First off, I'm a HUGE Nintendo/Zelda fan! :) Second off, with the youtube videos that I do, as often as I can, I try and pick "hot topics", and make videos on them, just so I can get the most exposure as possible :). In this case, the Nintendo video game Zelda: “Skyward Sword” is coming out this week, so it seemed like a perfect fit to make a video just to build off the hype that the game would already be getting. This was all considered months in advance.
So I got my violin friend Lindsey Stirling involved from the beginning. She had never actually played a Zelda video game before, but she did a ton of research on the game itself, and the music, and then she arranged her own composition based off of the Zelda world.
We did this whole process several months in advance before we were going to release the video. We then contacted my friend Dan who owns a recording studio here in Provo Utah, and he recorded the music for us. From there, we then went to my friend Stephen Anderson, who composed the backtrack that plays in the background.
I then contacted my friend Ben who I went to film school with. Ben is an awesome makeup designer, and he made the elf ears for Lindsey that appeared in the video.
If you love the music, you can download the song off of iTunes in the link below.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/zelda-medley-single/id481386691
My friend Melia Harris custom made the whole costume just for the video. In the video game itself, Link (the character who the game is based off of, not Zelda), wears a green costume. In the video Lindsey wears the same costume, but it's blue. The reason behind this, was I didn't want her to be compared to Link. I wanted people to know right away that she was a part of that same world, and in the video game Link does wear a blue outfit for a section of it, so we tried to put the best of both worlds in there, that was the logic for that.
As far as filming locations go, we shot this all in Utah, in a couple different locations. The first location, the Dungeon Castle, we filmed here in Provo Utah, where I am now living. All the mountain scenes were filmed on the Alpine Loop, when all the leaves were changing colors. The green forest was near the same location. For the snow scenes, we filmed those by Brighton Ski Resort. We filmed this video over a course of a month, just to make sure we could hit every "climate".
For the horse scenes, our friend Emily hooked us up with her friends horse, which we filmed those scenes in Spanish Fork Canyon.
As far as the technical side of the video, we shot this on our company's Red Epic camera, which shoots at 5K resolution. Sadly though, youtube has a hard time with all that information, so when we uploaded even in a low resolution version, youtube encoding made it significantly not as clear as it was shot :( But you work with what you got. But what I learned is that youtube can handle Canon footage significantly better than the Red Epic camera footage.
The reason the camera looks like it is floating, is because I do most of my filming with a Glidecam. I usually just use a small glidecam, a glidecam 2000 HD to be specific. But because this camera is significantly heavier, we just recently purchased a full glidecam with a vest, and an arm.
A couple other key players that helped make this happen was my friend Jacob Schwarz, he spent the first day of filming with me, just to make sure we didn't have any surprises with shooting with our Red Epic camera.
You can also check out our company's website in the link below. We started our production company together once we finished film school.
Mysterybox
All in all, most of the youtube videos I do, consist of just me, and usually the person being filmed. In this case though, it would not have happened without a full team behind me/side by side with me. Without the costume designer, makeup artist, sound recorder, helpers, background music, Lindsey, color correctors, and my other friends that helped with all the torces we had to make, this wouldn't have happened! So yes, make sure to check out Lindsey's youtube channel if you haven't already!!
Lindsey's Youtube Channel.
A couple other key players that helped make this happen was my friend Jacob Schwarz, he spent the first day of filming with me, just to make sure we didn't have any surprises with shooting with our Red Epic camera.
You can also check out our company's website in the link below. We started our production company together once we finished film school.
Mysterybox
Also, in regards to this video, and several other videos I have done lately. A decent amount of people have complained that they just want to see videos like the human slingshot video... My response to that is... Yes, those videos always do the best on my youtube channel, however it is almost impossible to come up with new videos like that each week. They always take several weeks of preparation, a ton of people, and a lot of other logistics. Also, my being a film maker, I don't want to be branded as just the guy that does "fun" things. I want to show that I can take on everything from fast and adventurous, to slow and thought provoking.
So for those who have asked, I want my youtube channel to show what I can do in every area, so I don't get branded as a one trick pony, so yeah, there you have it, feel free to complain about it if ya want, haha :) And your feedback is always helpful, but I do have to stay true to trying new things, and pushing myself in other directions just so I can move forward, and progress as a film maker.
-Devin
