dodie
If Educational Videos Were Filmed Like Music Videos
[Intro: Tom]
The opening shot is a little confusing, and a little unreal.
That sense of unreality is because nearly every shot in this video is being played back at the wrong speed.
We filmed this section at 30 frames a second.
But it's being played back at 24.
80 percent of normal speed. So it just seems a little bit off.
Plus, we're using rapid cuts with no continuity between them, different clothes, different locations, different everything.
We've also got some cutaways in extreme slow-motion, because it looks spectacular, and because it let's me do a moody stare in to the distance, without having to hold it so long, that it becomes awkward. It also let's us fit in some product placement. Some of the shots, aren't slow-motion though.
[Verse 1: Tom]
This is being played back faster than real time, so that the dancers seem more synchronized and precise than they really are.
I mean don't get me wrong, they're good. But with the speed change their movements look super-human.
Also they are dancers, because having attractive people move in attractive ways makes the video more appealing.
We couldn't afford a win machine for this shot, so we bought a leaf blower from a hardware store.
We kept the receipt so we can return it after we're done.
The trouble with filming everything in the wrong framerate, is that my voice won't sound right, so the vocal track for this was pre-recorded in a studio, and I'm lip-synching it at the wrong speed.
If my lips don't quite match up at some point, we'll just cut to another take or to a completely random slow-mo shot of an object being destroyed, and no one will care.
Actually this isn't the studio where we recorded the vocal track.
I recorded this weeks ago, so we could plan everything but we didn't film that session, so we had to go to this separate recording studio to fake that footage. This microphone isn't even plucked in.
[Verse 2: Dodie]
We're now about two thirds of the way through, so here's a middle eight from me the featured artist, in an attempt to cross-promote us. Our schedules didn't match up, so this was all filmed separately.
Despite that, we're still trying to convince everyone that Tom and I met up, are great friends, and are definitely in the same room.
[Verse 4: Tom]
This is the part where we break up the video, with a bit of diegetic audio so people can't just rip the whole thing off YouTube. (*slurp*)
This isn't actually a party.
It may look like we're having a spectacular time, as that's the image we want to project, but in reality we are on our fifteenth take.
Everyone would quite like to go home.
This final section is important, though, because it resolves the question at the start:
Why am I falling into a swimming pool?
Because ending the same way we started makes the audience think that there's a sensible, circular narrative that ties everything together.
Even if there isn't
[Outro: Tom}
You can't buy this on iTunes or stream it on Spotify. It's... It's not a song.