| Sam Baron | |
|---|---|
| Born | 8 June 1988 London, England |
| Occupation | comedian, writer, director |
| Website | |
| http://www.sambaron.com | |
Sam Baron (born 8 June 1988) is a comedian and film-maker from Cambridge, England.
His first feature film, Can You Survive a Week in Paradise?, was screened at the Cambridge Arts Picture House in 2004. In December of that year, his documentary Family Rights Group was screened at the Barbican Cinema in London, presented by Ken Loach. He was also featured very briefly in the documentary They Made Me Do It Too: The Cult of Donnie Darko on the Director's Cut DVD of the film Donnie Darko (2001).
Throughout his teenage years, he directed over 200 short films, often with collaborator Raphael von Blumenthal. With the advent of YouTube came some recognition from a larger audience, and he moved into developing webisodes for several shows which eventually evolved into television pilots.
The pair are currently writing a feature film. They have a website where their short films and TV shows are available to download.[1]
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In March 2006 he co-wrote and starred in a UK response to the Saturday Night Live rap video "Lazy Sunday" which became successful on the internet.[2] It received praise from SNL writer Jorma Taccone and "Lazy Monday" creators Mark Feuerstein and Sam Friedlander, and a clip from the video was featured on CNN. Later that year, the duo performed the song live on the BBC show Let Me Entertain You.
In 2007 they were commissioned by MTV to create an awareness video about global warming for the MTV Switch campaign. The video, produced by Mark Whelan and Cake Group Ltd., was shown around the world Al Gore’s Live Earth events in 2007, and screened on MTV worldwide. The video, a rap about climate change,[3] also became a popular viral video on the internet.
Their 2008 video 'I LIK CHIN'[4] spawned a spin-off website iLikChin.com,[5] a User-generated content site about "the olympic sport of chin-licking".
Since then he has created and produced three pilots for television series' with Raphael von Blumenthal. The first show, entitled Tom's Life,[6] was a sitcom about high-school students who get themselves into wacky adventures to distract themselves from their depressingly comfortable middle-class suburban lives. It was vaguely popular on the internet video website YouTube but was never developed into a full series. The entire cast and crew have subsequently disowned the pilot, with Baron choosing to euphemistically call it a "learning experience".
The second show, entitled Lemon Party,[7] was a surreal comedy sketch show starring the two creators in every single role. The show also gained a large following on the internet and was picked up by the UK television network Trouble, where the individual sketches were screened as part of another show, MyTV: Homegrown.[8] The pair were also invited to host two episodes of that show, performing original material written for the occasions. The first version of the hour-long Christmas Special they presented was decided to be too controversial and was subsequently banned. Their entire work had to be entirely re-written and re-shot at last minute, to comply with the channel's broadcast standards.
The third television pilot is 2008's House of the Rising Egos,[9] co-created by the pair with comedian Jack Miller. They describe the show as an "anti-sitcom", a fake documentary about four university students who move into their first house together. In the show, the characters find that the dream of living with your best friends soon gets overshadowed by the minutiae of chores left undone, and in the vein of Seinfeld and Peep Show before it, it’s life's little foibles which test the strength of life-long friendships.[10] The sitcom pilot, in which Baron plays ‘Sam’, von Blumenthal plays ‘Raph’ and Miller plays ‘Jack’, started off as a web-series, with short webisodes on YouTube. But when these also became popular, the decision was made to create a TV pilot for the show.
With Raphael von Blumenthal and Jack Miller, Baron created a radio pilot "Welcome To Tuesday".[11] Although it was not developed into a full series, it was aired on BBC Radio 4 on 2 January 2009 in the final episode of the series 'Pilots That Never Flew'.[12]
The trio also host a weekly show on UCL's Rare FM radio station. However, in their own words, the show is "a hit-and-miss affair, with little to no continuity on a week to week basis - often the show is just really quite bad."[13]
His father is Simon Baron-Cohen, and he is a first cousin once removed of Sacha and Erran Baron Cohen.