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Hotline Scream

Made by mmzucker

One masked man's search for love, as told by Drake's Hotline Bling

Created: November 8th, 2015

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Intention

There are a lot of video parodies of Drake's music video for Hotline Bling out there right now that use video content to retell a story in small ways. Using this as my inspiration, I thought it would be fun to combine a common horror movie trope - the scary phone call - with this lighthearted song. Having an affinity for horror movies, I chose the 1996 movie Scream as the story I wanted to retell through the lens of Hotline Bling. In doing so, the video I will create will tell the story of one man's search for love as he calls women on bulky 90's cell phones.

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Product

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3d4ulw

(I really hope that link still works because Youtube took down the first upload...)

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Context

I chose to focus on the movie Scream because it's character (the killer) and the mask he wears is extremely recognizable and because most people are familiar with the plot of the killer calling women on phones. Similarly, Hotline Bling is trending right now and it's safe to say that the vast majority of people in my generation have seen this video by now and maybe even some of its parodies. Of these parodies was a very popular skit from SNL:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjeORm4LMDk

While this video is a very recent media sensation, the concept of retelling stories through other perspectives is not new; from websites like Texts from Dog (which shows imagined texts between a dog and its owner) to more serious social media pages like Humans of New York that seeks to tell people's stories through photos, social media stories are all around us.

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Process

I compiled this video entirely on Adobe Premiere. After using an audio file for the song, I grabbed video clips from Scream. Because I couldn't find a full downloadable version of the movie, I downloaded small clips from Youtube using Video Grabby. I then spent some time editing the clips by cutting them and adding audio and video transitions timed with the music. While there were no inherent challenges in using Premiere to arrange the clips, the process of choosing and editing clips to the music was very involved and time-consuming. 

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Reflection

I'm happy with my work but making this video was extremely time consuming. While I think most of the cuts are decent, I think the end where there's a lull in the song is a little awkward. For the beginning, I wanted to mimic the style of the Hotline Bling video by starting with a clip before beginning the song. However, I think the cuts here are also a little disjointed as I struggled to tell the story of the first death in the series in a matter of seconds.

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3 comments · Latest by Cloud Tian

I thought you did a good job! The idea to use the song and rearranged clips to alter the meaning of the original movie is just great. At first I didn't actually catch the relation between the song and the edited story, but as soon as I caught that, I started laughing, a lot. However, I don't know whether it's the problem of the website or it's the problem of Premiere, while I was watching your video, it's always flashing in red lights and it's very disturbing. If you can fix that it would be great. As for the part of retell the story, I think it would be better to throw those killing scene away and add more love scene just like the last scene in the video. This way, I believe your story would be more compelling.

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One masked man's search for love, as told by Drake's Hotline Bling