Celebrating an Old Video

In 2015, a friend of mine was turning 21. Given her infatuation with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West at the time, some other friends and I decided we would recreate the Bound 2 music video for her as a gift. As we re-used the original audio, my attempts to share it online back then were unsuccessful as the video was automatically copyright striked and deleted. Recently, I went digging through my old hard drives trying to find the video so I could enjoy watching it again. Fortunately I found it, attempted an upload to YouTube and it turns out that 9 years later, the video is allowed to remain.

To my delight, while searching for the video I also found some behind-the-scenes content that made me laugh and so I thought I’d take the chance to share it along with some more information about how we took this from an idea to what it became.

A Quick How-To Guide

If I were to work on a project like this again in the future, this is what I would keep in mind from a retrospective point of view:

1. Have a good reason

Even though the individual steps that I list below aren’t overly complicated, the amount of effort required to complete the video was significant. I didn’t have a great understanding of this at the time but on reflection, being able to sustain the energy to get through all of the work was due to these key motivators:

• Something for others - The recipient was going to love it. I knew that she would appreciate and enjoy what we had made, especially since it was also a surprise. This had motivated me for previous video projects as well, but it was far from enough.
• Something for me - I was going to learn a lot. In the years prior, I had learned some basic video editing skills while working on a project. I knew what I wanted to see on the screen, so I kept researching and trying things until I could see something close enough in front of me. In the early days it was about improvising in front of the camera and then taking footage that friends had filmed to piece something entertaining together with some sound effects and music, for example: Masterchef for Isy’s 21st. In a following project I took a more involved role in the planning beforehand, providing direction while shooting and then editing in-sync with music, Bromance Parody for Florian’s 21st. This time I was going to attempt to do some acting, lighting, using props and more advanced editing involving replacing backgrounds. It was an incremental step up from before and worth my time for the extra challenge that it offered.

2. Have a clear vision that informs a plan

Depending on the type of project, the details of this step will change drastically. The purpose is to save wasted time and effort by thinking ahead about the result to be achieved and working backwards to decide what to prepare. The vision this time was simple; recreate the original music video as closely as possible. That meant my plan consisted of the following elements:

• Cast
  • An actor to play Kanye West as well as a costume
  • An actor to play Kim Kardashian (willing to be topless)
• Location
  • My parents’ garage. A dark, enclosed location helped to be able to control the lighting.
• Props
  • Motorbike - a friend was able to lend us theirs for the day and patiently waited around while we used it.
• Equipment
  • Green screen to make background replacements achieveable. I got mine from eBay at the time, and these days they’re available at K-mart.
  • Camera
    • This also required additional storage space for footage, as well as batteries to keep going.
    • An added bonus was to recruit a friend who had all of these things plus the expertise to operate it on the day also provide direction.
  • Lighting
    • An easily moveable or handheld light to simulate sunlight.
    • Additional lights to illuminate the green screen.
  • Power
    • In our case we had easy access to power from ports in the garage, extension leads and power boards.
• Editing software
  • There’s no point doing any of the work unless it can be transformed into a final product. I also recommend to do some test shots beforehand and see how easy the workflow is in the software as it may inform the filming process and yield a better result. At the time I used Adobe CS6 - Premiere Pro but simpler software like iMovie works just fine, see example.
• Extra hands to help - there’s plenty of unforeseen help needed during a film shoot of any kind, extra hands go a long way to help.

3. Execution

With a handful of people involved in executing this plan, clearly I needed to organise a time that worked for everyone and on top of that I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t unnecessarily wasting anyone’s time. To make things easier on the day, I segmented the original video into individual shots and arranged them by angle. This meant that on the day we were able to arrange all of our filming in a sequence that minimised the effort of shuffling things around and gave people the option to leave when their work was done. For example:

• Motorbike shots
  • Angle 1
  • Angle 2
  • …
• Kim and Kanye together shots
  • Angle 1
  • Angle 2
  • …
• Kim shots
  • Angle 1
  • Angle 2
  • …
• Kanye shots
  • Angle 1
  • Angle 2
  • …

With a sequence in mind, for each of the angles above we rearranged the elements in the scene including cast and props. We then ensured that the camera was framed and focused correctly, as well as lighting the scene as closely as possible to the reference footage that we were copying. We took multiple takes of each shot as the additional effort involved was minimal in comparison to the set up process. We were all amateurs so having a few attempts per shot was necessary to warm up and get a better performance. Having edited a couple of videos by now I also knew that capturing a few seconds before and after each shot would help to make the editing process more foregiving as it’s always easier to have more than you need instead of less.

Once the filming was complete I was left with the footage and a sizeable amount of work remaining to reach a finished product. To get as close as possible to the original video, I followed a method similar to tracing where I placed the original video on the canvas at the lowest layer. I then systematically trimmed and cropped all of the footage we captured and placed it over the top on a second layer. This made it very easy for me to get an almost frame-perfect result as you’ll see in the side-by-side edit below. Each clip required an individual green screen replacement. This involved adding the color-replacement effect to the individual video clip and adjusting it until the outline was as close to perfectly silhouetting the subject. As each angle had slightly different lighting, I was able to achieve a better result by fine-tuning each clip individually. Beyond that I needed to find some royalty-free video footage to use for backgrounds and capture some footage of my own to replace some of the early animal sequences. After that, export and enjoy.

Thanks to all the friends that helped with this silly idea. I look back on this work and even though it’s not original, it’s still possible to learn from the process and be proud of the result. The goal of delivering a gift was achieved and we’ve had plenty of laughs and lessons as a bonus.