(Work in progress 17 Oct 2017)
One day, my buddies Michael and James brought over a movie to my house. It was David Lynch’s ‘Inland Empire’. It’s a pretty surreal movie, and kind of disturbing in the way it’s shot – it’s hard to explain, but the whole thing is kind of unsettling. Anyways, James and Michael freaked out about ¾ of the way in, and left. I decided to watch the rest of the movie as it got later into the night. I did, and couldn’t sleep that night. So, I stayed up the whole night and made this little short called ‘Beatboxing Dave’ – the premise is pretty simple: ‘Beatboxing Dave’ beatboxes – it’s his one and only skill. His beatboxing is good enough to scare away ‘Passive-Aggressive Steve’ from Princess Yum-Yum – a lollipop princess who is always assaulted by the lecherousness of Steve, and relies on Dave to save her – with his beatboxing skillz.
It’s a simple setup inspired by Super Mario Bros – Marios saves the helpless princess from Bowser the bully, and I was big into Adventure Time at the time, so that also played into the vibe.
What I enjoy about the dynamic is that Dave isn’t actually very good at beatboxing – Dave is voiced by me. But, he’s so energized and keen about everything, it doesn’t matter.
I made the music for it too, and by the morning, had completed a little short. I released it, a few peope liked it, and one person kept urging me to make more.
I pitched the show a couple times – to a distributor in Joburg, to Nickelodeon, but no bites. I found often when I wanted to get a distributor involved, the distributor often wanted me to remove the shorts online, which I often did. Now I’m like ‘no’.
Anyways, I decided to make some more shorts, so I wrote a few more episodes – seven – recorded my voice at a studio in Cape Town with the help of my brother, animated all the episodes myself using Toon Boom Animate, created the music myself, and put them online.
(17 Oct 2017)
New ‘Beatboxing Dave’ episode – ‘Forbidden Dance’! I wrote a detailed post about it HERE.
‘Beatboxing Dave’ is very much a passion project. I enjoy its silliness, it not taking itself too seriously, it’s scripts that are purposefully hammy and pulpy, playing on the ‘princess in distress’ archetype, that Dave thinks he is the best and others think so too, that the show promotes itself with little ‘Beatboxing Dave’ stings inside the show, and that its simplicity is its strength.
‘Beatboxing Dave’ is also Bru & Boegie’s favourite cartoon on TV.