Blackout
Veteran
Blackout's Box LIVE interactive show with GH13 & live webcam - Trumpet BYTES Apple
I'm extremely excited!
This was the FIRST absolutely real world on location beta test that was successful of the world's first new completely interactive TV and web show where the at home audience, not the studio audience gets to DIRECT and WRITE lines and choose the course the show will take - Blackout's Box LIVE! (c)1995-2011 Patent and TM pending. Other shows would have you maybe vote on one thing, maybe be a little bit interactive, but none of them went so far as to have entire segments made up on the spot by what the LIVE audience AT home was suggesting - and any that attempted to do so were at HORRIBLE quality or were just live webcams of someone's house - not interactive shows fully guided by the audience.
I like to think of this as kind of like those old 'choose your own adventure' books that you used to read when you were a kid... only in full hd audio and video recorded in HD at the very same time it is broadcasted / streamed LIVE on the web.
This is the full NON edited LIVE take of the one of the show's LIVE segments in very high quality full hd as recorded to a GH13 camera. Mounted to the top of the GH13 in order to get the VERY exact angle and broadcast out out to a LIVE web audience, is a Logitech C910 HD webcam with a carl ziess wide angle lens on it. The GH13 is with the kit lens set to wide, but as you can see I had some focus issues on the first run, because my brain was really trying to focus on everything else working. It's QUITE a crazy setup and a bit cumbersome, but it works!!! You can see me struggle to readjust the backback a few times and when I got a little lost because the producer was talking in my ear the same time Katie (the chuckler) was talking and it's a lot of data to take in while also trying to keep a frame and operate everything correctly.
The show works like this: I announce to a small group of people (and very soon I will be announcing publicly) that I am doing a live show beta test. You go to http://blackout.com or http://livestream.com/blackoutsbox (iphone & ipad friendly even though Trumpet Dinopup is not) or http://TrumpetDinopup.com or http://BlackoutsBox.com and then you will see prerecorded clips and be in a chat room until I go live. When I go LIVE, my LIVE feed will take over my station / channel and you will be seeing what I am doing LIVE with about a half a second delay (when everything is working correctly).
I am wearing a backpack that has a high end Win 7 64bit quad core i7 laptop in it with a wimax 4G broadcaster than can get about 1.2 mbit up per second (114K per second) and broadcast live on location in almost any major city for approx 1 and a half hours before the battery dies, which is fine because the final show will be from a half an hour to an hour, with LIVE segments, prerecorded sketch segments, and then a talk show interview & special guest segment. The prerecorded sketch segments of the show will play while me and my team of producers change batteries and run to the next LIVE setup.. the show will bounce back and forth between these three modes. Prior to 4G technology, this was absolutely impossible and you needed a quarter of a million dollar satellite truck to do something like this with another big load of $$$ for grass valley switchers.
The GH13 is recording a high end version, while the C910 is mounted on top of the GH13 (where the mic mount is) getting pretty much the exact same angle, then going into the backpack, and out LIVE to the viewers via wireless 4G stream via the various websites hosting the stream, and livestream. As you are watching, you can type into the chat what you would like me to do. For instance, this show started out with me just standing outside on the street and asking viewers to "pick a direction," then as I panned the camera around and showed the three possible ways I could go - a few viewers chatted "go attack the Apple store!" ... "go talk to the hot dog vendor," "no he's retarded bite at the dog!!!" so that's the way I went - LIVE - none of this was a setup or rehearsed - that is why I have put up the UN-EDITED clip first - so you can see it how it happened LIVE. This is the high end HD clip - the lower end web clip is a 854 by 480 iphone / ipad compatible h264 stream that is encoded live on the fly at 24 fps by a Quad Core i7 laptop that is in my backpack, and is viewable in the "Vide Library on Demand: section of my website.
In my right ear is a wireless ear piece to listen to a producer tell me what the chat room is saying and voting on as I improvise the scene according to their input.
For instance, if you were in that chat room while this happened, you would have seen the start, then seen me ask which way to go, then see this in the chat room that is a side flash java app that runs right next to the live video stream:
User1: go attack the Apple store!
User2: go talk to the hot dog vendor!
User2: ask him is his brain is broken.. or have Trumpet eat all is hot dogs...
User3: Blackout, forget the hot dog - have Trumpet eat the little dog on the street!
User4: Go chase after the girl who is laughing!!!!!!
Ect ect.. till the LIVE segment ends and we cut to a commercial or a pre edited sketch. The pre-edited sketch
gives me just enough time to run to another location for another live segment in a different scenario. Some of
them will be me working puppets, some will be me as myself, some will be me in various full character costumes,
all while the chat room guides the show with votes and suggestions and even line readings.
I can't read the chat room. I tried originally by having a little lcd screen with the chat room mounted on the side of the camera but it distracted me too much as I am already operating the puppet, the cameras, a zoom h4n recording audio from a headset mic I am wearing for the character trumpet's voice, and it's on board 90 degree x/y pattern mics to record the publics voice all while listening to an assistant / producer talk to me in my right ear telling me what the chat room is saying, and I take what I want from it and run with it. Also obviously I won't be able to read the chat room when I am actaully IN the LIVE segment sketch myself rather than working a puppet, because I won't be operating the camera for those segments - obviously!
So I can firmly say that this comedy here is a magical new form of improvisational comedy coming directly from the audience just as much as it is coming from me - as it was the audience's idea to go to the Apple store and it was the audience's idea to talk to the hot dog guy - and chase after Katie, the chuckling girl featured in this clip, who was a very good sport.
Things get even FUNNIER when I go into the Apple store, but due to some legal issues that are still being researched I can not show THAT part of the show as of yet. Those of you who managed to catch it LIVE really saw a treat, and you know who you are.
Please - before you Apple fans get all up in arms - please remember that this is a beta test proof of concept for a COMEDY show and so it is not really an all out attack on Apple as it seems - as I don't quite dislike Apple as much as Trumpet Dinopup does... this is just what happened - and just as Simon Cowell ups his sarcasm on American Idol for entertainment purposes, so do I with Trumpet here.
The final phase of the show will HAVE the chat on the lower third of the screen so you can see the interaction and votes LIVE as they occur... but we are still working on that. The final version will also be edited for time upon rebroadcast, but you will be able to see both the edited and LIVE versions the first time around - and then on the web. I am in negotiations to get this on an actual network - so I would have to edit for time for the rebroadcast most likely, but the full live versions will stay up.
I would just edit some of the slower parts that drag out in this to make it better - but for a beta test I was
really happy.
If you want to see kind of what my setup looks like in order to do this show, you can look here at this behind the scenes clip:
http://vimeo.com/20005995
That was the ALPHA test live from Utah at Sundance 11. I didn't have everything streamlined and in a backpack yet, so I was stuck in one location. Now with the backpack setup I can move anywhere, but I can't read the chat room - which I don't mind since I need to focus on the performance more anyway and let the assistant producers filter out the chat room chatter to its best ideas.
The show is recorded by several cameras - but for this particular beta test it only went out LIVE over one - the Logitech C910 In future shows we will have up to 10 hidden cams LIVE as well, and yes, I and my producers can LIVE switch to up to 10 different camera angles with up to 10 of these backpack 4G wimax set ups.
Please note that my lawyer told me I had to say this: this entire show is copyrighted and patent pending - so if you are trying to STEAL it from me telling you this, I will come after you with my big bad wolf lawyers.. and trumpet will bite you. We all know lawyers suck... (No offense to my lawyer who naturally of course is the ONE exception to that rule) Enjoy!
- Blackout -
I'm extremely excited!
This was the FIRST absolutely real world on location beta test that was successful of the world's first new completely interactive TV and web show where the at home audience, not the studio audience gets to DIRECT and WRITE lines and choose the course the show will take - Blackout's Box LIVE! (c)1995-2011 Patent and TM pending. Other shows would have you maybe vote on one thing, maybe be a little bit interactive, but none of them went so far as to have entire segments made up on the spot by what the LIVE audience AT home was suggesting - and any that attempted to do so were at HORRIBLE quality or were just live webcams of someone's house - not interactive shows fully guided by the audience.
I like to think of this as kind of like those old 'choose your own adventure' books that you used to read when you were a kid... only in full hd audio and video recorded in HD at the very same time it is broadcasted / streamed LIVE on the web.
This is the full NON edited LIVE take of the one of the show's LIVE segments in very high quality full hd as recorded to a GH13 camera. Mounted to the top of the GH13 in order to get the VERY exact angle and broadcast out out to a LIVE web audience, is a Logitech C910 HD webcam with a carl ziess wide angle lens on it. The GH13 is with the kit lens set to wide, but as you can see I had some focus issues on the first run, because my brain was really trying to focus on everything else working. It's QUITE a crazy setup and a bit cumbersome, but it works!!! You can see me struggle to readjust the backback a few times and when I got a little lost because the producer was talking in my ear the same time Katie (the chuckler) was talking and it's a lot of data to take in while also trying to keep a frame and operate everything correctly.
The show works like this: I announce to a small group of people (and very soon I will be announcing publicly) that I am doing a live show beta test. You go to http://blackout.com or http://livestream.com/blackoutsbox (iphone & ipad friendly even though Trumpet Dinopup is not) or http://TrumpetDinopup.com or http://BlackoutsBox.com and then you will see prerecorded clips and be in a chat room until I go live. When I go LIVE, my LIVE feed will take over my station / channel and you will be seeing what I am doing LIVE with about a half a second delay (when everything is working correctly).
I am wearing a backpack that has a high end Win 7 64bit quad core i7 laptop in it with a wimax 4G broadcaster than can get about 1.2 mbit up per second (114K per second) and broadcast live on location in almost any major city for approx 1 and a half hours before the battery dies, which is fine because the final show will be from a half an hour to an hour, with LIVE segments, prerecorded sketch segments, and then a talk show interview & special guest segment. The prerecorded sketch segments of the show will play while me and my team of producers change batteries and run to the next LIVE setup.. the show will bounce back and forth between these three modes. Prior to 4G technology, this was absolutely impossible and you needed a quarter of a million dollar satellite truck to do something like this with another big load of $$$ for grass valley switchers.
The GH13 is recording a high end version, while the C910 is mounted on top of the GH13 (where the mic mount is) getting pretty much the exact same angle, then going into the backpack, and out LIVE to the viewers via wireless 4G stream via the various websites hosting the stream, and livestream. As you are watching, you can type into the chat what you would like me to do. For instance, this show started out with me just standing outside on the street and asking viewers to "pick a direction," then as I panned the camera around and showed the three possible ways I could go - a few viewers chatted "go attack the Apple store!" ... "go talk to the hot dog vendor," "no he's retarded bite at the dog!!!" so that's the way I went - LIVE - none of this was a setup or rehearsed - that is why I have put up the UN-EDITED clip first - so you can see it how it happened LIVE. This is the high end HD clip - the lower end web clip is a 854 by 480 iphone / ipad compatible h264 stream that is encoded live on the fly at 24 fps by a Quad Core i7 laptop that is in my backpack, and is viewable in the "Vide Library on Demand: section of my website.
In my right ear is a wireless ear piece to listen to a producer tell me what the chat room is saying and voting on as I improvise the scene according to their input.
For instance, if you were in that chat room while this happened, you would have seen the start, then seen me ask which way to go, then see this in the chat room that is a side flash java app that runs right next to the live video stream:
User1: go attack the Apple store!
User2: go talk to the hot dog vendor!
User2: ask him is his brain is broken.. or have Trumpet eat all is hot dogs...
User3: Blackout, forget the hot dog - have Trumpet eat the little dog on the street!
User4: Go chase after the girl who is laughing!!!!!!
Ect ect.. till the LIVE segment ends and we cut to a commercial or a pre edited sketch. The pre-edited sketch
gives me just enough time to run to another location for another live segment in a different scenario. Some of
them will be me working puppets, some will be me as myself, some will be me in various full character costumes,
all while the chat room guides the show with votes and suggestions and even line readings.
I can't read the chat room. I tried originally by having a little lcd screen with the chat room mounted on the side of the camera but it distracted me too much as I am already operating the puppet, the cameras, a zoom h4n recording audio from a headset mic I am wearing for the character trumpet's voice, and it's on board 90 degree x/y pattern mics to record the publics voice all while listening to an assistant / producer talk to me in my right ear telling me what the chat room is saying, and I take what I want from it and run with it. Also obviously I won't be able to read the chat room when I am actaully IN the LIVE segment sketch myself rather than working a puppet, because I won't be operating the camera for those segments - obviously!
So I can firmly say that this comedy here is a magical new form of improvisational comedy coming directly from the audience just as much as it is coming from me - as it was the audience's idea to go to the Apple store and it was the audience's idea to talk to the hot dog guy - and chase after Katie, the chuckling girl featured in this clip, who was a very good sport.
Things get even FUNNIER when I go into the Apple store, but due to some legal issues that are still being researched I can not show THAT part of the show as of yet. Those of you who managed to catch it LIVE really saw a treat, and you know who you are.
Please - before you Apple fans get all up in arms - please remember that this is a beta test proof of concept for a COMEDY show and so it is not really an all out attack on Apple as it seems - as I don't quite dislike Apple as much as Trumpet Dinopup does... this is just what happened - and just as Simon Cowell ups his sarcasm on American Idol for entertainment purposes, so do I with Trumpet here.
The final phase of the show will HAVE the chat on the lower third of the screen so you can see the interaction and votes LIVE as they occur... but we are still working on that. The final version will also be edited for time upon rebroadcast, but you will be able to see both the edited and LIVE versions the first time around - and then on the web. I am in negotiations to get this on an actual network - so I would have to edit for time for the rebroadcast most likely, but the full live versions will stay up.
I would just edit some of the slower parts that drag out in this to make it better - but for a beta test I was
really happy.
If you want to see kind of what my setup looks like in order to do this show, you can look here at this behind the scenes clip:
http://vimeo.com/20005995
That was the ALPHA test live from Utah at Sundance 11. I didn't have everything streamlined and in a backpack yet, so I was stuck in one location. Now with the backpack setup I can move anywhere, but I can't read the chat room - which I don't mind since I need to focus on the performance more anyway and let the assistant producers filter out the chat room chatter to its best ideas.
The show is recorded by several cameras - but for this particular beta test it only went out LIVE over one - the Logitech C910 In future shows we will have up to 10 hidden cams LIVE as well, and yes, I and my producers can LIVE switch to up to 10 different camera angles with up to 10 of these backpack 4G wimax set ups.
Please note that my lawyer told me I had to say this: this entire show is copyrighted and patent pending - so if you are trying to STEAL it from me telling you this, I will come after you with my big bad wolf lawyers.. and trumpet will bite you. We all know lawyers suck... (No offense to my lawyer who naturally of course is the ONE exception to that rule) Enjoy!
- Blackout -
Last edited:
