Sometimes you get a crazy idea in your head and you just have to do it. This was one of those times…
On February 1, a bunch of talented and enthusiastic Trekkers from the Czech Republic (with the help of one CGI bloke from the U.K.) released Part 1 of their amazing Dominion War-era fan film, SQUADRON. Six days later, they released Part 2. In the 2-3 weeks since, the two parts (both separately and combined into one) have garnered more than 100K Youtube views—an amazing feat, considering that the entire film is spoken in Czech and requires those not familiar with the language to watch with subtitles turned on in order to follow the plot. But even without a translation, the film looks completely amazing.
If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look…
I’ve been closely following the efforts of these Czechie Trekkies since they started planning to launch their Indiegogo campaign about a year ago. And so I was really excited to record an international interview with them for Fan Film Factor. And to make this even more of an event, I had a whopping SIX Czech fan filmmakers on one Zoom call! Indeed, it was my first-ever Zoom interview for this blog (I mainly do audio or text-based interviews). So I wanted to make it extra awesome!
The creators of Squadron gave me a great 90 minutes, but I wanted to spice it up even more. Since it would be a true video interview, I wanted it to be more visually interesting than watching seven “Brady Bunch”-style talking heads for an hour and a half. So I began to look for clips of footage from the stunning 2-part fan film to include as cutaways from the Zoom screen. You can watch the full interview here to see how it turned out…
Anyway, because the “search for scenes” doesn’t require actually listening to the fan film (and I don’t speak Czech anyway), I had some music playing in the background while I was looking through the footage for clips. More specifically, I was perusing the iTunes catalog (as I often do) looking for lesser-known songs from hit recording artists to purchase. In fact, I was up to the R’s, having just had an awesome (and somewhat expensive!) retrospective of the decades-long career of the late Ray Charles, and was now sampling the greatest hits of Ray Parker, Jr. (yep, the guy who recorded the famous Ghostbusters them song). Ray actually had a few other chart-topping hits like “You Can’t Change That” and “A Woman Needs Love (Just Like You Do).”
At one point I was listening to a song I’d never heard before from 1982 called “The Other Woman”…just as I was toggling to playback marker back and forth through Squadron looking for VFX sequences. As it played, I zipped through scene after scene playing along with the music, and that’s when I realized that the majority of the cast of Squadron was female. And that’s when a crazy idea entered my head to buy (never pirate!) and download the song…and then create a music video filled with clips from Squadron. I mean, why not? Heck, English-speaking viewers won’t even need subtitles!
It took me another week or so to clear my schedule to do the editing. But once I started the process, it went surprisingly quickly, maybe a couple of hours tops. I then shared the resulting video with the Czech fan filmmakers, and they loved it. So with their permission, I am now making the YouTube link public so that the rest of you can enjoy my crazy idea, too.
Let me know what you think…
That music video was a hoot and a half! Well done!
Thanks, Catherine. The funny thing is, it really worked best with that one song. The other songs in Ray Parker, Jr.’s catalog didn’t fit nearly as well.
The use of the scene at 3.37 made me smile. You brightened my Monday. Well done.
Always happy when I make someone smile.