The force is strong with the Hillbrook faculty. Inspired by the Jimmy Fallon & the Roots, faculty and staff at Hillbrook School sang along with their favorite Star Wars tunes. First, enjoy the video, then stick around for the backstory.

Why Make a Star Wars Sing Along?

Our Talent Show is long. The faculty act is the last act. This video lets us have zero setup (the previous year’s Taylor Swift cover with toy instruments took a while to set up), and this video can be shared later if the Talent Show runs long and we need to cut an act. Oh yeah, and we can share it with thousands of people later.

Arrangement

The first step was deciding what our faculty/staff act would be. We decided to copy the Jimmy Fallon & the Roots version, but cut out the Cantina sequence (for time, not because of the “who shot first” controversy (Han did)).

Sing Along & Record Audio

Emily Hendricks, our Tech Support Specialist, booked time with each faculty member that volunteered. She recorded them in Logic Pro X, asking each person to sing along with the Jimmy Fallon recording. For each track, Emily auto tuned and auto timed the vocal so that the pitch and timing lined up. Finally, she muted the original Fallon track, so you only heard the Hillbrook recordings. Pretty simple, and pretty rad. Audio? Check.

“Sing Along” to Record Video

The second step was to get some video. I held up two phones: one phone played the original Fallon video, and the second recorded the “singer.” All faculty/staff needed to do was sing along to the original YouTube video. Note: aside from enjoying my share of quotes, I added those because people didn’t really sing when I was recording them. It should be duly noted (spoiler alert) that some of the people in the video didn’t sing at all. But alas, that’s the magic of video editing.

Sync and Edit

Now that we had an audio track and a bunch of video tracks, it was time to line ’em all up. I used Final Cut Pro X to line up all the video tracks to the audio track that Emily recorded, and used the original Fallon video as a template (sort of) for the layout of the 9 video tracks. Final Cut is great for complicated things like this; here’s a quick tutorial of how to get multiple video tracks on the canvas at once.

Share!

So that’s how we made this video. It felt fitting to finally write up a blog post for Star Wars Day one year after this epic video. Enjoy, and May the Fourth Be With You.