- Project Type: Video
- Motivation: Contest
- Software: Adobe Premiere (audio & video editing), Adobe Photoshop (prop letters, title card)
- Crew: Me (editing), The DreamTones (props, vocals, cinematography)
DreamWorks has a new Trolls movie coming out next year, and to help with marketing, they’re holding a mini film festival. The studio handed out troll dolls to everybody, and asked us to create a 30-second film starring our trolls. My work acappella group, the DreamTones, had a great film idea, and I volunteered to be the editor.
Since talking more about it would give away spoilers, here’s the finished film:
(If you don’t get the joke, here’s the history of RickRolling)
Our idea hinged around singing the soundtrack, so we recorded that first. We did some cuts with normal voices, and then some in “trolly” voices – they were sillier, so I picked one of those. And then I put together a shot list and props list to help us get organized. The beauty of shooting a film starring troll dolls is that they don’t talk – no lipsync, no recorded lines… all we needed to do was get a bunch of shots of trolls “dancing” (wiggling) in various locations, wearing outfits. The rest would be done in post!
Since we were satirizing existing media, I made a rough cut with our audio and the source video, to make sure that we would fit in the 30-second time limit.
Our group used three of our usual rehearsal times to build props, shoot the Dreamworks intro sequence, and then run around the Dreamworks campus to gather the “Never Gonna Give You Up” shots.
Here’s some behind-the-scenes footage of the Dreamworks Intro shoot:
Overall, I’m really happy with how it turned out. Starting with the rough cut animatic made the editing process go really quickly. I think the entire project only took less than 10 hours (not counting the singing rehearsal)
- Recording Audio: 30 min
- Editing Audio: 1 hr
- Creating shot list: 30 min
- Rough cut: 1 hr
- Prop-making: 1 hr
- Video shoots: 2.5 hr
- Final edit: 2 hr
I submitted it to the contest on Aug 3 – I’ll let you know if we win!
Oh, and did I mention, Ben was a big fan?
Project! 