Ladder Jousting Talent Show

Apparently the term "ladder jousting" was created January 30th 2010 by Josh Dunlop, the day of the auditions for the Truman Live Talent Show 2010.

The short explanation is that I was trying to think of something fun Brian Poppe and I could do as a part of an act where we could just have clean fun together on stage and hopefully do things things the audience had not seen before. I knew we could both climb dorm ladders. What could two people on ladders do that people hadn't seen before? Synchronized dancing...hmmm... or... ladder jousting!

How did we come up with that act?
That's what I would have asked.

The long story is that I invited Brian Poppe over to BNB around noon to co-create an act we could perform at the 8:15pm audition that same day. Brian is awesome. I have a cell phone video of him fitting inside a dryer even though he is over 6'3". He's a contortionist and just an overall talented individual. We looked at YouTube videos and saw a video with a guy do different dances to sound clips. So having an act for each sound clip sounded like a fun thing to do. We brainstormed a few things we could contribute.

Josh- jump roping on a unicycle (kind of), ladder, music editing, Nerf guns (Humans vs Zombie)

Brian- Contortion, poi, ladder, piercing the leg he doesn't have feeling in (freaky and amazing but probably hard for the audience to see).

How could we combine Brain fitting into a box, jump roping on a unicycle, and ladder jousting?

It made sense for Brian to pop out of a box early on in the show. I was thinking it would be the most surprising if I carried him in the box (with a few props), set him down, opened the top of the box, and had him hand me things out of the box. That way it would look like a hand is handing stuff from the box to me. But when we tried it, carrying in someone that weighs over 200 lbs in a cardboard box proved to be a little too hard. I thought about getting a backpack he could fit in, but we couldn't think of any that he could fit in. He had apparently been in a show before where he popped out of a box, then balanced on a ladder on top of the wooden box. I laughed and half jokingly said, "Once you stand up, just say, "Well it looks like I'm the stand up comic". Then just stand there and wait for the audience to get the joke.'I looked on my computer for a fun song. The "Rydell Theme Song" from Grease seemed appropriate.

I asked if Brian had any jokes that might be able to connect the things. Remembering back to the Boy Scout acts he and I both did when we were younger (in different troops), he remembered the pun use the idea of carrying a "case" and a tennis racket" and the other person asking "Where are you going with that case?" "Oh, I'm taking my case to court." Linking it to the ladder came after we took a break for a while.. Brian called and said, what if you also carry a ladder and say "I'm taking my case to a higher court". From there we were able to get one ladder on stage for the ladder jousting. As for music, I was trying to think if there were any songs that could be associated with ladders. I thought about the Mario theme song. So I rearranged that so the ladder sounding part came up as we were climbing the ladders. Then for the ladder joust part, the "Going in for the Kill" clip from the TV commercial for the video game Baynonetta sounded great. The Skream Remix was close, but the audio was still off. So I just used the audio from the YouTube version.

Next, well what else could we do? Wanting the save the unicycle for later, we decided to do the poi first. there wasn't really a transition other than Him showing me how to climb a ladder, then me showing him how to do poi. (Originally we were going to one-up each other, but it took 12 minutes. We had a limit of 7.) How could we make spinning poi fun? After running through a few ideas, Tracy, who was watching, decided that having an inexperienced person "teach" the expert was the funniest version. Thinking about how I could remove myself to let him "practice", I thought it would be a hit/miss to say something like "I'm going to check on the pyrotechnics (fire is obviously not allowed in the auditorium)." I originally thought I would go behind the changing station in the center of the stage where our props were. Then I thought I could fake stair walk down into the "basement" behind the table. The day of the performance, just walking off-stage made sense. People could see behind the table.

Since (satisfaction = expectation - deliverable), Brian intentionally wasn't set up as someone who was supposed to be good with the poi, we hoped it would make his short poi performance perceived as more exciting than if we had said something like "Brian The Magnificent will now perform the Mayori tradition of poi performance".

Originally I was going to do the poi poorly, the would do it well. Then I would use the poi as hand cuffs. then he would use them as handcuffs and dislocate his shoulder. The I would use it as a jump rope, then he would get a regular jump rope, then I would get on my unicycle and finally do something he couldn't do better than me at. But I thought it made us look too competitive, but without a great climax.



I was thinking we could have a changing booth or puppet house thing to hide the unicycle. We ended up using a table with a transformers bed sheet instead since it fit with the Transformers theme song we used.

Brian thought about


Well today I learned about YouTube.

1. To prevent failureWhen you are about to upload a video, first rename the original video file the title you want to display on YouTube before you upload it. YouTube makes titles, descriptions, and tags searchable. Do it right first because YouTube can take 3 or so days to update changes to these fields after the upload has finished. So if you don;t want to wait for people to be able to search for your video, have the title, description, and tags done and saved before the video is posted.

2. Before you upload the video, open up a Word file or something and have three sections you can quickly copy and paste.

REMEMBER: Your video will be most searchable if you have two or more distinct words that show up in the TITLE and DESCRIPTION. (TAGS would likely be a second.)

TITLE

You can also include website URLs in this

Truman Live Talent Show 2010 - Josh Dunlop & Brian Poppe


DESCRIPTION
--The first three lines of this will be viewable without expanding the page. So put the important stuff here.

Truman Live Talent Show 2010
Comedy Act by Josh Dunlop & Brian Poppe (ladder jousting, poi, unicycle, jump rope, Humans vs Zombies, contortion)
If you enjoyed the act, please rate the video 5 stars! ----(the last part of this sentance gets cut off in the preview)
If you would like us to perform this, or some variation, for you, please let us know!
Josh Dunlop dunlop.joshua@gmail.com
Brian Poppe bdp855@truman.edu

Thank you for your support!

Thank you to the audience member I handed the camera to and asked to record the show. She did a great job!


Soundtrack and video editing (including optimization for YouTube by syncing up the original soundtrack to the video audio for better sound quality) by Josh Dunlop


Let us know what we can do to help you out!

Sincerely,
Josh Dunlop

TAGS

--If you want 2 or more words to be searchable together, put them in quotes and they SHOULD be more likely to come up as a match in search results when those exact words are searched for together. I don't know if they have to be in order or if they can be missing a word between them. Will "Truman University" show up before "Truman" "University" if someone searches for Truman State University?

Truman Live Talent Show 2010 Josh Dunlop Brian Poppe Comedy act ladder jousting poi unicycle jump rope "Humans vs Zombies" contortion "Truman State University" HVZ "Talent Show" "ladder jousting" "Truman Live" Joshua Dunlop

--"Ladder jousting" in tags is theoretically more likely to come up when someone searches for "ladder jousting" than the separate tags "ladder" "jousting"


--
To prevent the video from being uploaded without updated descriptions, titles and When uploading the video, copy these three segments into their spots on the upload page before the video finishes uploading. Then save! Hopefully it will get saved before the video stops being uploaded. Things that are updated after they are posted don't seem to get updated (at least within the next 7 hours) in the YouTube search bar. So re-uploading it may be the best idea if you do make a mistake and your youtube video is not found in the search bar after it has been uploaded.

However, the same video file uploaded by the same username will likely get denied (even after you wait the hour or so for it to upload) because it is too similar to an existing file.

However, you can upload the same file using a different account.