He's Alfonso

Who, me?

One of the many original songs written for Hookman: Redemption is entitled "I'm Alfonso (Pop Pop Pop)" and features Alfonso exclusively.  Fans of Hookman: Requiem may recall Alfonso on several songs, even his own "Robot Rap," but in every song except one, he just rapped his verses.  The only song where we got a glimpse of his singing voice was "I Could Be Your Lover (Forever)" - but that was not Alfonso's actual voice! 

Ted Nichols (in the blue shirt) before a gig with his band.
Notice Captain Awesome in the pink? (R.I.P.) 

Instead of getting actor Robert Downs, Jr. to sing his own song, the director felt his singing voice was sub-par, and therefore enlisted the help of Foster "Ted" Nichols, who was the singer for Funky Foster and the Charles Street All-Stars. Ted did a great job.










This time around, however, we wanted more.  The "I'm Alfonso" song was being written in the style of late-90's boy band songs (think Backstreet Boys) and needed a real personality, so we convinced Mr. Downs that he had to sing.  It took many hours and roughly 100 takes, but finally we had something that could be reasonably salvaged with copious amounts of pitch correction, robot effects, and auto-tune!

Fruity Loops: where the magic happens

Before: Listen to the rough mix here




After: Listen to the "fixed" sample here 





The shooting of the music video was slated for the first day on stage at BlueRock Productions in Baltimore, MD.  It took a while...

Mr. Downs has a special talent wherein he can sing the same two verses nearly a hundred times and yet manage to forget them all within two weeks - so that when we get to the studio, he has to re-learn everything in order to get passable lip-sync!  In the end we got some great footage by utilizing a teleprompter, so he could literally read the words off a screen during his dance. 


See a world-exclusive sneak peek of the final video here! (Be sure to watch on YouTube for HD quality)

Background dancers were choreographed by Kelly Szpara. Bim Mamber and Chris Hill provided the lens flares, while Joe Davidson ran playback (and wrangled the stool).  Special thanks to Faith Erline for running the teleprompter so Mr. Downs didn't have to memorize anything!


Stay tuned next week for more updates!