Tim Saccardo is a comedy writer and director, born and raised in Middletown, Rhode Island. He is currently an Associate Producer on TBS's 10 Items or Less and a writer for The Huffington Post's comedy/news site www.236.com and their Wikipedia parody site www.Dickipedia.org. Tim has written and directed several videos for the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre's site www.UCBcomedy.com, one of which won him a Stony Award for Best Web Video from High Times Magazine. He also performs sketch and improv comedy regularly at Hollywood's UCB Theatre and Improv Olympic West.

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Production Blog, Week 7 (Post Production)
You can’t imagine how weird it is to hear your boss’s voice echoing out of 5 different rooms at the same time. But that’s what my life will be like for the next two months.



After several grueling weeks of shooting, we’ve left our offices above Jon’s Marketplace and moved down one Reseda block to an building that houses various non-English speaking medical offices and now one hilarious TBS comedy program. And we’ve brought along hundreds of hours of raw footage on video tape that we need to turn into 8 episodes of Very Funny television. That’s where the echoing voices come from.



At any given moment there are at least four different episodes of 10 Items or Less in various stages of post-production and sometimes more. So that’s one hallway with four different editors in four different rooms playing and replaying four different video clips of our characters talking, all at once. Add to that three different Assistant Editors doing the same thing on editing stations that aren’t even behind closed doors, and with all those lines of dialogue constantly bouncing around, you can start to see why we all go a little crazy in post.


It starts off innocently enough. We watch a rough cut of an episode and a particular line stands out as funny, odd, memorable or all three. Then we watch a new cut of that episode, and there’s that funny line again. Watch the next cut, same line once again, and we’re practically moving our lips along as its delivered. Then, maybe I end up working with an editor specifically on tightening up that one scene with that one line in it so I end up hearing it played about, let’s say, fifty times over the course of an afternoon.



But it’s not just me, it’s everyone. We all hear the same lines all the time to the point where we end up repeating them to ourselves like some sort of weird secret language. Instead of passing David in the hall and having the normal “How’s it going?” / “Pretty good” type of exchange, one of us might instead quote Leslie learning to speak Shawnee from an episode, “Way-se-gee-gee” and the other will instantly reply by quoting Mercy P. Jones from that same episode, “Way-se-WHAT?” It’s a special kind of mental illness unique to television post production.



After a month of quoting obscure lines from the show, we move on to humming and singing obscure music stings from the show. They might all sound similar to the untrained ear, but they all have their own flavor. There’s the fun “ooh-wa”s from the opening credits, the sad “ooh-wa”s for poignant moments, the bass-heavy record-scratch “ooh-wa”s for exciting action beats, and a dozen other variations that we sing to ourselves as we wander around the edit bays like zombies.



The ultimate memorial to this insanity can be heard as part of the Howler Monkey Productions logo that runs at the end of every 10 Items or Less episode. When the monkey mouth opens and the company name falls out, you’ll hear Nancy, John, David and I yelling “Heyyyyy Gang!” in a high-pitched falsetto. All I’ll say is that it’s a line from a specific season 2 episode which I urge you to find for yourselves in the 10 Items or Less season 1&2 DVD set you no doubt just bought.

Hopefully “Heyyyyy Gang” becomes the next “Sit Ubu, sit.”


The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer/speaker and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Turner Entertainment Networks, Inc.”