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We've been shooting some new videos for MISCHIEF MAKER'S MANUAL, my new book of pranks and practical jokes for kids ages 8-12 [sign up to get notified when it's out]. I'm used to the two-person run-and-gun filmmaking method, but this has been a real shoot, with a studio and crew and everything.
It's fun to have a professional film crew lighting and arranging all the objects in a Jell-O prank, like they're shooting a Food Network show.
I don't want to say we were extravagant, but we did buy a one-ton egg made of solid gold.
Emmy-award winning television personality Sara Edwards does a cameo role as a TV reporter.
The only glitch in our week was filming an ambitious prank called "World's Largest Butt Photo," in which we show kids how to print out a massive, 12-foot photograph of a butt. The prank involves using a free online program that will take any size photo and break it down into individual pages that can be printed on an ordinary printer. So you feed the image into this program, which it converts into an enormous PDF file. You print out the PDF file, then tape the pages to the wall, mosaic-style. Before you know it, you've created a 12-foot image of a butt.
Just a few of the images found in the amazing Rasterbator gallery
The morning of the shoot, I went to my local copy shop to get my butt file printed. Keep in mind that this is a huge butt file -- nearly one gigabyte of butt -- with each "page" an indistinguishable part of the whole butt picture. In other words, no one knew that they were printing a butt.
This copy shop usually gives me good service, so I won't use Staples' name when I tell you what a nightmare it was to get this printed correctly. It's not that difficult: the file is too big for most printers to handle, so you have to send it to a high-capacity printer, in batches of 10 pages. You cannot mix up the pages, or the "puzzle" won't sort correctly. You cannot change the orientation of the pages, or your images won't line up correctly. You can't lose track of where you are in the printing process, or print blank test pages in between, or skip a batch of 10 pages. And you definitely can't pick up piles of pages as they come off the printer, then drop them on the counter with no explanation of the foregoing.
Perhaps I should have been more clear with all this when I dropped off the file, because the guy printing my file broke, I think, every one of these rules. You can imagine trying to piece together a 150-page puzzle in a crowded copy shop when you are looking at a huge stack of random colors, shuffled, repositioned, with some duplicates and some missing. It felt like a Mensa audition.
"Why didn't you just ask him to reprint it?" I did, several times. This is why I'm not still stuck in Staples, subsisting on those 5-pound tubs of office pretzels. A one hour print job ended up taking nearly six hours. The only thing that helped me keep my sense of humor was the pleasure of knowing exactly what we were printing.
The finished prank.
It's hard to get too mad at Staples when the project you're working on is so incredibly silly.
Watch the finished video here!
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