Eliot, Never Not Funny, and Andrew Koenig
You all know Eliot Hochberg as the video producer and resident whipping-boy for Jimmy Pardo on Never Not Funny. But he is a very talented man apart from his work on Never Not Funny, and does much more than simply “run the cameras.” Also, his history with Never Not Funny and our late friend Andrew Koenig goes deeper than most fans are aware of. With Eliot’s permission, I am copying this story from the Never Not Funny Video Fans page on Facebook.
Eliot Hochberg
Over on the big group, folks are reminiscing about how they found NNF, and it got me to thinking about how I originally became involved. It is not, as you may assume, from the sad events of Season 6, but was much earlier even before Season 3, and I thought you might be interested.
Before Season 3, Andrew came to me to find out what I’d charge for renting some camera equipment I regularly rented out to shoot video for some show called “Never Not Funny.” I told him what I normally charged, which was more than he could afford, and we chatted about what he wanted to do, which was try and establish his site MonkeyGoLucky.com (which I had been helping him build) flesh out some content. I told him that he could go ahead and use my gear for free until he started making a bunch of money, unless I needed it for another job that paid, which obviously I couldn’t turn down.
As Season 3 drew to a close, we started talking about what it would take to edit while the show live, instead of in post. Andrew’s computer was giving him trouble; I had even lent him one of my computers so that he could edit on one while doing other work on another. Around the same time, the theatre we met at, The Empty Stage, had closed, and I had inherited a video switcher from there, a Videonics mixer. I eventually bought a second one, as that one proved to be unreliable. It seemed that there would be a little bit of money in it, and I told Andrew to pay me whatever he could afford, and that would guarantee a schedule for the equipment.
I helped Andrew with the workflow for live editing the show, he decided how he wanted to do things but asked me for advice on video formats and software. I also bought some extra cabling so that the cameras would all connect up to the mixer. I had been doing live video editing at ACME Comedy for some shows there, which taught me some things we used for the process. This culminated in my being there for episode 401 with Maria Bamford, basically to make sure everything worked as intended, and to show Andrew how I wanted things packed when he was done, etc.
I’m pretty sure this was the first time I actually saw what the show was, and was actually my first introduction to podcasting, although I had been told about it by various folks in the past.
Anyway, that’s the story besides what most of you already know.
Thanks for posting this, Darryl!
Glad to share it, Tracie!