PR Wars was originally a video introduction to a fourth-year Journalism presentation on Public Relations vs. Journalism. It is often said that PR and Journalism are two sides to the same coin – PR being the “Dark Side of Journalism”……..we felt the Star Wars analogy was fitting.
I came up with the idea of a scenario involving Darth Vader and Princess Leia fighting over a pair of journalists in order to showcase some of the stereotypes of Public Relations and Journalism and their heated relationship with each other, as well as to inject some Star Wars references for good measure.
I decided to film it like The Office as A: it would be easier for shooting and editing purposes, and B: it simply lent itself too well to the scenario not to shoot it like The Office – I had recently finished off a marathon of the five current seasons at the time so everything about the show was very fresh in my mind………so much so that I think I wanted to shoot everything like The Office for a while……
Production took place on a single Saturday (Feb. 21, 2009) and post-production was done in Adobe Premiere and After Effects over the remainder of the weekend in preparation for the presentation at 8:30 a.m. Monday morning. I found it necessary to chop the Star Wars theme for time-restraints purposes, as we only had an hour to do our presentation so every second we could spare for that was top priority.
We ended up getting an A+ < --- Funny how a university still uses letter grades...
CAST: Excited Journalist...................Courtney Symons Nervous Journalist...................Taline Bedrossian Receptionist.........................Stephenson Price Darth Vader..........................Dennis Molnar Princess Leia........................Natalie Zakrzewski
**Since this time, the original PR Wars presentation video has developed into a Proof-of-Concept Pilot episode for an upcoming web series that Stratasfear Productions will be producing on YouTube :D
Keep an eye out for more details as production begins on the latest web series sensation.
