Category: Video - Dan Fiorella: Writer @ large

Dan Fiorella

A.I.-Caramba! presents: Chef Shift

5/13/2026

Because of lack of resources, I’ve taken to “producing” my sketch ideas with AI. This is not a recommended solution. See that logo? AI generated. And yet I had to run it through photoshop to really get it right. There were a couple of things I already had to tweak, besides. Anyway, on to more creative things:

Chef Shift popped into my head while I was working on something else...the words Chef Shift popped into my head and I just built it up from there. It's a cute idea, but once I had the basic concept of the show, I decided to do it promo-style, so I just started to create photos of chefs and kitchens and judges. But trying to get the images to move, even briefly, got too aggravating. All my dialogue was created as off-screen lines, the video I created had to be edited in the software. I ask for a rock and rock chef waving romaine lettuce and it just had the lettuce hanging in midair waiting for the chef to grab it. Ask for a kitchen full of chefs to run around panicked, and AI just has them merge into one another. I thought something simple like having a group of chefs just cross their arms would be okay. Instead, they all do the Wakanda salute. Just to get a judge to wave a chef off, his hand was upside down. So, it's stills and short shots, and narration to carry it through. I hope you enjoy!

A.I.-Caramba! Cake Hoarders

1/29/2026

Because of lack of resources, I’ve taken to “producing” my sketch ideas with AI. This is not a recommended solution. See that logo? AI generated. And yet I had to run it through photoshop to really get it right. Oh, and I just notice the exclamation point at the beginning is the wrong way for Spanish. There were a couple of things I already had to tweak, besides.

Now, as for Cake Hoarders, I'm starting to get the hang of it. I picked this material because it is a series of cuts to different people, so I avoid the stress of trying to keep the people looking the same from scene to scene. Based on budget, I had to bounce between creating "talking avatars" and "talking pictures." The first is a video of a person talking and motioning. The second is a very Clutch Cargo effect of lips moving on a picture.

The sketch was written for radio, but I actually switched some dialogue to simple visual reactions (the line "whoops" becomes simply a face-palm). And one verbal gag (about reusing material) I turned into a visual gag by actually reusing clips over and over. Subtle? Maybe. But jumping between different AI sites does create different levels of image quality. Still trying to figure out which site is giving me what I need. Some sites are incredibly stupid and not paying attention to me at all!

In the end, I think it comes off well. The writing is there, so I hope that carries the audience through.

Sketchy Tales: The B Team-Big B's Traveling Sideshow-Red Tape Tech

1/9/2026

Time to do some flashing back. In the years after college, I fell into a group of people trying to put together a fan-zine. This was a thing back in the early 1980s; "self-publishing" a magazine which you would then self-distribute to various stores, usually record stores and hemp shops, hoping that someone would actually pick one up and pay to read it (it now occurs to me that this is actually a story for another day). Anyway, one of the members of that group mentioned to us that he was working with a "comedy troupe" that was doing a sketch show on Manhattan's infamous public access channel. Me? I didn't have cable. In fact, I don't think any of us did. So, we met with the head of the troupe who were doing a 1/2 hour comedy show called "Big B's Traveling Sideshow" (Or "Travelling." We never quite settled on that). They had a sponsor. They had four people who could do characters, impressions and seemed to be able to perform comedy. They had a music guy who wrote them a theme. They had head shots.

We met with the group; led by Jim Farley (no, not of the SNL Farleys, but of the former Postmaster General Farleys), his girlfriend, Bea Beavis (the one with an actual credit), Danny Migliarese, Larry Shaw, & Terry Sommer. They had done an episode for the infamous Manhattan cable public access channel. They liked our stuff. Take, for example, the below bit, Red Tape Tech. I wrote this with my friend, John Rawlins. It was just your average commercial parody, but we met an interesting dude here, Jordan Auslander, a very funny and frantic person. I wish I remembered more of the details, but Jordan got to do the sketch, a big, old, wordy sketch. It had the typical word play and back-tracking logic any piece written by Rawlins would have. So, it got taped and was put into show 2. And me? They misspelled my name in the end credits, which is actually kind of a show business tradition. Also, I apologize for the picture ratio, I digitized this myself years ago on some software and didn't realized I switched it from standard TV square to landscape. Not sure I have the original tapes to re-do them.

They used the guy Larry Shaw in the opening, along with a new "featured player" who was coming on as a writer. I'm still friends with Jordan, who does investigative ancestry searches now and would throw these wacky James Bond-themed parties. Later on, we did some theater groups together, he even did a VO for one of my book promos, Space Case. A good guy.

Red Tape Tech

A.I.-Caramba! Escape From the Island of Misfit Toys

12/17/2025

Because of lack of resources, I’ve taken to “producing” my sketch ideas with AI. This is not a recommended solution. I wrote and re-wrote this sketch multiple times over the years. There was a draft I wrote for the heck of it. That was basically the Jack/Charlie question and segued into the standard “What’s Dolly’s deal?” that the internet has since decided to suck dry. Then I attempted to rework it for Prairie Home Companion during my time there as an audio bit. Then I pulled it out again for my time at TMI: Hollywood, where I actually combined it with a second sketch I had written about the new kind of toys that would be exiled to the island, an idea I had some time later for one of the radio outlets I often submitted to.

I’ve played with AI before, but not to this extend. But this sketch seemed to be a logical one to attempt; all the players are toys, which I can easily reference. Then after thinking about it, I decided to work as much as I could with actual clips from the show. The past projects I created all have the same defect, I can only produce the material in 5-second clips (that’s the default setting for the various AI sites I’ve logged onto) Then trying to make them talk becomes a hassle. First, because they’re “toys” some of the faces aren’t apparent to the AI system and the attempt at generating a video would fail. Sometimes it was just easier to create an AI voice and run it under some original footage. Towards the end, I was tired of caring if the mouth movements matched up. Half the time with AI, it couldn’t match up. Then I maxed out AI’s ability to manipulate characters. You tell AI to have a character exit the scene and it would have a human hand come down and pick it up.

I was able to get the voices I needed from AI. Some sound very good. Others sound like bad actors handling the part. I was able to create variations of the Misfits I needed. Then I had to create some of the “new toys.” That took a couple of attempts. And that's the problem, every attempt costs.

Then came the fun with the editing software. At five minutes, the software was grindingly slow, updates and corrections took forever to make and even the slightest change would send me into buffering hell. I reached the pointed where halfway in, I exported the working video of dozens of clips, audio, stills and music into a single video. Then loaded that into the software to edit and polish and add to it. I had to do it 2 more times for the ending and then music and text. One issue was figuring out the chromakey. I had to create the images. Then I realized I had to create them on a green background. Then I had to deal with the different shades of green that the AI would create.

At least I created some of the clips at the end first, so as I was hitting wall after wall, I had some of the bits already in queue. There was a lot of editing, copying and pasting and altering speeds and playback to get the clips I needed to the audio I had. At some point I’ll have to make a post about my AI outtakes, creations so horribly wrong there was nothing to salvage from them.

I could have tightened it up a bit. When it was written as a stage piece, I had to have the characters introduce themselves to set up the bit and place. But here, using the actual characters and footage, I could have easily begun the sketch with Charlie and Dolly bemoaning another Christmas Eve. Oh, also, the Zimbabwe thing, that was based on actual events about 10 years ago where a dentist caught a lot of online flak for his trophy hunting selfies. So, maybe I could have dropped that, too. It is pretty grim. But, hey, if I don't do it now, the way I wrote it, when will I ever?

As a showcase for my writing, that’s up in the air at the moment. But the fact that I can’t get AI at the level I can afford (which is minimal or “free trial”) to maintain how a dolly looks between clips is something I’m sure the bigwigs at the Hollywood studios are battling with.

But as a hobby? Hobbies are supposed to be fun, no?

Barely Home Companion - Mel's Dinner (Jun. '06)

6/20/2025

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...

Wow, I must have been in a slum this week. This is an old sketch of mine, written originally for the group Style Without Substance. It was one of their go-to pieces and they did it several times during their existence. It's a funny sketch. It also involves several women, which could have been one of the reasons PHC didn't use it. I had to tone it down a bit for radio. But this was written I my vaudeville/Python period; silly premise, building jokes, odd logic. It's a solid bit, but in the end, it probably is better on video.

I've linked to the Style version we did for Staten Island Public Access TV.

MEL’S DINNER

Home-Made Videos: Abbott & Costello Elementary

4/10/2025

So, we just started watching Abbott Elementary last month, streaming it until we got all caught up and are now watching it at its regularity scheduled time on ABC. As I've often pointed out here, I grew up on old movies and grew up loving the movies and shows of Abbott and Costello. So, naturally, anything with the name "Abbott" in the title is going to trigger me. The joke is the title. The trick was how to put it together. I don't have what you would call a big support group of creatives out in the 'burbs. But I remembered there were movie scenes of Abbott & Costello in class rooms. And I knew "7 times 13" would be included, even which version. TCM recently showed "Abbott & Costello in Hollywood," and that included a scene of Lou in a kid's classroom. So, it was off to Youtube to find the clips I would need. Naturally, I had written a narrator's script to lead from scene to scene. Then I pulled up the original "Abbott Elementary" trailer and it was just music, a few scenes with dialogue from the show and just some of the wilder physical bits. So that became my template. I created a logo on MS Paint, found the whole version of the show's theme song and enough of the A&C clips I knew I needed. I played around with the editing software, make all the new clips black and wide, panned and scanned the old slips, all to maintain the visuals and got to the point where I was happy with it. It's up on Youtube and I've been posting it on LinkedIn, FB and Twitter. And if you found your way here, check it out:

Friends of Leon: Pepsi Challenge Outtakes

9/25/2023

Apparently Pepsi is celebrating its 125 anniversary of not being Coke. They are doing many things to mark this milestone, but one of the things they are not doing is showing this video that parodies their famous "Pepsi Challenge." That honor goes to me.

First, some backstory. Sometime after college, I signed up for one of those Stand-Up comedy workshops with my college humor magazine cohort, the late John Rawlins. In that class we met a guy who was trying out stand-up. We got friendly, but not so friendly that I remember his name. But he insisted we should meet some people he was dealing with who were trying to put together comedy ventures. So we did. We hit it off and put out a fanzine called "Salvator Deli" for a couple of issues. Then attempted a stage show. A video program was always something the group was looking to do, so when in 1985 one of the members had a friend who was looking to do something on NJ Public access, so we decided we could fit that bill. We gathered up sketches and went to Jersey. We called ourselves "Friends of Leon." We worked on a cold-open together, then did material we all brought in. My contribution was the Pepsi Challenge outtakes. Look, I'm a writer and a bit of a ham, and tend not to pass up an opportunity to perform, so I'm the lead here. What we have here is a bunch of writers performing their own material. I only digitized my two contributions, because I only wanted to toot my own horn when the whole concept of YouTube came about. There were several others sketches and I preformed in them, too. But since I wasn't looking to be an actor, I only copied the skits I wrote.

Maybe I'll get into this stage of my writing life and how that led to another venture, Big B's Traveling Sideshow. Frankly, so many of these threads cross and mingle, I don't remember everything as it happened, just flashes of events. But it's something worth revisiting (for me, anyway). Until then, let's present Pepsi Challenge Outtakes!

Sketchy Tales: I Knew Him When...

8/13/2021

Ok, so a new movie just came out and I'm a little bit more excited about it than I usually would be. The movie "Free Guy" is hitting theaters and I'm thrilled that someone I know is in it! Mark Lainer is an actor I met back in 1988 or so as part of a comedy troupe I became involved with. I've written about Style Without Substance many times on the blog. They were a remarkable group of talented people. It really was an exciting and creative time in my life and I was thrilled to be part of a team.

Mark was an incredibly funny actor (and totally still is). Any part you handed him--mime, priest, colorizer, beach nerd--were much improved by his presence. We did a lot of sketches together and I was lucky enough to get tapes of some of them. I want to share them here.

The Amazing Maskoroni: His Big Shot!

7/17/2021

Some final plague prestidigitation

TMI: Daily-Week of June 29, 2021

7/7/2021

These are my final jokes from the final week of TMI: Daily. The group is taking the summer off and then plans to relaunch the show under a different title and/or format, adjusting for post-pandemic life. And hopefully the group will be back onstage in their sketch-comedy format, too.

I am glad to be a part of it, in the background. Writing for this day after day kept the pandemic at bay and let my vent a lot of my fears, anger and frustration. I was one of the lucky ones, I was able to work from home the whole time and didn't have money woes or eviction fears. But many of the cast members did. They got to share and vent and make the pandemic person for us. And hopefully brought some laughter with the insights.

It was a short week, 3 shows. I missed the first show because I was away. Nothing got in the Wednesday show, but then I managed to score 2 jokes in the season finale, which underwent the usual re-wording. So, take it away, TMI: Daily...

comedy, writer, Dan Fiorella, Daniel fiorella, screenplay, sketches,radio,computer games, television writer