Have you heard the song “Cupid” by Fifty-Fifty?
If not, you should go listen to it! It’s an annoyingly catchy but relatable song that’s going popular right now. Search for the sped-up Twin version sung in English.
For the senior Humor project, my teammates’ and my main goal was to have a lot of fun while completing this final project in English. I collaborated with TaeY, JanineL, TheresaM, and ZoeyB. We decided we’d have the most fun through making a music video – for a parody of Cupid!
Brainstorming
In early May, before we started recording or filming or doing any part of the production process, my group and I worked on brainstorming ideas for what we could create. Having just read Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five”, in English class and analyzed his use of dark humor in his storytelling, some of our ideas were inspired by symbols from this novel.
Now, this cactus pot is an iconic symbol of Freestyle (it moved with us from the old campus to the new buildings), and I also thought it looked like it had a big brain. I’ve linked a PDF of my group’s brainstorming document to the image – please check it out!
After completing our project proposal, I wrote this Humorist Study, analyzing two shows that have influenced my individual enjoyment of humor (“Somebody Feed Phil”, and “Modern Family”), which I later included as comedic influences on this project. This document also includes our project proposal. *Note: For best appearance, I recommend clicking the title to the left below this document that says “Wang_Lucy-Humorist-Study”, which will take you to the media page.
Three forms of humor (borrowed from Mr. Greco’s Comedic Toolbox) we strove to use in our video were:
- Situational humor: the audience knows something that the actors don’t.
- Blunder: physical acting, clumsiness or being goofy.
- Parody: a different play on something well-known.
Writing Lyrics
To come up with lyrics, we first took a divide-and-conquer approach where each person or pair of two had free rein over writing their own version of a song, then everyone got together and we chose parts from each version to compile into the Final Lyrics box.
Recording
We set up a recording session with Mr. Flo, who helped us organize the audio in Pro Tools and was sort of our director. Here’s a photo of the five of us singing the La-la-la part:
I’m thankful because Mr. Flo made some really helpful suggestions – in particular towards the end of the music video where we each say “I want a new building” in a different language, either our home language or one we are learning.
We were the first ones to use the recording studio on the new campus, which is ironic in contrast to our project.
Audio production
After Janine set up a Pro Tools file in the Collaboration Groups folder on the EVO, we were able to enlist Mr. Flo’s help with recording in the brand new studio.
For 1.5 hours on Friday 5/19 (during my 6th period Statistics class, because people were taking an optional final and I was free), I edited using Pro Tools by matching our recorded singing and dialogue to Cupid’s music instrumental.
Here’s what our session looked like: I have plugins open for D-verb for making select recordings have echo and be able to blend with the instrumental better, and for Normalize which is to make the selected portion of the audio as loud as possible.
I’m proud that we accomplished progress on a lot of our project in under one week – and all on our new campus. We completed the entire project (from brainstorming to production) within about two weeks.
Above shows JanineL listening to our edited audio for the first time!
Filming
Our shot list is organized by lyric line to match what scene and moment we wanted to create for that line.
Tae was our one group member who was a Film student. She was in charge of directing and filming and helped us figure out what to plan for the shots to include in the video. Below is our planning document of shot lists.
Video production
Our video was produced using Adobe Premiere Pro. We also added subtitles to the project so make it easier for the audience to understand the lyrics.
There is one scene of Mr. Greco talking, which was filmed on our new campus. I wanted to switch out the background to a photo of the old campus. Thank you so much to CamillaR, who reminded me of how to use the Rotobrush in After Effects to delete the background from the video. Below is a screenshot of my interface, paused at a point where Mr. Greco looks really happy, which is kind of wholesome.
Final production
Click on this image below (a group selfie we took while recording our song) to access the music video!
Very finally, below is a video made by TheresaM sharing some of our behind-the-scenes of production: