Greetings and welcome to another edition of Notorious Notes, the blog where I kinda just talk about whatever suits my fancy even though it’s kind of supposed to be a wrestling blog. In the last blog, I was finally able to talk about wrestling again, because I actually did something wrestling-related, and boy was it short-lived. The Academy was invited to join in on 5CC’s “Scornucopia” promo tournament and in the first round met with (for the first time) and were heartily trounced by The Caution, all the way from HoodSlam. This is the tale of the first round flops.
No hard feelings really, they have a much bigger following, and they’re quite entertaining – though their promo was pretty much the “the dog ate my homework” bit for approximately a minute, which feels like a direct attack when you’re a scholar-based tag-team. Regardless, Sheik and Anton Voorhees are pretty cool folks and we’ve since become online buddies of sorts, so that’s neat. Making friends in wrestling – what a concept! Despite our thorough defeat, The Academy has gotten a taste for the filmed promo/vignette, and we want to do more. We have more stories to tell.
Hopefully, by the time this blog comes out, we will have released our first “The Academy Drama Club” video, but just in case, I’ll save discussing it any further for a future blog and just focus on the creation of the video we filmed for the promo tournament, lovingly titled “Getting the Band Back Together,” as referenced by the title of my previous blog.
First Round Flops
Thom and I wanted to do something different for this promo. We were originally thinking of just doing the whole promo via Zoom and recording the call. Still, we were kind of worried that other tag-teams might do something similar, so we minimized the Zoom concept and kept it as a joke to end the promo (and prevent me from reading my “world-famous erotic fanfiction poetry”). The rest of the promo was pretty much entirely Thom’s idea.
He wanted to do some POV stuff a la Blair Witch, where I find him alone in the woods acting crazy. Unfortunately, the time limit imposed by the promo tournament prevented us from really drawing out the suspense – we actually filmed about 30-45 seconds of content that had to be cut in order for us to not go over. That was honestly one of our favorite parts of just filming our own videos – no time limits to worry about. Obviously, we’re not shooting a feature-length movie out here, but it was nice to be able to just let things play out as we were filming. My part in putting the promo together was mostly figuring out how to frame the shots and figuring out what we wanted to say and figure out how to fill in any gaps.
The Filmed First Promo
When we filmed that first promo, we already had a plan in place to film more. We made sure to start a story that we could continue in the future, whether we advanced in the tournament or not. And as it said, it’s almost nicer not to have to worry about a time limit. That said, you should still watch that tournament. There’s still quite a bit of great content being pumped out over there. Besides, we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, so why not support local wrestling when and where you can (especially when it’s being done safely)?
But also keep on the lookout for more Academy videos, which I think we’re probably gonna release on our social media, including the brand new Academy Instagram page, and probably YouTube because, at the time of writing, I am editing together the most recent video. It looks like it’s gonna be (is) around 5 minutes long. We’re planning on releasing them every couple of weeks for the foreseeable future. But we don’t have a set schedule, and I don’t know if we’ll ever set one. We might just fling them out there whenever we’re done with them. Anyway, check them out – all the links to those places I mentioned are down below. Let me know what you think! We’d love to get feedback on these things. It’s pretty much my first time really playing around with editing videos. This was the tale of the first round flops.
WEAR A MASK!
The world is your burrito!
Links:
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- Amazon Wishlist
- Commissions: PayPal/Venmo – $5: Poem, $10 Poem + Recording; Include topic and if I have your permission to use it for social media content.
- Podcast: Wrestlerotica
