More topical tomfoolery

It's time for a sad face. I'm now 0/3 with getting my sketches used on Newsjack. Although I did receive a nice email telling me they liked one of my sketches. They obviously didn't like it that much though did they?!

Here's a couple more topical sketches I've written for TheSpoof.com.

Michael Jackson had been dead for 2 years

Obama tells Putin to Chillax

I'm slightly uncomfortable with the Michael Jackson sketch. I hope it's not too disrespectful to the man. I thought I would try and write the idea up as you can't be a topical comedy writer and ignore the biggest stories of the day.

I've been watching the Daily Show to see how they handled the story. I tried to make the target of my sketch the freeloaders that were around him, rather than the man. It's a silly sketch and I think I lost my way a bit so it may (or may not) come across like that, I hope it does.

Newsjack and TheSpoof.com

No news is good news right? Well no, not always. Sometimes no news just means that the news is really bad and nobody wants to tell you. Fortunately my lack of updates is just down to the simple reason that there's been no news.

The topical comedy news show Newsjack has started on BBC Radio 7 and it's really rather good. I submitted two sketches last week but neither were used, oh well, I'll keep trying. Because you can't re-use a topical sketch I've decided that whenever I write one I'll also try to write a version of it in a newspaper format. That way I can post it on this website I found called TheSpoof.com. It's sort of the British version of the Onion except with contributions from the public.

So here's a couple of Spoof news articles I've written.

Princes William and Harry to get BBC3 sketch show

Ahmadinejad wins Iran's tallest man competition

I'm working away on a small animation for someone but other than that no new animation projects on the horizon. When I've moved house in a few weeks I'll hopefully get back on to that.

The Teddy Bear's Picnic

I thought I would try and make something a bit different with this video and overall I think it worked quite well. Hopefully the cuteness of the fuzzy, wuzzy, puppet Bear medium allows them to get away with swearing so much. It was brilliantly voiced by David Bussell and sound mixed by Mat Davidson. I hope you likes.



This was my first proper attempt at Green screening characters and it turned out to be VERY fiddly. Adobe Premiere and Blender's green screening functions each had their problems so I ended up having to buy VisionLab Studio. It's a bit expensive but it worked perfectly and I'm looking forward to using it again. Especially the grading features which should bring a more professional look to my videos.

Spreading Rumours

A few months ago I was lucky enough to win a sketch writing competition run by FunnyOrDie.co.uk and the prize was that they were going to film my sketch. Well it's finally here and they did an absolutely amazing job! I can't believe the cast they got for it either... they're like famous people!

Spreading Rumours (ZHURA WINNER) - watch more funny videos

Sadly I can't take any credit for the ending which is hilarious. They also made the dialog a lot slicker in places. I said I was happy for them to make chages to the script if it wasn't working on the day. I'd much rather have a funnier end product than them sticking religiously to what I'd written. It's actually quite a humbling experience to see what professional writers were able to do with my script to take it to the next level! Maybe I need to start looking for a co-writer? Preferably one who can do this to my scripts!

In other news, I completed my second ever 5K fun run yesterday and set a new personal best! Woohoo! I came 175th out of 177 runners, just behind a couple of ladies called Maureen and Moe! But I won't dwell on that too much, it's still a personal best!

April News Update

Hello, this is just a quick update as it's been a while since my last video. Not much has been happening on the animation front recently as my PC decided to die after less than two years (Thanks Mesh Computers!) The good news is that I now have a new PC on order from Dell. Here's the specs. below for any nerds out there who might be interested. According to these CPU benchmarks it should be about 40% faster than my old PC without taking into account the extra RAM or 64bit OS.

Intel® Core™ i7 Processor 920
8GB 1067Mhz DDR3 Dual Channel
512MB ATI® Radeon® 4850 Graphics card
1TB Serial ATA (7200RPM) Hard Drive
Vista® Home Premium SP1 64Bit

Despite the lack of hardware I still have two sketches in production. One should (fingers crossed) be online this Friday, it's being produced by FunnyOrDie UK so that's very exciting. The other sketch should be finished towards the end of May and that's currently being recorded for me by a couple of writer/actor friends.

And Finally! I saw 'In the Loop' at the cinema yesterday and it's one of the funniest films I've seen in ages. Great writing, great acting, great British film, go and see it!



P.S. Hooray! The IT crowd just won a BAFTA!