October Project #3: A Ghost Story (continued)

Hey now!

Where to begin on the creation of "A Ghost Story?" Last Sunday, I was starting to worry that I might have set the bar a bit too high with the first two songs. I was really happy with how they both turned out, and I was especially happy with how different they were from one another.

Initially, I was trying to come up with a concept where the song was told from the antagonist's point of view. I wanted to play the spooky archetype (AKA Hellmo) rather than the person being haunted. Not long after that, I came up with the idea of a ghost who has been haunting a long-vacant home, desperate to meet/spook its next resident. The first version of the idea had a genuinely spooky person move into the house and spooking the ghost instead. I considered Tim Burton, Rob Zombie, Crispin Glover and Stephen King. None of them really clicked, and I moved on from a spooky person moving in to an annoying person (Steve Urkel, Screech from Saved By The Bell, etc). I thought that concept could be funny, but I liked the ghost being frightened better than being annoyed.  I also heavily considered having Shrek and his family of ogres move in. It was another version of the joke that I think could have played well, but it still wasn't checking all of the boxes.

I started trying to come up with characters that are undeniably creepy even though they aren't intended to be. My wife suggested CoComelon and that felt like a bullseye to me. I really wanted to give Brielle Garcia the reigns for one of these videos and this felt like the perfect opportunity to let her go crazy. She always surpasses my expectations in unbelievable ways.

My one hesitation from moving forward was whether or not the source material was too similar to Hellmo (both videos being centered around horrific versions of children's IP). After a lot of thought, I decided that there were enough major differentiators that made this direction worth pursuing. The funniest thing about both of these songs is it appears that I'm going insane from watching so much Elmo and CoComelon, but it really wasn't a major inspiration for either video. I didn't land on the Elmo concept until after a friend made a joke about the "La la la la" hook being similar to Elmo's song. The truth is Elmo is my daughter's favorite thing in the world and I enjoy watching with her (Maybe that subconsciously influenced the hook??). The heart of that joke came more from a place of taking a very beloved and adorable cultural phenomenon and turning it into an unequivocal nightmare.

I think seeing a lot of parents comment on how they go insane listening to Elmo on repeat made me realize that I could really expand on that experience with CoComelon. For one, it is genuinely awful. When we went to the beach earlier this year, it was one of the only children's programs on TV. I was so confounded by what I was watching. I started googling and researching and trying to figure out how something like that made it onto TV. This song in particular blew my mind.  The dad's parts sound like they were written and performed by a robot. The random groans really get me as well.

I haven't watched any CoComelon since that trip because we deliberately avoid it. But I realized pretty early during the songwriting process that the visual joke of the CoComelon family haunting a ghost couldn't sustain a 2 minute song. So I really leaned in on tying everything back to the perspective of a young parent whose child is addicted to CoComelon.

This one currently has 87K+ likes on TikTok. It's always been wild to me how some songs can do so well on one platform and nothing on others. Maybe all of the parents of CoComelon-addicted parents hang out on TikTok.

I feel like I could do a whole separate post about Brielle's work on this. She animated the CoComelon families on Monday and Tuesday and did all of mo-cap + rendering in Unreal on Wednesday. She's one-in-a-billion and I've truly hit the jackpot getting the opportunity to collaborate with her as often as I've been able to. The dedication and commitment to such ridiculous ideas on even more ridiculous timelines/deadlines is truly unreal (pun intended). Here is Brielle doing mo-cap for this.  

It's Sunday night and I have no idea what this week's song will be. We leave for Los Angeles in the middle of the night on Friday and childcare is currently all jacked up for this week. Gold help me!

See you on the other side.

-Nick