This was a fun one!
The Jackson Chamber is one of my favorite clients. They like to have fun, are pretty laid back, get me the information I need, and let me be creative with our projects. That makes for a great combo of traits. When we got together to talk about ideas for this year’s annual celebration staff video, Alexis and Jill decided they wanted to go after one of the trendy styles – a Carpool Karaoke video.
We started with research. I googled and googled how James Corden films his videos and came across this great video from the Met Film School with some excellent tips. We then set a date to record and I went over to LensRentals.com (A Great Tennessee based Firm!) and had 3 GoPro Hero 6s and suction cup mounts sent over for the shoot.
Normally with Carpool Karaoke, Corden and a guest(s) sing different parts from a lot of songs. This is great if you have two celebrities who are ready to ham it up on camera. We saw it as a weakness during research. If you do not have Adele and Corden, sometimes it can drag a bit depending on the guests. To counteract this, we decided to have everyone sing the same song, which would allow us to use the most entertaining bits of each group, to help keep the video funny and fast moving.
Disclaimer: I did not pick the song. But the choice worked out great. It was somewhat ironically funny and had enough vocal parts that people could get into it to add some hilarity to the shoot.
We shot in one afternoon. Starting at lunchtime, we borrowed the executive director’s SUV and set up our 4 cameras. I had a GoPRO Hero Session which we mounted on the sunroof to get a good view of the folks in the back seat. (This turned out to be important because 4-Runners are built like tanks and you can’t see the back seat from the front.) GoPros provided the right size and camera abilities for this task, and the Hero6’s got pretty good audio. (I did have an H4N recording but something went wrong and it failed me, which has happened on a few occasions.)
Each group went through and we had a fun time.
The editing was tricky. I needed to put four cameras in sync and then edit all 8 different groups into one final video edit. To accomplish this, I synced the four cameras based on the 8 groups. I could usually do this by finding a clap or a door closing as my match point. Then, I found each song start in the car and synced it to the audio track. I then had all 8 groups synced to the audio at the start of their own timeline. This allowed me to see approximately what time I made each cut to bring a group into the main timeline and make the next cut at the same time spot on the timeline on a different set of people. This made editing take just 4-5 hours instead of probably 8-9.
I believe in content marketing. With a shoot this intricate and fun, I decided it would be worth the investment to have someone there to take photo and video of this event for Adelsberger Marketing. The photos throughout this article are from Ricky Santos and the behind the scenes video is from Brooks Neely.
Here’s the video:
Behind the Scenes: Carpool Karaoke with the Jackson Chamber from Kevin Adelsberger on Vimeo.
Here is the Carpool Karaoke video:
