The Nick White Show: Series Trailer (March 2022)
First series trailer for The Nick White Show.
I got a rough cut done on Sunday night but wasn’t feeling it and decided to leave it til morning (it was 3am and my brain was fried). Upon waking I determined that I should shoot some more groupie scenes and tweak how those come up in the trailer, as well as tweak the bit where the narrator refers to “poor saps who have to put up with [Nick’s] bullshit.” Originally I had a bunch of groupies mixed in here with Nick’s staff and the main characters from the strip club next door to flesh out the montage while maintaining the quicker edits, but we’d already seen them and I felt like it implied the groupies were main characters (only one is a semi-recurring one, Atlanta’s cousin Summer, but even so, she’s mentioned more often than seen and even that’s not very often).
Also I knew I had a couple staff members I hadn’t shot – namely the elusive Martin Johnston (he’s the one who looks like Rick Rubin with a big beard and long brown hair) and his assistant Mike (the blond dude in the blue hoodie. I also had Zosime Xenakis, Nick’s manager (who he calls Suzy and still believes is merely the manager’s assistant, despite the fact that his former manager, Mark Hoffman, has now been retired for 3 years) and Carol Baudelaire, Nick’s long-suffering publicist.
So, I added those folks into the mix, along with Nick’s scowling bass player, Wayne Fury. They replaced the groupies nicely and both Mike and Wayne were also in the last video, “The Smoke Pit.”
BTW: I have dolls for Nick’s 3 daughters, but haven’t put them into either of the videos so far because frankly they might come across more as groupies by means of being blonde bimbos like Nick’s ex-wife, and that’s kinda gross, so I figured I’d keep them out of the mix until they’re properly introduced.
Speaking of Wayne… I realized this morning that I had thought up all these characters around Nick, including family members, mistresses, etc., but had completely blanked on thinking up band members.
Which I guess is appropriate because Nick’s the kind of singer who considers his band members to be quasi-subhumans and not worthy of much thought, but as the show creator, that’s a pretty major oversight even if they’re not in the show too much because the show revolves around Nick goofing off at his studio or the boobie bar next door.
I mean, I do have one episode written for down the road called “Bass Player Blues” in which his bassist quits over not getting a much-needed pay raise, but that was it (and we never see the actual bassist in that episode).
Anyway, this morning I came up with some bandmate characters and ordered a few dolls to play them.
I already had Wayne (and only named him today) intending to use him as an extra in another episode where he would play an annoying client of Richard’s, but he kinda has a look like whatsisface who plays bass for Metallica, so I figured I’d go with that.
And now I have more character bios to write for the website and more character interviews to script and shoot… however, I think this new batch (bandmates plus Zosime and Carol, and eventually Nick’s daughters… and if I can find dolls to play the two sons as well, they’ll also get interviews and bios) will probably wait a while. Next week’s video will either be the show’s opening credits or a little skit about band rehearsal, then the 10 main character interviews start to go up, one per week, and after that I want to put the first proper episode up (split into parts over a few weeks) so I probably won’t delay any more than necessary. I can always pop up these extra interviews in between episodes or if I’m having tech issues or need filler, whatever.
What else do I want to say about this… I nailed Nick’s voice. Took a few takes to get it as close as I could out of my throat and then I pitch shifted him down by a whole tone and slapped some EQ on him and it’s pretty close to how I imagined him sounding. I’m sure a year from now as I develop that character voice (well, all of them, really) I will listen back to this and cringe, but that’s always the case. Early episodes of The Zamo the Destroyer Show also sound nothing like the Zamo voice’s final form, and I think that’s just the way it goes.
Bonus: whipped up a little video of the disclaimer which will go at the front of future videos/episodes:
In case it’s too quick on the scroll to read (well, I know it is), a version of the disclaimer is on the blog here too. Slight changes have been made since, but whatevs.