SUCCESSION BREAKDOWN - KINDA FUNNY (2023)
Due to the excitement of HBO's series Succession going into its final season, Kinda Funny wanted to do 2 podcast episodes around it. One for the premiere, one for the finale. Despite knowing this would be some of their least viewed content, having loved the iconic intro to the show so much, everyone was keen to give our take on it our full efforts.
I started off by cutting a version of the intro to Carter Harrell's (incredibly cool) jingle using shots from the actual opening to the show. I was then able to decide which shots I knew I could fill in using existing footage, and which to ask KF to recreate. Not expecting to get everything I wanted as it was an extremely busy time for everyone, I gave each shot an order of importance, some direction, and organized them by unique set ups. I was thrilled that they came back with everything. They fully committed.
As I was editing it, I felt like I wanted to go one step further and try to give unique backgrounds to the shots, match what was in the show as closely as possible. It required a lot of rotoscoping and masking footage in After Effects, and some weird trickery to get by, but I'm really happy with the results.
There was one shot though that they could not recreate, where it needed to take place years earlier in an apartment they no longer had access to. This especially took a lot more work than I was asked to do, but it was too much fun trying to push what I could pull off. For the short period it's on screen, and with the old VHS effects distorting it, I'm happy it turned out as well as it did.
This brought me back to when I would make silly videos with my friends as a kid. Goofing around shooting footage, and then seeing what we could turn it into.
Music by Carter Harrell,
