the Payola Collective

I haven’t been posting as regularly as usual because I have entered in to a season we shall call “The Busy Time.” I am currently moonlighting for a local company doing medical illustrations, audio editing, etc. On top of that I just stepped on to a short film that will be epic. To add insult to overworked injury I have been wrapping up freelance projects for all my clients prior to “The Busy Time.” All of these projects are completed after I put in my 40 hours at my full time gig as the video guy at the Kroc Center. All this adds up to 70+ hours a week of work. While I am grateful for the work I am also glad that this will be for a season and not forever.

That brings you up to date on my work schedule. Now for the business at hand.

A few weeks ago I had a meeting with the Kroc Centers Marketing Director and she had a brilliant idea. We had our first annual core values all staff meeting in a couple of weeks and she wanted to have a special video highlighting the employees at the Kroc. I do Interview style Documentaries all day long so this was par for the course. Then the Marketing director threw in my lap the opportunity to do something completely foreign to me: A musical parody. A Glee musical parody to be exact. I personally can’t watch the show for more than 2 minutes before boredom builds in my gut and I throw something at the TV. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t make my own version of Glee. I loved the idea and began immediately planning.

Through the next week I watched anything I could find on youtube about Glee. I watched The musical numbers from various episodes of the show. I watched other people’s parodies of Glee. I watched the Jimmy Fallon Emmy’s opening number that is by far the best Glee moment I have ever witnessed, original show included. I watched so much that now whenever I open Youtube up on my office computer it immediately loads suggestions based around show tunes, Glee Characters, and musicals. I googled glee so much that the ads that pop up are advertising glee fanclubs, 20th Century fox and musical theater. If an investigator took a few minutes to analyze my computer the conclusion they would come to would be that this computer is obviously the property of a teenage girl with dreams of hitting the bigtime.

All of that research led to one factor that set good, viral parodies apart from bad, nobody cares, parodies: Quality. A common theme in the glee parodies on youtube is groups of teenage boys singing all the parts in a “look at us, we are boys pretending to be girls, isn’t that funny” kind of way. I didn’t want to stoop to that. So, I decided to go for the tough laughs and go for quality. Quality video, quality, editing, quality actors portraying these singers as if this was their big break.

I understand that watching this there are rough patches that video guys can point out but I also was given a deadline. My marketing Director had to talk me off the ledge a few times as well because I wasn’t sure we could make it to the standard that I was aspiring to. She was great about reminding me that while quality is nice, this is supposed to be fun. So I had to live with a couple shots kind of out of focus and marks not hit. And while filming was rough in spots the actors in the video totally committed and made up for camera errors.

This project would not have gotten off the ground without the awesome support and help from Jodi and Erin in our marketing and design team, Miranda, who was the best AD I have ever worked with, and the men in the RJ Kroc suit, Zak (who also edited the audio) and Chris.

The night of the premiere people were laughing so hard you couldn’t hear the music. It was awesome to see a project go from an idea to premiere in two weeks with little to no budget.