Geek(s) of the Week: Nick Murphy, Michael Sadorf & Dominic Moschitti of Zelda ’87, Indie God of War

You have probably seen the Legend of Zelda 1987 movie trailer or the God of War Indie Movie Trailer on YouTube. But did you know that these were both created by a bunch of Philly guys?

Nick Murphy, Michael Sadorf and Dominic Moschitti are the gentlemen behind these and other YouTube masterpieces and they all call the Philly area home. I recently had the chance to talk to them about the making of their videos and their creative process.

Who came up with the idea of doing video game trailers in the form of movie coming attractions?

Michael: There was a guy we work with that came up with the idea for Inglorious Plumbers, which is Super Mario Brothers and Quentin Tarantino. But they weren’t really sure how to execute that. They kind of just wrote the idea down.

Dominic: That was just a straight up parody too. He wrote the idea down, wrote out the script with a couple of our other friends and we shot it and people liked that one a lot. It was on the YouTube front page which was really cool for us. And then our buddy Luke said what if God of War was like a Wes Anderson film, like an indie film and so they got together and…

Mike: About like a dozen of us worked on that one total. And we kind of kept pouring in. And in between these projects we had worked on other projects and we kept on marrying (ideas). Video games being the X and the Y was either a coming attraction trailer or a retro commercial or whatever. We just kept on superimposing an idea on top of another and people love the media mash-up. People just love when those two ideas come together. They just geek out over seeing references to all their favorite things in one big happy goulash.

Dominic: It’s just really cool because instead of just a straight up parody we can take a number of things that people like, lay them over something else people like and then grab both of those demographics and put them together.

Nick: And we wind up making something new that nobody really expected could go together and it’s this nice little mixed media package that we deliver to them.

You played homage to a ton of 80’s movies in the trailer, even The Karate Kid! Did anyone keep count of exactly how many?

Nick: Before we even started we had an idea which movies we wanted to do and which scenes we wanted to do. So before hand I cut together a version of the trailer without our actors, just footage from the movies and how we wanted our trailer to go. We used that kind of as our animatic almost like a moving storyboard of our version of the trailer.

Dominic: We had Breakfast Club…

Nick: Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller, Karate Kid. Say Anything was a big one on there.

Dominic: One that got cut was Fast Times at Ridgemnont High…

Nick: We wanted to have her coming out of the pool. The scene got cut for a number of reasons, but that was cool. We made reference to the television series The Legend of Zelda, which aired in the 90’s, I guess.

Are the videos filmed around the Philly area?

Nick: Yeah, a lot of us are based out of Bucks County. I live in South Philadelphia and we shoot in Bucks County.

Dominic: A lot was shot in Doylestown and we shot the library scenes at Bucks County Community College.

Nick: Which we can’t thank enough for a million reasons…

Mike: They were really awesome to let us shoot there. A lot of the extras we got for the prom scene, they’re students at Bucks, they’re film students, they were so passionate about it.