Get Ready, to get Dirty!
Chris Rogers has always been an influential person to me, primarily when I was younger and had him as a theology teacher in middle school. I would consider him one of the first professors I’ve ever had who truly inspired me to take on my interests in video and photography; encouraging me to work on a series of video segments produced with other student’s participation during our time in middle school, to use our talents in a positive and productive way. As I’ve mentioned in my previous post, he called on my expertise to assist him with a video for his Reformed Universities Fellowship group out of Mercer University.
Not long after I graduated from FPD, Chris had moved to work with the University of Mercer as a theology professor, while running the RUF Mercer group too. Although I never attended Mercer, he knew of my experience with video work to which he’d previously inspired me to work towards when I was younger. I’ve worked as a freelance videographer and photographer for quiet sometime, to which Chris called upon my capabilities for editing together the footage recorded from a mission trip him and the Mercer RUF took to Israel.
This is where he combined inspiration with experience, and allowed me another opportunity to work with him on a video segment he’d derived as an idea for a parody from the Dirty Jobs television series. Chris decided to be take the viewer into the action like Mike Rowe, in a way which the camera and “Buck” were a resemblance to Mike and his camera crew when going on different dirty jobs.
With this presentation I had been hired to edit the raw footage into what it is presented as at the top of this post. Chris gave me the footage, the pitch, and set me on my way with an understanding of how this short film would be used as an example of some of the fun adventures RUF Mercer took during Chris’ days as the RUF Leader at Mercer.
I began to study some important and recurring facets of the Dirty Jobs show, focusing first on the exciting, and energetically loud intro each show contained.
I found out about the main group responsible for editing and providing work related to promotion of the Dirty Jobs series, Justin McClure Creative, which returned as the resulting studio for a few ads representing Mike Rowe, getting dirty! In continuation of close observation and analysis, I kept hearing, “It’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it!” as the theme song within the intro, of course the lyrics belong to the band Faith No More’s-We Care A Lot.
I focused on staying as ironically true to the original Dirty Jobs intro as I could; examining the edits within the song, including a sort of drum roll prior to the song during Mike’s preliminary words before the action of the intro.
I also was fond of all the collaged 2-D images presented as forms of animated transitions within the videos and the work; driving me to choose more humorous forms, in my rendition as I used toilet paper in support of those nasty splats, a latex gloved hand and squeegee for one transition, even a refrigerator for the smelly scene!
