The Bee Team

This week’s video, The Bee Team was very fun to film. Typically the “core” members of the LRR crew are pretty busy on video shoots, especially when they’re the more involved Commodore Hustle videos. This week with our friends Tally, Cam and Kate taking over most of the acting duties, James, Paul, Matt and I were able to sit back and actually observe the act of putting together a video, and Graham’s directing process. A rare treat indeed. That said I tried to help out as much as possible with the shoot just because it was so genuinely fun to watch.

The genesis for The Bee Team came from Jer, who tossed out the idea of a B-team video that could go up while we were away at PAX East. He freely admits the idea was born entirely from the pun of an “LRR B-team” needing to deal with bees. The walk from the LRR office to Stark Manor is six blocks, and over the course of those six blocks, Graham, Jer and I threw a variety of silly ideas back and forth, cumulating in a rough outline of what the video would eventually become. Graham then took it all down and wrote it out, and I helped refine the finished product. While the finished product leans heavily into magical realism territory (and is closer in spirt to a season one episode of Commodore Hustle than a season two episode) I like to think it works in its own weird universe.

I particularly enjoyed the dialogue we gave to Cam, and I was relieved to see it worked so well in the finished product. Comic relief characters rarely work when they are too stupid or too mean-spirited, but we were able to thread the needle between grouchy and silly in this video-greatly helped out by the dignified demeanor Cam brought to his role. I do believe there is something comedically satisfying in the only character with the common sense to call experts also being the character who spends the entire video in a balaclava and googles.

Episode Trivia!

• While originally intended for PAX East, we couldn’t arrange a shooting day with our so-called “B-Team” in time, so it became the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo. As you can probably guess, the pre-title segment was shot on-location, at our panel. Tally, who was at the panel, had to hide to avoid confusing continuity.
• Also shot at Calgary were the cameos of our friends Jarett Cale and Joel Gardiner, better known respectively as Jeremy teh_pwnerer and FPS Doug, late of the webseries Pure Pwnage. As friends and fellow Canadian comedy web video creators, it was great to have them appear in the episode. Much as our commodoreHUSTLE “characters” are exaggerated and often ludicrous versions of ourselves, Jarett isn’t nearly that much of a dick in real life.
• Cam is not really allergic to bees, though he is lactose intolerant. The more you know.