with other Actual Film Projects, so it’s nice to get something up onto the ol’ channel again.