You Will Not Believe is a one-man shop of semi-creative production run by Matthew Latkiewicz. For all intents and purposes, "creative production" herein = internet based writing and audio work. MORE →
You Will Not Believe is a collection of writing, audio, and web projects by Matthew Latkiewicz. It is based in Turners Falls, MA, but also spends a heck of a lot of time in San Francisco, CA. CONTACT & MORE →
You are visiting You Will Not Believe, which is not me claiming you will not believe where you are visiting; that is just its name. All content here by Matthew Latkiewicz unless otherwise stated, with some restrictions on how this stuff can be used.
Today, I launched the You Will Not Believe Tour Company, fake audio walking tours of real places. The official announcement is below, but I assure you: YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE.
As much as I enjoy audio walking tours, however, it is high time we take this story-telling medium away from the museum and historical societies! I am proud to introduce the newly founded You Will Not Believe Tour Company - maker of totally fake audio walking tours of totally real places.
It's been over three years since I ran the first Love Poem Project, in which take a love poem and replace the word love with another word. I was asked to read this poem at a wedding; and I couldn't believe how many times the word love was in it. So in my head, I pretended I was saying Batman. Still funny to me.
“On Batman” by Thomas Kempis (Here's the original, in which the author has taken the word Batman and replaced it with the word love.)
Batman is a mighty power,
a great and complete good.
Batman alone lightens every burden, and makes rough places smooth.
He bears every hardship as though it were nothing, and renders
all bitterness sweet and acceptable.
Nothing is sweeter than Batman,
Nothing stronger,
Nothing higher,
Nothing wider,
Nothing more pleasant,
Nothing fuller or better in heaven or earth; for Batman is born of God.
Batman flies, runs and leaps for joy.
He is free and unrestrained.
Batman knows no limits, but ardently transcends all bounds.
Batman feels no burden, takes no account of toil,
attempts things beyond his strength.
Batman sees nothing as impossible,
for he feels able to achieve all things.
He is strange and effective,
while those who lack Batman faint and fail.
Batman is not fickle and sentimental,
nor is he intent on vanities.
Like a living flame and a burning torch,
he surges upward and surely surmounts every obstacle.
NOTE: this post is 593 words long and contains two videos, each of which are around six minutes. Doing some math, I would say, this one's gonna take you a good 15 - 17 minutes. You got that? But again, 12 of those minutes are slack-jawed video watching.
As as followup to my last post; the web series I have been working on with Scotty Iseri premiered this past Wednesday. It is a Christmas Carol spoof about bad customer service. I am very proud of what we did here and while I am bummed that it's kept me from putting out the next Not About Wine episode, I sincerely hope I can continue doing this kind of work.
There's a lot to be said here about doing creative work that mostly uses the web for its distribution. In some ways, what we are doing here is a very traditional video project - episodic, no audience interaction, linear - and in this way, it may not be that successful. There's a lot of episodic, non-interactive, linear video out there - on the web and otherwise - and ours is no better than what's already out there. In fact, in many ways, it is much worse. You have to watch it here, on the web, for one.
But what was so exciting about working on this project with Scotty in the coffee and beer heaven that is Portland, OR is that even while making something fairly traditional, we were doing it in extremely untraditional ways --
All of it was shot on prosumer XSLR cameras - cameras you can reasonably buy.
Our budget was very low for what our product looks like.
We relied on a network of people from the net to help write, promote, and act in the movie; not people from the film and television industry.
The project was funded entirely by Zendesk, the help desk software company that I work for. No production company, just the advertiser. This is either awesome or horrible depending on your point of view. I think it is in between.
-- and it was these ways that made me feel like we will be making more web-native projects soon. Since we aren't relying on traditional processes, we don't need to make a traditional product.
A Holiday Special
But for now we are tackling the most traditional of structures: the holiday special. We wrote this story to be funny and to satisfy two themes:
Customer Service - this was the "brand message" that Zendesk wanted the entertainment to carry.
Holiday stories - we were releasing it in December. Seemed to make sense to take advantage of that.
We are spoofing both of them. The basic idea is that there is this Scrooge like character who has created all the bad customer service experiences we all hate -- hold music, phone trees, hipsters who work at coffee shops. In this story, he is forced to experience at an absurd level all the bad customer service he spawned. This drives him to drink heavily.
I play this character. DO NOT WORRY - I went to one year of acting school so everything will be FINE.
Below are episode one and two of the series. WATCH THEM. And then go to the Merry Holidays, Please Hold page to sign up for further episode notifications. That way you won't miss the part where I grab somebody's boob and get punched in the face.
OH AND ALSO: we have a thing where you can win an xbox 360 with Kinect as well as some Threadless t-shirts.
I am currently ON VACATION and gasping for breath in the absurd Rocky Mountain climate, but I am happy to report that the Star Wars Yoga video tape I shot with Time Magazine's pretty wonderful Techland blog has been edited, titled, voice-overed, and posted.
MAY I SAY that I am just as horrified at my R2-D2 impression as you are. But, Time.com must not have noticed as they have made Star Wars Yoga the TOP NEWS OF THE DAY:
The Next Campaign - Star Wars Yoga at New York Comic Con
I will not keep my plans a secret. I want to teach a Star Wars Yoga class at New York Comic Con; and then from there SKYWALKER ranch. If you are a nerd who would take such a class, let me know in the comments here or by communicating with me on Twitter. Enough interest and it is possible they will HAVE TO LET ME DO IT.
This is an installment of Advertisements for Emotions. In a world of limited emotional energy, emotions need to get the word out if they are going to retain market share.
In this installment, Skepticism vies for your attentions.
You are visiting You Will Not Believe, which is not me claiming you will not believe where you are visiting; that is just its name. All content here by Matthew Latkiewicz unless otherwise stated, with some restrictions on how this stuff can be used.
November 29, 2011;)
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