MY BIGGEST PROJECTS of 2023: CHICKEN COMMERCIAL + GAMBLING STREAM + $400,000,000 TV SHOW ⚖️
Wow, 2023 truly went by in a flash! Perhaps that’s because I experimented with making myself numb to the concept of time, or maybe it was just a busy year. Though development on all WLDWLF official projects was technically put on hold, a couple interesting collaborations somehow slipped through the cracks… In this blog post I will take a deeper look into all the things that have kept me busy over the last few months, and how you can enjoy them today!
These endeavors may have totally screwed up my work/life/sleep balance, but at least I have some fun updates for you now, and as long as you’re happy- I’m happy.
MASTERS OF THE AIR
If you read each of my blog posts all the way down to the bottom (as you should), then you may have noticed in a previous post that I had the honor of accepting a job on an upcoming Apple TV+ Miniseries as an Editorial Production Assistant. That show is called “Masters of the Air”, and it’s epic as hell.
For over a year, me and the various Post Production teams worked in darkness (literally), without revealing anything about our show to the world. Then, at last- Apple dropped a teaser. Take a look at this video to witness the wildly ambitious scope of the series, and then I’ll continue breaking down my role below!
I’m so proud to have my name in the credits of a show of this caliber, and I can’t wait to hear what other people think when they watch it through. The two-episode premiere is on January 26th, 2024!
I’ve always loved Apple as a tech company, and the medium of Television for storytelling, so I feel unbelievably lucky to have gotten the chance to merge these two passions into the start of my own Hollywood career. I owe this one to my friend Ruhi who helped make the necessary connections to get my name in the ring while I happened to be on a cruise in the Baltic Sea. As soon as I could find some wi-fi to connect to, I told them I was interested.
There’s not actually many specifics I can say for now, besides making it clear that my work on this show has consumed my life since the last quarter of 2022. I wake up at 6:55am now (hard for a nocturnal being like myself), drive an hour to Santa Monica, do "Office PA stuff” for 10-12 hours, then drive an hour back. 5 days a week, all in person, for over 17 months…
These tasks are often unpredictable, anything from making coffee and taking lunch orders to some very intricate spreadsheet/organization work and even making conceptual mockups for things that ended up in the show. One of my favorite random tasks was being asked to come into the main edit room and dub in temporary voice lines that would later be swapped out by our leads, Austin Butler and Callum Turner. Maybe the DVD box will have an extra “Jordan Cut” where you can hear me yelling “ENGINE THREE HAS BEEN HIT BAD!”
Additionally, I got to meet tons of awesome industry people including executives from Apple TV, actors from our show, and the absolutely wonderful people who work at our production company, Playtone. Most eccentric of all would be Gary Goetzman, the legendary Executive Producer and Showrunner of MoTA and many other Hollywood classics. If you want to know more about his fascinating life, check out Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie “Licorice Pizza”, which is heavily based on Gary’s real childhood!
The absolute wildest part of this whole experience was finally making it onto my first Hollywood set when we did two additional reshoot days. My amazing supervisors pulled strings at my request to get me a slot as a Set PA, which was an incredible change of pace and scenery from my work in the editing office. I was able to observe our principal cast and crew members working in their element, and help bring a new scene to life for our show. My job may have simply been to stand outside and warn them when a plane was about to fly over before a take, but it was still a highlight of my career so far.
Of course, I was most often working with a small team of professional editors- who could not have been more supportive in welcoming me and mentoring me along the way. I hope they win some awards for the dedication and passion they brought to this project, because I feel like these 9 hours of final content have to be some of the most complicated things ever made for TV. Shoutout to Mark, Carmen, Brian, Nick, Brad and Jarret, plus Bobby, John, Lisa, Caity, Will, Gary, Tom, Steve, and Kirk for pulling it off. And to my new friends on the Sound, Music, and VFX teams, congrats as well.
I know there are dedicated fans who waited over a decade for this show, and that MoTA is a crucial way of remembering the young heroes who helped bring justice to the world during one of its darkest and most brutal times. Hanks, Spielberg, and Goetzman are all legends, and I can not be more honored to be a part of their masterpiece. At the premiere, I realized it’s going to be very hard for anything I do now to surpass the impact of this massive project. I guess we’ll have to see!
A quick snap I took of Gary Goetzman, Callum Turner, Austin Butler, and Steven Spielberg at the Masters of the Air Premiere.
A still image from a video I took of Tom Hanks introducing MoTA at the show’s premiere.
If you want to know more about what I did on the show, stop by my livestream over at The Midnight Rangoon and ask me questions, I’ll answer whatever I can!
HOWLIN’ RAYS: THE PERFECT SANDO
In the midst of the AppleTV gig, I found myself working for yet another client that can only be described as dream-come-true. OG fans of the WLDWLF Blog will know that I have a scorching obsession with a very special Nashville Hot Chicken spot in LA called Howlin’ Rays.
This passion, knowledge, and excitement would prove to be useful when my friends at Landport Productions started talking with Howlin’ about creating a short promo for them that showcases their perfect sandwich. I knew the piece had to be humble like they are, but bold and confident at the same time, letting the sandwich speak for itself. Eventually, a hilarious script called “The Perfect Sando” came my way, and I signed on to do the edit and VFX!
The scope of work here included 9 wire replacement shots, a couple custom animations + screen replacements, a color pass, and some intense sound design. Not to mention an entire narrative edit, aiming to pack in as much emotion, tension, and sensory experience as possible. Jack, Josh, and the rest of the Landport team were great in helping this get shaped up to its final quality, plus we got to eat Howlin’ multiple times during the job :) You couldn’t ask for a more fun and tasty gig.
Once again, my favorite part was working on the set, seeing a bunch of talented artists collaborate and bring something quite cool to life. Even when I’m not necessarily in a leadership position, I still love helping any way I can: like slating each take, and supervising the VFX-related moments.
This would be important later, as I had to promise the crew I could remove the wires used to puppeteer the sandos, even when the camera was not locked down. I elaborate on this a little bit in the clip from my live stream below:
I am so proud of what we made, which currently has almost 29,000 views and a ton of nice comments over on Howlin’s Instagram! I look forward to collabing with Howlin’ and Landport some more in the future if they’ll have me ;) Everyone crushed it!!
LOW STAKES LIVE!
Jordan Chervitz (Technical Producer), Michael Lappen (Producer), Jeremy Kemp (Creator / Director)
This was undoubtedly my dark horse project of 2023. At a birthday party, my friend and former housemate, Jeremy, approached me, telling me he had an idea. To back up- I was already familiar with his weekly home poker game, since it used to take place in our backyard. Every week he’d assemble a tent complete with lighting, music, food, and drink. 7-to-10 interesting people would arrive, play a spirited cash game of Hold ‘Em deep into the night, and the next morning everyone would go on with their weeks.
These weren’t professional gamblers, and there wasn’t even that much at stake, but the energy at the table was good and relatable. So- back to the idea- what if those home poker nights were livestreamed in a way that emulates the World Series of Poker, but done so in an even more tasteful and cinematic way despite the gameplay being laughably amateur? Instead of sterile locations, uninspired graphics, and stone-faced players, what if we featured a lively cast of young adults in a cozy living room with stories to tell and not a ton of money to lose? This was the foundational ideology behind what would become Low Stakes Live!.
Immediately I understood the potential of his idea, and why he was bringing it to me. As a freelance cinematographer, Jeremy knew he had the gear, crew, and other resources to shoot in high quality, but he had never dove into the world of live streaming. In fact, he didn’t even believe it was possible to pull off his vision live- complete with real-time stat graphics, leaderboards, and mixable audio- until he saw me nearly doing it.
Over on my own streaming channel, I had been slowly leveling up my game for months, adding interesting elements into the mix for my show. He popped in one night, noticed my command and the flexibility of the stream, and realized he had found the missing piece to his puzzle. As soon as we could, we began to iron out a data collection process, test some equipment, and develop an aesthetic for the prototype onscreen assets. Jeremy even designed and ordered custom branded table stencils, chip sets, and card decks. ~(A few images from early prep work seen below).
The next graphic shows the evolution of an onscreen asset like our Leaderboard, going from Prototype to Concept to Final. With Jeremy’s guidance, I designed our informational graphics in After Effects and implemented live data powered by Google Sheets, editable from any machine in the Cloud, or updated automatically through formulas (more on this below).
In this post I’ll spare you the specifics of our actual solution for knowing what cards and chips are on the table at a given time. We may showcase that in future LSL content… but it did require some custom physical equipment, as well as numerous complex spreadsheets built from the ground up. They needed to provide our board operators, Ethan or Mike, the ability to quickly and accurately log any possible game-action, plus display it for the live viewers to follow. Not only that, but the actions needed to add and subtract from each other like real chip stacks would according to the rules of the game, which actually evolve during its runtime. This lead to a TON of custom macros and formulas recorded and working on the backend, which essentially programmed an online poker simulator into plain old Google Sheets. This data then feeds automatically into the Leaderboard, which sorts itself in descending chip value order, and uses conditional formatting to strike you out and tint you red when you lose all your chips. Yes- we spent an unfortunate amount of hours getting all of this to work, and there’s still so much more that Jeremy accomplished to prepare for the season all on his own.
A part of just one of our cloud spreadsheets that tracks and displays live data throughout the game.
When ready, we locked in eight dates for shooting: 7 nights of regular season games, 1 all-star championship game with the previous 7 winners. Thanks to LA’s rush-hour traffic, I had a 2-hour commute from Santa Monica to Echo Park each time, so I had to start leaving Masters of the Air early on Wednesdays to make it before the stream. With the control room all set up, the set constructed, and each role thoroughly tested, we began streaming our eight weekly shows.
My favorite element of the finished product is actually the charismatic analysis and funny reactions from our off-site commentator, Clayton. I truly believe he’s a big reason we were able to maintain around 45-60 people concurrently watching a four-hour livestream. If you’re curious by now how the final product turned out, check out our “Best Hands of Night Four” abridged episode below! Season 2 will launch early this year, and we already have plans for massive upgrades to make it bigger and better.
So 2024… WILL IT BE AWESOME?
OF COURSE IT WILL. IT’S THE YEAR OF A PHYSICAL, ARTISTIC, and INTERPERSONAL RENNAISANCE for your boy. And basically by that I mean: 24 is my favorite number so it’s just gonna be a good year. Hopefully I’ll be working on my screenwriting samples, from shorts to pilots to feature films. But also- THE LONG-AWAITED HOWIE CONCLUSION WILL DROP. FOLLOW @WLDWLFFLMS on Twitter (not calling it X) and turn on notifications so you DON’T MISS OUT!
Absolute bonus points if I get around to the debut E.P. of my yet-to-be-realized musical alter ego, Giraffes Everywhere, AND- if we’re extra lucky… I’ll even direct my next short film, which currently looks to be the visually experimental existential comedy: POINT CLOUD.
