Student's Spoof Airs on Discovery Channel
Lisa L. Messenger
Issue date: 5/2/07 Section: Closer Look
Media Credit: Kozbi Simmons
Dan DeFord prepares to film another documentary for Big Daddy-O Productions.
When Dan DeFord, applied information technology (AIT) student at the University of Baltimore, submitted an entry to the Discovery Channel show "You Spoof Discovery" he never thought "Survivordad" would air internationally. His parody of the cable channel's "Survivorman" won him $500 and airtime.
"My wife leaves me alone for a couple of hours with four children to care for," DeFord said of the video concept.
The eight-minute satire shows an out of breath DeFord trying not to panic while changing the baby's diaper as an older child plays with the camera tripod. His wife left him a note reminding him, among other things, to actually feed the children. The video ends with his wife catching him napping instead of watching the kids, which she forbade him to do.
The three boys appearing in the video are the actual children—aged 2, 4 and 6—of DeFord and his wife, Kara. The girl is a friend of the family. DeFord is a network administrator for the American Urological Association. He chose UB because the AIT program gives him a degree that suits his chosen career.
He said he loves IT and video-making equally, but that the constant change of the IT world gets monotonous. "Everyone should have some sort of artistic hobby to get out of the monotony of life." DeFord began making spoofs around age 15. He and a friend parodied "Wayne's World" and called it "Dan's World." They used cardboard figures of celebrities such as Cindy Crawford and Ken Griffey Jr.
Unfortunately, he said, there was no female to give the voice to Cindy Crawford, so her voice "always had a strange male falsetto ring to it." In addition to the cardboard celebrity guests, the show poked fun at various people.
"Spoofs are pretty easy because you don't have to come up with characters, you just make fun of someone else's," he said. In 2001, after years without a video camera, DeFord brought home the unused digital video camera from his workplace. He videotaped his then-one-year-old son playing so that he could send it to family members during the holiday season, a tradition he continues. This began his re-entry into video editing.
His production company was named by one of his sons, who heard DeFord's friend refer to him as Big D. When his son attempted to call him Big Daniel, it came out as "Big Dah Yo," sounding like Big Daddy-O. The company started by making home videos.
Currently, DeFord is working on two projects: a documentary about his grandmother and another about eating disorders among young women.
The latter will be entered in a contest held by iStockphoto.com in which the video must be between 30 seconds and three minutes in length. If he lands in the top three, he will win high-end video equipment.
Messenger, staff writer, can be reached at lisa.messenger1@ubalt.edu.
See the article on the UB Post site