In this project, I came across many adverse challenges ranging from needed equipment and finding the correct places to take shots in order to fulfill my desired outcome, but in the end, I believe it turned out just as good as I had imagined.

Introduction:

The original idea for my project was to make a video to the song “Old Town Road” By Lil Nas X. I thought it would be funny to dress up my roommate as some 2 cent cowboy and have him do stupid stuff around campus (which he was totally down for).

Our first challenge was getting all the props for the video. We went to Walmart and bought all the clothing needed but had to go to Goodwill to get a horse-on-a-stick prop. In the end we were able to get cowboy boots from one of my friends on campus.

Our second challenge was coming up with the script. My roommate and I bounced ideas off of each other for about 4 hours then spent another 2 hours dividing the time so that every scene fit. Original Script:

Horse skit

• [10 sec] Opening scene is picture of Pullman but in 8 bit with title and blinking start button with retro 8 bit music. Ding is heard and start button stays lit as frame fades to black and the option “continue” appears. Another ding is heard and the game goes black.
• Start with it fading into Thomas in a first person view walking towards the horse on a stick
• [5 sec] Next scene opens to another dialogue screen saying “there is an old town road ahead, would you like to use a horse?”
• Yes? <–
• No?

• [10 sec] Old town road starts playing. Thomas emerges from around a building in slow mo. Film him passing me down the road.
• [5 sec] Get some close ups of what he is wearing
• [10 sec] Show him entering the bottom floor elevator to the CUB then exiting the upper floor elevator into the CUB. (Or Vice Versa)
• [5 sec] Show him heading for a hill in the sunset
• [5 sec] Close up of him riding over the hill towards you
• [5 sec] Enters a building with camera at his side/back
• [5 sec] He finds a bottle that says water on a sticky note, and he drinks the water (With text “drink?” yes or no)
• [15 sec] Zoom into his face while he pulls his sunglasses down then cut to the bottle with the sticky note on it, he peels the sticky not to reveal another sticky note below it that says “Pullman water”. Cut back to his eyes and narrow so you just see his eyes turn into a surprised expression. Fade to black
• [20 sec] Instantly cut to him partying with his horse in slow-mo at Mike’s or a frat. Change Audio to live sound while Old Town Road plays At the club. Get some shots of people dancing with Thomas.
• [10 sec] At the end cut from the dancing to black, back and forth to the beat of the music then cut to black and throw on some quick credits with maybe 3 seconds of bloopers.

Our third challenge came as how I was to incorporate this video to my course topic. I came up with the idea to make the video as if it was a video game itself. How I achieved this was by adding in 8-bit music and sound effects alongside animations I had to make on premiere pro. With the pixelated intro artwork and first person camera angles, it turned out beautifully.

Editing:

Once I had all my shots, it came crunch time. After about 10-12 hours of editing total, I came to my final rough draft video that I felt proud at. It ended up taking me so long due to having to completely restart 3 times because of some glitches in the video previews that wouldn’t allow me to edit the videos as I liked. I ended up coming up with the solution by having to convert every one of my videos from a MOV to an MP4 file.

Conclusion:

Now comes the largest downfall from this project: No copyrighted material. Throughout my entire design process I was very careful to use only songs and sounds from sources under a creative commons license. But the idea of making a video around the song “Old Town Road” was a mistake because it is indeed copyrighted content. My reasoning for using this song was that I didn’t think it was copyrighted and I didn’t find out until I uploaded the video to YouTube.

I have taken some steps towards fixing this issue by contacting some developers of a free to use instrumental version of the song “Old Town Road”. I really hope you enjoy the video!

Bib for sounds under creative commons license:

Birds and walking

https://freesound.org/people/dobroide/sounds/22384/

Background intro song

” https://www.playonloop.com “

Sound effects

https://www.zapsplat.com/sound-effect-category/game-sounds/page/2/