Hand on heart, we get bored. Despite having a house full of toys, games, books and several TV streaming services, on occasion getting outside and doing something silly is the best antidote to being fed up with everything you have.
Today was one such day, so we decided to reshoot my favourite scene from Monty Python & The Holy Grail. Well, the most suitable scene for children anyway. I opted against doing the Grail Shaped Beacon scene. The great thing about the Holy Grail is the whole film was made for under £250,000, which even in 1975 didn’t amount to a whole hill of beans.
Swamp Castle with kids from daddacool on Vimeo.
If you’re interested in the original clip, it looks like this. The kids love creating stuff, and with something like Premiere Elements 15 being affordable and dead easy to use (you can even do green screen/chromakey with it relatively easily), you can knock up something like this 37 minute masterpiece in an afternoon.
We started off by watching the scene endlessly on Youtube (woe betide you if you try to upload anything with even a snifter of copyrighted material in it but somehow there is tons of stuff already up there- go figure) to get an idea of how the scene worked. The kids found the visual humour great, and said it would be best if Ned played Lancelot as he’s the smallest so it would add to the fun.
We then set about shooting it on my smartphone, a Huawei P9, making sure we shot everything twice and for twice as long as we needed, with a couple of run throughs first, just to be sure.
When it came to editing, the clever part I’m proud of involved downloading the clip from Youtube using one of those online sites that let you download Youtube clips. We put the clip in Premiere Elements, separated the audio and video, and went about cutting the Python’s video at the same places the shots cut in the original. That way we could line up where our replacement footage should go. We deleted the audio from our clips so it fitted in with the Python original.
Once we’d got our footage over the top of the original, we could simply delete the original footage, leaving our video synced up with the original audio track.
That makes it sound more complicated than it actually was but we’re all over the moon with the final result!