Make your own comedy video as a family!
We just returned from a wonderful family reunion week in St. George Utah. My parents spoiled us with renting a huge house– seriously, 10 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms and two pools! All 35 people in our family were able to be there and it was awesome.
My mom split all of the grandkids into age groups– the Teens, Tweens and Terrifics– and assigned the parents a day and age group to plan an activity or field trip. One day my brother took the teens on a rappelling tour- they said it was the best day ever! A sister took the Tweens to visit a historical pioneer site and dinosaur tracks. We combined activities and went hiking in Snow Canyon State Park one day. We had water fights and pool time, visited parks and played games.
As I was preparing for the reunion the idea came to me to have the Teens make their own sketch comedy movie in the style of Studio C (from BYUtv). My 13 year old was skeptical while I was pitching the idea to him, but once we were at the reunion all of the teens were excited and so involved.
I took a bag of props and costumes and a list of brainstormed scenarios to spark their creativity, gave them a notebook and markers to write ideas with, and with just a little bit of direction they took over and came up with three different sketches. All of the teens were involved, laughing, and having a great time.
Superman and I video’d them when they were ready to film. We just used our family’s video camera with an external microphone and our smartphones to capture the different scenes. We loved all of their creative ideas and their awesome and sometimes awkward and silly acting. It just added to the comedy.
Brainstorming and filming the scenes took up the whole afternoon, but everyone had a blast and kept on laughing. They had several more ideas, including making commercials for ridiculous made up products, but we ran out of time. And my 13 year old that had been rolling his eyes? He LOVED it and took charge of directing and came up with so many great ideas. Success!
The next day while everyone was playing in the pool and teaching each other how to do flips off the side and the baby was napping I edited their videos together– I added titles, music and sound clips, added in a few clips of the cousins dancing or playing in the pool, and stitched the sketches into a full “Episode.” We use Corel VideoStudio for video editing. It’s fairly new to me, and although it’s pretty user friendly there is a learning curve to it that I’m still working on… As I was working the Teens would walk by and watch over my shoulder and laugh and say they were so excited to show it off to the whole family. We decided to name it Studio T (for the family surname). Even though I rushed through the editing I was still super happy with the final results.
We met together as the whole family that night and put the video up on the big screen. Everyone laughed and loved it! It was definitely a highlight of the reunion, and it’s something we can keep and watch again to remember these fun times together.
Here is our first episode of Studio T– hope you enjoy it and laugh! We included a few family inside jokes which just made it more personal and funny.
So, if you have a family reunion or even an activity with teens or youth groups, making your own sketch comedy videos should be added to your must-do list! We’re already looking forward to Episode 2!
