Campus News

Campus Activities intern raps his way to an announcement blockbuster

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The video, which features Campus Activities intern Braden Fish rapping about painting in a Ross-esque soothing voice, garnered quite a response in chapel, and Fish said he’d gotten comments that said the same. “A lot of people liked it, I was told it was…better than all my other announcements combined,” he said. “But I didn't fully expect the positive response.” Fish was the instigator of the parody, from the lyrics to the filming to the editing. Fish said that, all in all, the video took about 18 hours to produce. Fish said the idea for the video stemmed from last year’s Art D’oeuvre event, which went very well. As intern this year, Fish knew he wanted to do the event again, but wasn’t sure how to advertise it in a way that would entice people to come. “I had the image of Bob Ross, who is known to be very relaxed and chill, just suddenly rapping, and I was like, 'What if we did that?'” said Fish. Fish composed the backing track and lyrics himself over the course of a couple days. Once he composed that and wrote a script of what the video should look like, Fish and a friend approached Resident Director Reed Lyons and asked to use the Bethical News studio. “And we went down there, recorded all the shots we had pre-planned, and then, after that, it was just editing and lining everything up,” said Fish, “because, how we did it was, we had the track play, and I lip-synced to it, so then we could have the actual audio track play and it look like I was doing it on the spot...” Fish said that the hardest part of the process was the editing, citing a specific 20-second sequence in the video where a self-portrait starts rapping. “That self-portrait consisted of like 120 different frames,” said Fish, “and I had to take all those in and individually turn them into a painting, so that they looked like a painting, and then combining that together.” Art D’oeuvre garnered 17 extra attendees this year after the video announcement, including a group from Oakwood-Slater Hall who stayed for the entire event, which surprised Fish. As for future blockbuster Bethel announcements, Fish didn’t say much. “It took a lot of time, and, being an engineer, I don't exactly have quite a lot of that.” he said, “It just worked out very well. Who knows, we might have something coming up for the end of the year, Midnight Breakfast, we'll see.” Video link: https://www.facebook.com/braden.fish/posts/1666727343411913 (Image Credit: Braden Fish)
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