ridleytownship:

Unedited outtake from Late Night Interview #135 with self-help expert Ernie Gumboldt.

It’s been a year since the first Late Night Interview! I wanted to have the sixth episode (Anna Rubanova as French chef Sharon Arceneaux) done in time to post today, but my weekend unexpectedly filled up with practicing, coaching, hosting and sleeping. Instead please enjoy this, the first ever release of an unedited LNI outtake. If you want to compare this two-minute segment to the 25-second fully edited version, watch 4:15 through 4:40 of the finished video.

LNI is improvised, but we do as many takes as we need to get coverage for various lines and reactions. Sometimes a significant percentage of a shoot will just be us laughing hysterically as we try over and over to get certain lines down. It’s extremely hard to keep a straight face (even with no audience and hot lights making you sweat) when you’re sitting across from a really funny person saying really funny things. It takes constant effort not to laugh, and I’m still pretty bad at it. Fortunately, a lot of the apparently impressive straight-faced reactions in LNI can be faked during the editing process.

I don’t always use the additional takes we feel like doing during the shoots, because after the first take it’s not improv, it’s acting, and it’s not nearly as funny or real the second or third time around. So I often end up using the original take, the one that made me or the other improviser crack up for thirty seconds straight, and I find a way to make it work by cutting away from the breaking improviser at the right moment or splicing in audio or video from another moment to make it seem like they reacted with surprise or boredom or disgust.

This particular clip isn’t the best example of a clean cut - for the first episode I was learning how to use Final Cut Pro while I was learning how to assemble footage from a multi-camera shoot, so some of the edits were a little rough around the edges. But most of the time you can’t tell when the shots are being juggled in this way.

Of the episodes shot so far, #137 (Rob Stern as Frosty Shop owner Craig Sanford) was the easiest to edit, not because I didn’t laugh during it, but because we somehow managed to hit almost every beat of the interview in the right order and with solid delivery the first time through. If you watched the first 20 minutes of the footage from that shoot you’d basically be watching the finished interview plus five minutes of my laughter.

I haven’t uploaded outtakes before because 1) originally I was obsessive about not uploading anything that made it clear that the show was fake, 2) I’d rather people assume we’re actually that funny without any editing, and 3) it’s a little embarrassing to let people watch you laugh like a moron with your friends while you sit at a little wooden table in a corner of your crowded bedroom.

Anyhow. Thanks for watching.