Furious World Blog

We’re excited to be one of the first stops of NewTek’s tour of America!  They’re starting here in LA, and then driving all the way to NYC, stopping at various shows and events along the way.  If you see a Mini Cooper driving down the road with a huge satellite dish on top, well, that’s the tour bus!

Our TriCaster has made a HUGE improvement in the video quality of our show, and Marc’s gotten pretty good at running it.  It’s also nice and small, which makes it very portable- and nice to have in our *tiny* studio.  We’re looking forward to showing it off to the NewTek team!

So, we have a large number of studio guests tonight.  Ruby Friedman happens to be bringing along her band with her!  We’re very pleased to have the Ruby Friedman Orchestra in our studio tonight, but we’re scratching our heads over studio space.

See, our studio is fairly small.  I know it looks big when watching over the internet, but as everyone says when they actually are here, “It’s a lot smaller than I thought!”  It’s even smaller when you add 5 musicians, the four production staff, and then a few audience members.  For an overflow crowd, we’ve had the audience on stage before- and while it was a cool idea at the moment, the bored looks and nose-picking was not quite what we wanted on screen.  So, like any show, we have a ‘line’ separating the stage from the audience.  Three, maybe four people can comfortably sit there.

Unfortunately, our studio audience tonight will be 11 people!  Marc and I have moving chairs around the studio like chess pieces, unable to find the right moves to checkmate our problem.  Our audience may be sitting in each other’s laps, maybe we’ll knock down a few walls; we may even duct-tape our intern Lev to the ceiling to keep him out of the way.  But that’s the Furious World- at 7pm, we shoot from the hip and go live, no matter what the problem!

Well, it was definitely different!  Marc had theorized in the past about doing a show like this while Peter was touring, and I’m pretty excited for how it turned out!  It could have been a smoother episode, but that’s the Furious World.  Besides, it seems that our production hiccups are great moments for Peter to “be himself”!

We were also having issues with the mic that Peter was using; it worked fine in our pre-tour tests, but for some reason it sounded kind of rough the evening of the show.  The mic caused a large difference between Peter’s volume and the rest of the show; getting a consistent broadcast volume from all of our different elements is a process we’re still perfecting.

Marc and I enjoyed having a nice, relaxing show.  No band rehearsal, no tweaking each headphone mix, no audience members wandering in at 7:05, no lights to adjust… you get the idea.  Though we did miss our intern Lev and the great snack tray he makes up every week…

We had a great time producing the show tonight.  There were seven people in the studio audience- hard to fit them all in, but the band reacts well to the presence, and ‘steps it up a notch’ when there’s physically an audience.  The virtual world has yet to recreate the physical sense of performing for a live audience!

It was also nice to see Marc’s dad, as well as his wife & daughter (who didn’t stay for the show- too loud for the baby).  Our studio audience tends to be close friends and family of the Furious World team, and it’s wonderful to be able to share the experience with them!

We’re also getting to know our internet audience better- we’re getting your emails, your tweets, your phone calls, and we’re learning from you and about you.  Slowly, our community is growing, but not in the sense that a garden grows.  Our community is more like the neurons of a brain, learning and establishing new pathways of information, sending & receiving signals down those pathways that- eventually- will echo back to our sonar from a new path.

Either we’ll run out of money and have to turn off the lights, or our community synaptic network will start to resonate in a way that will change the human experience.  Either way, we’re playing for keeps.

Marc and I were just calling our guest for tomorrow night.  We normally schedule a skype test call with our guests a day or two before the show, just to make sure everything works on their end.

So, today we get on skype and call Robert.  After a few minutes of awkward conversation, we realize that the older gentleman on the other end isn’t very familiar with computers, and speaks with a slight drawl more reminiscent of rural Texas than urban Los Angeles.  A few questions later- “You know why we called you, right?  For the show tomorrow?” and we learned the truth- we called the wrong Robert Kenner.

Well, he was a really nice guy, seemed to enjoy the conversation, and we let him know about our show.  He’s going to watch it tomorrow night- in fact, we might even call him back during the show!

What are the chances of calling the wrong Robert Kenner, who happens to have skype, be online at right time on the right day, and be willing to answer the call?  Even in this hyper-connected, computer-controlled digital age, it’s refreshing to know we can dial the wrong number- and meet a friendly person.

Marc and Sam

Well, I’m fresh off the plane from St. Louis, excited to be back at the Furious World!

Samantha Ray is doing great!  Congrats again to Marc (our producer) and his wife Jen!  Here at the FW, we’re happy for them both.  Though I suspect Marc’s dog, Buster, is not very enthusiastic about his change in status…

Well, Peter’s been busy with some projects, I was on vacation, and Marc (as you can see) has his hands full- so we had to do a rerun for tonight’s show.  But it’s a great episode, and Peter is enjoying being in the chatroom, talking with fans.  The FW is growing into a great community, that we really enjoy being a part of.

…and we’re back from the weekend, Furiously working on a number of things for tomorrow’s show.  Peter’s working on tomorrow’s episode of Turtle Talk- in fact, it’s the 22nd episode of the series, the longest-running of the show.

I also helped PH make a new “Massive Truth” last week- and it was definetly Furious.  First, Peter wrote & recorded the script; then we both sat down at our computers.  Peter would shout something like “I need videos of Mayan Indians, an astronaut in space, and that mouse from the Ed Sullivan show!”  I’d find what he needed, send it to his computer, where he’d put it into a movie.  While he was working on the files I sent him, I’d be looking for more stuff.  You never know quite what to expect when working for Peter.

Peter: “Any videos of a bunch of old ladies at a Hadassah Convention?”

Me: *Sigh*