Pirate!™

Pirate!™ is an interactive sitcom I created at age fourteen. It was the late '90s, and the concept was inspired by the increasingly absurd ideas for sitcoms released by the major networks in a desperate attempt to keep viewers as cable channels and the internet were beginning to flower.

Here's a quote about the show from the "Official Pirate Website" (a basic site I created and uploaded via dial-up to the personal webpage our internet provider allowed us):

"Pirate™ started as little more than an idea -- rather like a vision. A vision of what television was becoming, of what it ought to be. I imagined a sitcom starring an innocent and fun-lovin' pirate from the 1600s who is transported to the '90s, where he is adopted by a single, working mom, her young daughter, and the lesbian next-door neighbor...Obviously, Pirate™ took off immediately, and has branched out.  Pirate™ is no longer just a sitcom character, he's a phenomenon!"

I played all but one of the characters, requiring the use of a primitive blue screen (a bluish bedsheet) in order for me to interact with myself. The analog video I shot was then digitized by a Power Macintosh 8500 and edited and composited using Adobe Premiere. Many of the other visual effects were achieved by converting the video into a "filmstrip" file that could be manipulated frame by frame in Photoshop. The music is original and some of the additional images came from Encarta encyclopedia on CD-ROM. Interactivity was originally produced using Macromedia Director (and its simple coding language, "lingo").

Here is where the pilot episode(s) begins:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoig58fh8YE

Category:

Film & Animation

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