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"Party Down" and "Veronica Mars" star Ryan Hansen wants his own hilarious pranks tv show, and members of the UCB sketch comedy group The Midnight Show are his first victims. Director's Commentary: Cale Hartmann wrote this video, and my goal in directing it was for it to be as realistic and amateurish as possible, without sacrificing any of the comedy. We set it up so that it looks like James Pumphrey is operating the camera, but in reality it's me (he passes it to me when Ryan hands it to him), and each gag was choreographed very carefully several times in order to get the timing just right. Lighting was also a challenge, as I wanted all of the action to be visible, but to not appear "lit," so the camera direction was chosen so as not to reveal any of the lighting sources (mostly kino 4 banks). In editing, I tried to emulate the look of the titles in Windows Movie Maker, which show up on most terribly-made prank videos. Then I desaturated the colors a bit, cropped the picture to 4:3 to make it look more like a home video, and added some tape noise to make it look like we shot on high-8 or miniDV (I actually shot it on the Panasonic HVX-200 using P2 card media).