Freestyle Academy proudly presents
My partner, Stella, and I were inspired by the game, Among Us, a game that encourages players to investigate and work together to figure out who the imposter is while completing tasks on the spaceship. We both enjoyed the game very much and went through various song ideas while coming up with lyrics. We settled on the song "Boys Will Be Bugs" by Cavetown since we felt the clear syllables and pacing of the song was best.
Writing the lyrics came naturally. The song depicts the story of a player who is pretending to be a crewmate when they are actually the imposter. Their gameplay strategy includes faking tasks as well as shifting blame. A challenging aspect of producing the song was removing the vocals. During the remakes I’ve made of the parody, I added backing kazoo playing as well as mimicked the different backing vocals in the original song to make it more personalized. The song went through major phases, the original version having a voice impression of Toad from the Mario Games. I changed that to be my normal voice so the lyrics would be more understandable. I’m proud of using the feature of having it sound like there are voices coming from different directions, such as for the "anxious" and "tired" bit. I spent time retaking takes for the vocals and adjusting volumes so the parts I want the audience to hear foremost would come to the front. In the song clip used, there were two instrumental parts, so I needed to learn how to have the LPF turn off and on twice in the same song clip to have the bass in the mix when appropriate. It was a slow process to have all of the pieces come together for my parody, but I’m happy with the problem solving and effort I put into it. Removing the vocals from the original improved with each remake. If I were to do it again, I may try to have all of the different parts of I’ve made for the song come together more cohesively. I’m very happy with the syllables and rhyme of the lyrics.
I’ll be able to create more song parodies in the future using the skills I’ve learned from this project. I also feel a lot more confident with ProTools and the program seems a lot less intimidating. I could help others create their own song parodies as well and branch out to make my own songs from scratch. I now know how to edit and make my own vocals, which is already a big step towards becoming a ProTools master.