#earwolf challenge

[dtafm]

EARWOLF CHALLENGE LOGO // DTAFM

This was one of the easiest logos I got to put together for Earwolf. I provided a handful of color options [first image] and we finally settled on the yellow and dark blue combo [second image].

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[mattlittle-blog]

Earwolf Challenge: Week #9

So this week's show caused a lot of talk. Here's how it went down on our end:

Zach Galifianakis! Zach Galifianakis! It felt like the hard work we'd been putting in to this competition was going to pay off in the best way possible. NYC was in the middle of a "hurricane" - I think we can use quotes around it now - and even the shitty weather couldn't bring us down off that high.

The coaching call was the next day, and I'd already written two sketches. The rest of the group was also tossing around ideas…only for us to find out during the call that we couldn't use sketches. It had to be an interview/improvisation that could be boiled down to a 5 minute segment.

We spent the next two days going back and forth over email regarding how we should interpret the coaching call, and what the parameters were surrounding the call. In between, we were doing TONS of research on Zach, trying to figure out how best to approach the interview (5 straight men? Do we just let one person speak and feed them questions off mic? Hit on a subject then riff? Treat it like a Daily Show-style interview sketch?). Lots of work went in to this because it felt like our moment to actually step up to the big time; however it came out we would have a comedy segment produced by us featuring one of the biggest comedians/actors in America right now.

Then, at 7:00EST on the dot (when our call was scheduled), we got an email.

Zach's not coming. Zach was never coming. Guests cancel. You now have 30 minutes to…

I stopped reading and ran to my computer. I knew what the rest of the sentence would be, and it was 7:01. We had 29 minutes to put together our submission.

Some process background - when LHR produces a show, we take a week or 2 for writing and rewrites. Then we record. Then…EDITING. For a typical sketch that airs on LHR there's anywhere from 1-5 hours of editing involved (the 5 hours is on my end because I'm not very good at it yet). Editing includes SFX, mix, producing, notes, then producing again. But, as stated above, we didn't have that time. Everything had to be created in that 30 minutes. EVERYTHING. The clock was ticking.

Our back was to the wall and every second that went by was a second that we weren't recording. Therefore, we needed to make decisions as quickly as possible as we knew the next 30 minutes were going to be VERY INTENSE work. Plus, we were dealing with the growing disappointment that we would not be working with Zach.

As I opened my computer, I saw a sketch outline for RoboBorat, an idea that I'd had months ago that we would throw around as a bit when we were hanging out. I love the idea of someone creating something so close to their heart but ultimately so useless. I yelled out "Let's do RoboBorat!" and we jumped on the idea immediately. 

Adam, Dan, and Taylor recorded all their lines in one take each with all of us contributing lines and ideas for them to say. We had it recorded by 7:15 and Dan grabbed the files and began editing while Anna and I searched for SFX online. Meanwhile, Taylor and Adam began prepping the 15 second intro.

At 7:27, we were out of time. It had to export from Dan's computer and we had to upload by 7:30. What we had did not have a final mix, complete sound effects, or sound effects for the robot voice, or even cleaner line reads. There was LITERALLY no time to do those things. However, we felt good about what we'd done - we proved that we could work and produce under pressure. Bottom 2, but we could defend ourselves. I don't want to sound like a dick here, but I would challenge anyone to try to do what we did in 30 minutes and produce better results. If you can do that, please also build a time machine, go back to last week, and help us produce our submission. :D

I got to Adam's at 8:00 on the dot Friday (TRAINS!!!!), which was when the call was supposed to begin. I was surprised to hear him talking loudly as I approached the door…Anna shushed me as I walked in the door and I realized we were on the call. I was taken aback at how the call was going but again, I think we did a great job of defending what we did and why we made the decisions that we did.

Then we sat for a WHILE waiting for the call back. We had been in the bottom 3 in the first week and (barely, by their admission) in week 8 as well. Each time the follow up call came within 15 or so minutes…it was a much longer time than that that we were waiting, which made us more anxious. As you know, the axe came down shortly after.

I was surprised and a little bummed that people interpreted this as a meta sketch or even a commentary on other comedians. It wasn't, in our minds at least. I was also bummed that people felt we were just using another comedian's work for our own laugh lines. We liked the idea that Borat was SUCH an intense cultural phenomenon for a few months in 2006 that people began to turn on it because of the sheer amount of their friends constantly quoting it. It could have been Star Wars, or Spider-Man, or countless other pop ephemera…ugh, okay, I'm stopping here because I'm starting to sound bitter, but I'm not. I'm just surprised when I'm part of creating something and others see an intention that isn't there or interpret it in a way that had nothing to do with the piece. The price of commercial art though! We're adults, we can handle it.

At the end of the day, the competitor in me was mad that we didn't make it to the end of the line, but other than that I was okay with the result here. We have gained hundreds of new listeners (hopefully they are also subscribers!). We got to work with professional comedians. We got to talk to Matt Besser every week about sketch for 9 weeks. We spent our summer pushing ourselves on deadlines to produce sketches for the express purpose of public judgement and we did a great job. 

Personally, this is what I got out of it:

I listened to comedians that I have followed for YEARS listen to work that I had created. Stuff that I'd made and felt strongly about. I heard them listen to it and like it. And quote it on air. I heard them say that we were doing great work. I heard them say they respected the way we work with other talent. I finally had the ear of people in the industry I have spent the past several years trying to find a way in to, and they liked what they heard. It reminded me that I DO know what I'm doing.

This isn't some kind of ENDING for our show; we're not going away after this. In fact, it's fired us up to do more. I'm really excited about our future. Also, with the way the forums have reacted, I have a feeling that when people remember The Earwolf Challenge they're still going to remember us as part of it. Even though we didn't win the competition, I think we won the attention we were hoping for.

I will say this though - if you are reading this and were on the Earwolf forums, PLEASE do not put energy into trashing other shows. You can always be constructive, sure, but you have to learn how to temper that. Instead, ignore them and double down your efforts to get behind the show you LIKE. It's so easy to dislike something publicly; you're simply pushing away things and shouting…that's the BASEST reaction we have as humans. It's what babies do. I mean that literally. Babies only know how to react initially by pushing anything away it perceives as out of the ordinary and scream and scream. It takes a willingness to be open about who you are as a person and what your tastes are to openly like something. You have to be vulnerable and say "I stand behind this" and then take the criticism that may come with that stance.

Thanks to everyone that stuck with the show and offered us support, encouragement, and more. Thanks to Caroline for shouting out these navel-gazing musings I've been doing on my Tumblr. Thanks to Anna and Adam who are AMAZING comedy writers and contributed some of the best material for the show. And thanks to Taylor and Dan for doing the heaviest lifting in producing all of our submissions for the competition. Those guys deserve a gold medal made of chocolate but is also worth what gold is worth but is also delicious to eat.

If you have a chance, why not sign up for our mailing list? Head to lefthandedradio.tumblr.com and enter your info in the widget in the left column. Or leave a review on iTunes?  Or just keep listening to our show.

If ever there were a summer that were bitchin', surely it was this one passed.

[mattlittle-blog]

Earwolf Challenge: Week #7

(This is a week late...my apologies to Caroline. :D)

Three and a half minutes. No introduction. The piece has to stand on its own and make the judges understand what you're all about.

When we received our instructions, we were eager to jump in. We had talked about the fact that, at that time, LHR seemed to be under the radar as far as discussions surrounding the show. Lots of talk about the other shows, and when we did come up, we felt we were being casually dismissed. Going in to this show we knew we'd be up against the expectations that podcasting=gabfest, much the same way people assume comic books=superheroes, and felt that we still had something to prove (as an aside, I'm sure all the shows have felt this way at some time during the challenge). At this point, we'd been in the bottom 3 once, in the very first week, for intros. We certainly wanted to show that we took that week's criticism to heart and wanted to show that the challenge had helped us not only to shore up loose ends of our show, but also that it was helping us grow as writers and performers. I don't know what the numbers are on The Earwolf Challenge, but I'd bet they are way bigger than ours. Bigger stage? Has to be a better show.

Anyhow, the first thing we addressed was the intro. We had changed the intro in our latest episode and took that through to the challenge. When we all sat down for our record/production night, we had prepped 13 scripts. We read them all and voted on what would best serve the challenge. We picked three, one of which didn't even make it in (but there were three sketches in your submission, you say...I'm getting there), and started recording and rewriting.

I wrote Dog Lawyer, and in fact wrote 2 versions of it - one with barks and woofs, and one where the lawyer was speaking "human" the entire time. We chose the one that was heard on the show because it just felt funnier. That was also one of the hardest reads I'd ever done, trying to sound convincing while basically speaking gibberish...an acting exercise disguised as a sketch, I suppose.

Anna wrote Talk Show after watching Kathy Lee and Hoda do...whatever it is they do on Today. We really liked how unashamedly awful it becomes, hitting beats quickly, and jumping back out. Also, it gave us another reason to have Taylor perform a Southern-inflected woman having a freakout. We love that.

The third sketch was one that Taylor wrote which actually didn't make the final cut (but will be in the next episode of our show). We had been ambitious enough to discuss doing 3 sketches with an interstitial (which is what we call the snippets of dialogue that we toss in during radio dial transitions). Dan had an idea for Orson Wells finishing the War of the Worlds read then talking some shit afterwards, not knowing he was on the air. When he got behind the mic, he started improvising lines and we were laughing our asses off. Immediately we knew we had something more, so we told him to run it again, take his time, while we threw lines at him. It was a really fun organic sketch that just came out of us fucking around.

After getting all this together Dan and Taylor stayed up into early AM editing, which is when they realized we had to cut something for time; unfortunately, Taylor's sketch had to go. Once we sent it off, we waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

Lots of waiting because the judgement call got cancelled due to travel schedules getting jammed up on the guest judge end (nobody's fault; it happens). Because of that, on top of Matt having to travel for the Del Close Marathon, we were informed that the call wouldn't happen for 2 weeks. TWO. WEEKS. So our team of five insecure comedians had two weeks to sit around and pick apart our submission, until the day of the judgement call when we had apparently convinced ourselves that we were going to get eliminated. At the very least, we were going to be in the bottom three (fun fact: the horizon point of a comedian's mind is failure). So we were ELATED to find out we were in the top 2! We fielded the call at Taylor's place, where his roommates were having an afternoon brunch party, which means there was a party happening around us while we were huddled in a room with our stomachs in knots. Thankfully, the best cure for a stomach in knots? ALCOHOL.

Also, a small bonus: during the 2 weeks of waiting, we had a chance to meet Mr. Matt Besser at UCB! We talked about Hill Country Chicken, improv, podcasting, and yes, the message boards. Also joining our conversation - Mr. James Adomian. Now I'm not saying he'd ever do our show, but at the very least he's heard of it now. :D

Final 4!

[mattlittle-blog]

Earwolf Challenge: Week #6

So! We come to a challenge that is exactly what we do. We were nervous as Matt immediately let us know that the scrutiny was on us this week. We were also surprised at his amazement when we said we would be submitting new material for this challenge. That's the one thing I've been really proud of throughout this competition: we have viewed this as a chance to push ourselves and grow. So aside from the first week, for each challenge we have created original material. I guess the other shows have been submitting stuff from the archives as it fit to each one, but we have viewed every challenge as something to work towards rather than a search term for our past episodes. I'm not disparaging the other shows for submitting old stuff, mind you; I'm just explaining how we have approached the show. We're of the belief that we're only as good as our last sketch, and whatever we've written isn't as good as what we will write.

Speaking of writing, let's talk about process for a sec. I submitted Dinner with Batman in an original draft that was 6 pages long (I like to cram as much as I can in those early drafts to help pick a direction because I'm bad at decision making). It also included an appearance by the Penguin and...well, it wasn't great, but Bozarth had some good notes about what was working which helped me grind it down to 3 pages, then he took a pass that beefed up the jokes and added some great new ones, and eventually we had a sketch. My point is, that first draft that isn't that great? Don't worry about it. Find what works, ditch the rest, and go from there.

PA System is Off Limits was another gem from Taylor, who has a habit of creating characters that are so fun and strange I think they're not from Earth (a sketch he wrote called "Pussy Monster," which has a beach blanket bingo-style musical number, confirms this). All in all we were excited to submit this week's challenge.

About our intro: for this ep, I recorded the intro (after the sketches were in the can), and we were a bit loopy by that point. I had done 5 unusable takes of our 8 second intro because of us just being silly. On the last one Dan decided that, in lieu of saying "Hello!" like the rest of us, he would bray like a donkey. This caused all of us to laugh, or try to stifle a laugh in Bozarth's case. In fact he stifled it so hard that the second I finished talking he farted something awesome. We thought that was so funny that we actually kept it in the introduction. If you go back and listen with the speakers turned up, immediately after I say "hope you enjoy" you can hear the fart happen. YOU GUYS WE HID A FART JOKE IN OUR INTRO. I FEEL LIKE KEYSER SOZE NOW, HIDING THINGS IN PLAIN SIGHT.

Anyhow, we were incredibly flattered by the critique and the subsequent discussion. Tig is always great, and Seth Morris was once artistic director at UCB, which put us over the moon after hearing him compliment our submission. We are now in the TOP 5! This hill keeps getting steeper the further we climb, but it's really thrilling. Well, it's thrilling for a few hours until we get our next challenge, when it becomes a source of anxiety. But if I had to pick something about which to be anxious, this is MOST definitely the thing.

[mattlittle-blog]

Earwolf Challenge: Week #5

Week 5 was an interesting week, personally, as I had the least involvement in this challenge (so this will probably be a short recap). We have brought in guest performers, and even writers, for our show previously, but we knew the challenge here was to SPOTLIGHT the guest. The unusual, fun thing in the sketch had to be the guest. As such, we immediately started racking our brains for some type of "name" comedian we could use. That racking ended almost as immediately when we realized that A) our submission was due in 4 days, B) we don't know a single "name" comedian, C) even if we did, they'd surely never listened to our podcast and would ignore the request, which is always the case in our experience, and we couldn't afford to have that happen with our deadline. When Neil Casey's name came up, there were 5 sketches pitched in the next 30 seconds. That's how you know you're on to a good idea.

Bozarth delivered a great script here with a clear, simple game with some nice darkness around the edges. In fact, Marc Maron described some of the lines as dark poetry. Exciting! I was wary of them having Marc Maron on as a judge for the sketch segment as he seems to also believe sketch is just funny hats. That was an incorrect assumption as anyone who listened heard some interesting insight from him.

During the judgement recording I was out of town, sweating bullets that we would not be torn apart by Marc and Howard. I couldn't sit still and began doing time math again, trying to guess when they would send the release email letting us know we'd passed. Boy, it's one thing to sit there and wait in front of the computer; it's another kind of hell waiting from far away to hear via text (maybe they lost service! maybe their phone died! is my phone loading my email? AGH!).

So the competition keeps getting tougher. It got even tougher when we found out what the next challenge was as it put a target squarely on our backs - sketch.

[mattlittle-blog]

Earwolf Challenge: Week #4

...and we're still in there!

Okay, so this episode. We decided on using Herb quickly after the coaching call, as he's really the only recurring character we had that was presentational, and we wanted to get more use out of our phone number (you know you hear the same phone number in every episode for a reason, right? It's because it's REAL). Also, we wanted to do one character because we knew none of the judges had ever heard of us, so we didn't want to fracture focus by throwing a bunch of different points of view at them in less than 2 minutes.

So we whittled down to a few advice calls and wrote to those, maybe 6 or7? Of the ones we picked, I brought in first pass on Spider-Man and Quinoa and Anna brought in Movie Advice, and we punched everything up, recorded, and I headed out the door to be at a show at UCB by 11:00 pm. This was a Thursday night, submission due the next day.

I get out of the show at 12:35 am, immediately my phone rings. Taylor.

"Hey buddy, Dan's computer crashed, we lost all the audio."

Again, VERY lucky we only did one character, as I was able to get back to Dan's by 1:20 am and jumped back into recording. We finished a second time, and heard a heavy sigh. Taylor.

"FUCK, we forgot to set up the mic as the input source."

So we finished up recording that night at about 3:10 am and I went home to crash, feeling pretty good about the challenge. Dan and Taylor jumped in to editing and producing (those two have been working the hardest during this challenge with all the production work).

Saturday. The call.

I was excited to hear Paul Scheer was one of the guest judges. True fact: I was a page at The Late Show with David Letterman when he made his first appearance on the show. I knew how excited he was about it, so I snagged a copy of that episode's script, then messaged him on MySpace (early 2007 y'all) to see if he'd like it as a keepsake. He immediately responded and passed along his address at the time. Hopefully it made it...I don't know, I don't trust the mail (kidding, sorry Mr. Bozarth).

We got the notification that we passed and were elated. However, when we heard the feedback from the judges, I took it pretty hard. Herb is a character I'd been doing for years (I hosted an insane podcast about Steelers football called Da Burghcast as that character), and being from Pittsburgh, I felt like I had the POV down pretty well. Listening back, I took it harder than I should have, though it was mostly because it was someone I really liked listening to my work and saying "Meh." You can tell in the episode Paul and Matt Gourley straight up don't like the character; Matt actually calls them out on this.

THEN! The Pittsburgh accent got called out! If there's one thing I knew I did right, it was that. Trust me, that is based on 30 years of listening to my insane family. Matt asked Frank about the accent. He and Peter said that wasn't it, then talked in what sounded like a Canadian accent. Ha ha, so that stung a little too.

However! Our next conversation with Matt started with him asking who did that sketch. I spoke up, expecting to get more critique. Instead, Matt said he listened to the sketch again and liked it a lot more the second time around. THAT felt validating.

In the end, they made some fair points that we can take forward, but that was the one challenge that felt the most outside our wheelhouse. We sweat out week 4 the most...up to that point.

[mattlittle-blog]

Earwolf Challenge: Week #3

So week 3 is now complete...Left Handed Radio lives to see another challenge!

After falling into the bottom three last week, we were freaking out a bit while prepping material for this challenge. We questioned a lot of what we do and how we do it, and I don't think it was from a standpoint of "OH GOD we don't know what we're doing," but rather "we NEED to be able to step up and stay in this competition." We know we make comedy, but we are taking this competition VERY seriously. Everyone wants more people to connect to their art; we've been fortunate enough to find ourselves in a position where not only that can happen, but we have a direct conduit to feedback from some of our favorite comedians. None of us come from entitled backgrounds so we never take opportunities like this for granted. It was time to prove that we had a reason to be on this show.

We went round and round about our intro after it landed us in the bottom three and after licking our wounds we decided that we'd use the professional feedback we received to make a better opening. Check out our new episode that just dropped yesterday to see how we changed it and let us know what you think!

Anyhow, we agreed that exemplary content would be best served by us showing how we not only do sketches, but cram content into the transitions between sketches as well. The challenge for us was finding a way to get 2 cohesive sketches into the restricted timeframe of 2 minutes...YIKES.

Taylor and Adam both brought great sketches to the table. It took a bit of work to get Salad Horse into a place where it not only made enough sense, but made sense in under 40 seconds (which was how much time we had left after recording Taxi Cash). Thankfully we have Dan Chamberlain on our side, who, if you don't know, is the mad genius who makes us sound as good as we do. Go back and listen to the production in Salad Horse...that's a LOT of foley to cover in 40 seconds!

So the way the show works is that, when the Earwolf team is recording with the judges, all the shows sit on standby with Skype and email open. Skype stays open in case your show falls in the bottom three and you have to take that call (as was the case for us last week), and you refresh your email every 15 seconds, waiting for word from Peter & Frank that you made it through and are released. We sat and waited and waited and waited. As time dragged on, we started getting nervous again. We started pacing. I couldn't sit down (I pace when I'm calm; when I'm nervous I practically jump out of my skin). We tried to calculate the timeframe of a process we weren't involved in: how long would they take discussing each submission? If each submission is 2 minutes, do you think they are through them all yet? They started a little late, how far back does that push the email? Will they email everyone at the same time? DOES THE CARPET MATCH THE CURTAINSAGHGHGHGGHGHGH!

Finally, we got the email saying we had passed. It felt like SUCH a relief from the stress that we had put on ourselves. We hit the bottom in the first week but bounced back strong. VINDICATION! If only for one week.

Afterwards it sunk in that we were only 1/5 of the way through the entire series, so there were still miles to go before we slept. The Complete Guide To Everything was dismissed, but I don't think they'll be losing anything being eliminated from the show. They have a fun show with an already impressive following.

For us, it's onto week 4! That one...well, you'll see. :D

[mattlittle-blog]

Earwolf Challenge: Week #1

So the first week of competition for The Earwolf Challenge is complete...did you all listen? What did you think?

Embarking on this project, we were incredibly excited. We all stand pretty strongly behind our show and were confident that we could last at least a few rounds in this competition. That isn't a slight on the other shows (who are all swell), but more a comment on how we view what we do. When we heard the first challenge was intro, we were relieved because we had what we felt was a pretty well-polished opening with a theme song, teases, jokes, and ramped up well for people jumping into the show.

So imagine our horror when we found out we were in the bottom three. In the VERY first challenge of the competition.

When we got the call, as it was ringing I think we were all still in a bit of disbelief that they were calling US. B-but didn't they know that we assumed they'd love us? DIDN'T THEY TAKE THAT INTO CONSIDERATION?

I thought many of the notes they gave us were fair and can lead to a stronger opening for LHR. After they hung up, and before they called back for the 3-way elimination call, we were sweating bullets and second guessing everything we'd done. I felt a little sick, because I sorta led the charge of "I feel REALLY good about our chances in this challenge you guys." It was like getting a cold bucket of water tossed on you while relaxing on the couch, eyes closed.

That 3-way call...MAN, for a second we thought we'd be the first group told we were safe...and then that didn't happen. And we stood in silence. While Matt, Jimmy, and Jason tried to decide the best way to announce the elimination. Do they say who is safe, or do they say who is eliminated? Listening to the show today, it was only a few seconds, but at the time it felt like they debated for 3 minutes. Silently, we were looking at each other with more anxiety than I'd ever seen in any of our faces. When we were announced as the "safe" show, we all breathed a sigh of relief (which you can sorta hear if you listen closely after Matt makes the announcement). Emotions are like a roller coaster y'all! Has anyone ever said that before? Probably not, ever, I'm guessing.

So we moved on to week 3 of the show. It sucks that we fell to the bottom three in the first competition, but a) it lit a fire under our asses for sure, and b) we DID get to talk to Jimmy Pardo and Jason Sklar! That was a positive takeaway.

Also, sad to see Wrestling Team off the show...they have a fantastic writeup about the experience on their Tumblr, from which I'm going to quote right now:

When you bomb on stage, the big question you ask yourself is, “How can I do this better next time?” Beginnings lacked that instant feedback, so we had to rely on our instincts in building the show. It turns out that the judges provided a much-needed outside perspective, which forced us to evaluate the show from an audience member’s point of view.

I think the same could be said for us as well. In podcasting, and at our level, you really do operate in a bit of a bubble. That outside perspective is clutch. Go check out Wrestling Team's show Beginnings with utmost immediacy.

On to week 3!