What Is Hot Coffee?
Hot Coffee Show is an improv group based in Brooklyn, NY and features Chris Black, Geordie Broadwater, Nate Dern, Pippi Kessler, Matthew O’Malley, and AJ Wolosenko, all alumni of a successful long-form improv group in New England. The group’s Web media is produced by Robbie Mitchell and Matthew O’Malley.
The group started with a series of weekly podcasts in fall 2008. Using news prompts as a replacement for audience suggestions, we recorded 2+ hours of audio improv each Sunday night, including banter, sketches, and songs. The material was hyper-edited down into shows lasting 10-15 minutes, including more fully-produced versions of the songs that retained the original, improvised vocals.
We quickly realized that people loved the short videos that accompanied the podcasts, so we upgraded and began releasing video versions of the shows along with the audio. This made people very happy.
And now, we’ve come full circle. As of March 2009, Hot Coffee Show is a live performance group.
Q: What’s improv theatre?
A: It’s where people make things up on the spot. You know that show Who’s Line Is It Anyway? That’s a form of improv called short-form. We do a different style, called long-form, that uses audience-supplied details to create an immersive, non-stop story, typically up to an hour long. Wikipedia explains improv more thoroughly.
Q: What’s a podcast?
A: It’s an audio file (MP3, AAC, etc.) that is published by someone (us, in this case) with some sort of regularity, and you listen to it just like you would any other audio. You can download it manually, but the key difference is that a podcast allows you to subscribe to it: whenever you dock your iPod to iTunes, the program will download the latest episode(s) and sync it/them to your iPod. Magic! Other well-known Web broadcasters such as NPR and The Onion publish daily podcasts. Wikipedia explains this in more detail, too.
Q: So what’s with the videos?
A: We found that people don’t listen to long pieces of audio on the Web no matter how funny they are or how much love went into it. It just doesn’t happen. Put a video with it and you’re golden.
Q: Wait, so do you guys make a podcast or videocast or are you live performers?
A: We are many things to many people.
That’s Hot Coffee.
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