humor project
The Sister Squad
what is it?
The final “humor project” is an opportunity for seniors to explore personal comedic influences in the creation of their own lighthearted, laugh-invoking content. Given that this project was our last at Freestyle Academy, we were free to create in any crossover of mediums with few boundaries. My time spent on this endeavor was thoroughly enjoyable, and a steadfast reminder of how creativity feeds the soul.
inspiration + the idea
I worked alongside LexiD and EvaD to recreate popular YouTube trends in a way that mocks their nature, otherwise known as “parody content.” Before we even approached this project, it was clear that the three of us shared a mutual love for YouTube influencers of the 2010’s. As we reminisced on laughter-filled moments of our past, the idea of starting our own comedic YouTube channel was highly favored. We conversed over popular YouTube trends that made us smile (in part because of their predictability/corniness), and were overcome with the urge to merge those trends with the beloved parody genre. To initiate the brainstorm process, we crafted a list of over 12 trends to recreate, which was narrowed down to the following: (Tesla) Giveaway, inspired by David Dobrik’s expensive giveaway videos, Apology (Song) Video, inspired by Colleen Ballinger infamous “song” apology, a haunted 3AM Challenge as inspired by JayStation’s eerie 3am videos, and a cheesy Introduction Video that mocks YouTube culture as a whole.
Both our YouTube aesthetic and personalities were heavily inspired by the movie Mean Girls. We recreated the famous pose made by the 3 mean girls in the film for our channel icon and banner, while using a similar pink-inspired color scheme. In our video content, we each took on the role of a respective “mean girl” by pertaining their personality; I portrayed authoritative, bossy Regina George, LexiD portrayed ditzy, naive Karen Smith, and EvaD portrayed insecure, gossip-obsessed Gretchen Wieners. We aimed for this to come across in our videos, while also maintaining the nature of the trends we were recreating.
the process
Our process for producing each of the 4 videos consisted of:
- Drafting a script based on our humorist influences, the trend we were recreating, and our respective acting “roles”
- Setting a location, casting extras as needed, and determining any lighting, equipment, props, accessories, and/or attire necessary for filming.
- Cutting and arranging our video clips in Adobe After Effects, inserting sound effects/graphics/music to enhance our humor techniques, adding subtitles when necessary (ie. for the apology song) *We used ProTools, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Photoshop to facilitate this process as well, although not consistently.
- Designing a comedic thumbnail to represent the YouTube video in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator
- Uploading the finalized video + corresponding thumbnail to our channel titled the “Sister Squad” on video-sharing platform YouTube.
*The “Sister Squad” channel banner, icon, and intro clip were edited using Adobe Photoshop, Canva, and Premiere Pro
research: humorist study
The following “humorist study” communicates how I intended to incorporate the humor techniques that are commonly used by my influences.
parody video thumbnails
the videos
behind the scenes
#productive
