The glorious video that is InDesign came about in April of 2009 when YAPMO colleague David Weisz and I were trying to come up with a concept for a video submission for our Journalism Graduation Video – the video was to be played at the grad prom at the end of the month.
David first proposed we write a rap song and make a music video – a song he wanted to call Bust-a-Nutgraph – a great idea, which turned out to be more work than we had time to deal with, as the two of us became bogged down with our final assignments of the year.
Coming down to the wire we decided that maybe we would re-work this idea into a parody of the Flight of the Conchords song Rhymenoceros vs. Hiphopotamus – the never created, yet aptly named CP Stylist vs. Source-Anonymous
As we sat down to actually write the parody song, we started to make a list of journalistic terms in order to make our writing and rhyming easier – jotting down “InDesign”, the most commonly used layout software for print publications, and “Newspapers are Dead”, a term often repeated to us by our professors throughout our 4 years in the program.
Instantly realizing the correlation between InDesign and the Conchords’ song Business Time, and Newspapers are Dead with their song The Humans are Dead, we set out to parody these two songs instead. The latter never really came to fruition as time wasn’t on our side, though the former definitely came together quickly.
I managed to get the lyrics finished within a day and storyboarded the video shortly thereafter, though I made sure when I was writing to retain all of the awkward sexual innuendos in the song….which ended up making it even more awkward when applied to journalism/the boss instead of a man trying to seduce his wife.
It was my original intention to film in the Centretown News office, where every journalism student spent at least a little time in either 3rd or 4th year, though my position on staff at the student newspaper The Charlatan made it an easier location to access and modify as needed.
Shooting took place over two days in late April; however the video wasn’t completed in time for the grad prom as I wanted to track drums for the audio – something I wasn’t able to do until I returned home from school and had access to my drum kit.
Special thanks goes out to Charlatans Julia Johnson and Heather Wallace for acting in the piece, and Joel Eastwood and my brother Jamie Price for helping out with some additional camera work.
