Recently, we ended the Chachi Says Vidcast at Sorgatron Media.
The “video blog” was started on my insistance that Chachi needed to get on camera. He’s a character I’d known personally for a long time, and thought it would open up some doors if he did something.
The original concept: Have Chachi rip off a recent show I had started watching called Penn Point. So he would sit there with a blackberry and Android phone camera, send me the clips, and I would sync and edit to make it as interesting as possible.
It took a while for him to buy into the concept. Finally, he took his Android phone, work Blackberry, and in some cases a small MiniDV camera, and sent me along several angles to edit together. It made things interesting, maybe more so than him just staring at the cam talking. The best use of this concept was at Podcamp Pittsburgh 5 when we invited the audience during our live AwesomeCast recording to all film Chachi doing his show talking about the event, and send us the footage to splice together.
We continued with the concept, eventually losing the extra cams since the quality was just off base with the lackluster cellphone cams. Chachi eventually had the chance to update to a Kodak Zi6, learn to front light, and have some more fun. We took him to New York Comic Con for some on the floor impressions along with our other coverage of the event, broke some news on what was happening at Occupy Pittsburgh before the local news did, hand turkeys, Santa Claus, SOPA, Batman, and the epic struggle of robots and zombies…
It was a great run, with more than 69 episodes (we had some fun with the numbering). It gave Chachi a place to develop in front of the camera. Since, he’s returned to being a staple in my projects, including helping me in studio for Wrestling Mayhem Show and AwesomeCast, bringing even more to those shows. It can also be determined that Chachi Says led to his spot as on screen host of the PittsburghonVideo.org project, Unsung, which has recently been honored with an award.
Altogether, I found the project to be a great exercise in doing a different kind of show than we normally did up to that point for Sorgatron Media. It wasn’t a breakaway hit, but it hit where it needed to. Chachi’s become a great on screen presenter and I can’t wait to see what he brings with his new InsertCointoBegin.com project…