Dump Stat

12/6/09

A few miscellaneous notes about our latest video.

  • Dump Stat marks my fourth video collaboration with Ham*STAR (or as we like to call him, “Seth”). Most have been entries into one contest or another; our earnings so far consist of one absurdly shiny microphone and four bottles of worcestershire sauce. I am not quitting my day job.

  • This was a long time coming. Seth first approached me about making this back in June; I took one look at what would be our prop and costume list, promptly freaked out, and pushed the project down into the who-are-you-kidding bottom range of my to-do list. Then he had the brilliant idea of coercing our friends into helping, by way of a themed halloween party. This made the whole project much less intimidating. Making other people do most of the work usually does.

  • My friends own a startlingly large number of strangely-shaped knives. I had not expected this.

  • They also own a startlingly large number of D&D books, representing pretty much every point in the entire history of the game. This was not even a tiny bit unexpected.

  • The reason 4th edition features so prominently is that those were the only books we were willing to risk in the hot tub, because who cares if a 4/ed book gets wet.

  • The dancing “dragon” at the beginning was meant to be Kate’s halloween costume for 2008. She is still actively working on it (at least as of two days ago). It is actually a Skeksi, which strictly speaking do not feature in the D&D world, but we are not sticklers.

  • It may or may not be obvious that one of the women in the hot tub is eight months pregnant. That’s probably not true of most rap videos which feature women in hot tubs.

  • The iPhone app in the gaming scene is called “The Dicenomicon.” It costs five dollars. Which on a per-millisecond-of-screen-time basis makes it by far the most expensive special effect in the entire video.

  • I could swear there were some other interesting tidbits I meant to share, but I can’t think of them right now. Make up some of your own, they’ll probably be true. Or just watch the video: