“No way.”
That was Richmond resident Albert Leung’s reaction when he woke up with more views on his newest video project than he had ever seen on his entire YouTube channel.
A parody trailer of Marvel’s newest film Spiderman: No Way Home had hit more than a million views in less than four days on YouTube – and it cost less than $40.
Leung, the creative director of Richmond-based Apic Productions, said he and his two business partners thought “10,000 views would’ve been nice” to see when they first uploaded the video on the social media platform.
“We were expecting a little bit better than our camera tutorials, which on average are about a couple thousand views,” said the Steveston-London alumnus.
“The first day it was pretty good at 20,000 when I went to sleep, and the next day … we saw (the video) was at 400,000 views and I thought ‘there’s no way’.”
The views, while “mesmerizing” in the beginning, gave Apic Productions motivation.
“I’m really grateful that people understand it’s not just something we put together in two seconds and they enjoy the video. It’s a huge motivation for us to make something similar and give people a moment to laugh and even learn something as well,” said Leung.
According to Leung, the film team also gave themselves a challenge, to make the video with the least amount of props and money spent as they could – the aforementioned $38.84 to be exact.
The money was used for the Spiderman costume, but the challenge was not about the budget. Rather, it was the angles of how the video was filmed to achieve “a similar effect to the real Marvel trailer.”
Gymnastics and wall-climbing were not skills Leung and the rest of his team had on their resume so they had to work with their creativity and camera knowledge.
“Getting creative to match the shots without doing what they do was challenging. I can’t do a backflip and climb walls so we had to position the cameras to make it look like I was actually doing those things,” said Leung.
He added that they had to work around many people’s schedules, including school and employment, not to mention this fall’s horrible weather.
The video was filmed and created mostly in Richmond, which included indoors and at local playgrounds.
When asked why Apic Productions chose Spiderman as their project topic, Leung said they are huge Marvel fans.
“I’m the biggest Ironman fan, but Ironman isn’t around anymore so Spiderman it is. Also, the movie release is just around the corner so we jumped on it.
Marvel’s Spiderman: No Way Home is set to hit theatres on Dec. 16.
