Lil Dicky is coming by the edit suite (your hotel room)

It was 2017 and the Ball Brother’s were all over ESPN.  You couldn’t tune into ESPN without hearing LaVar Ball say something crazy about one of his phenom son’s or his own assertion that he was better than Jordan.  At the say time a white jewish rapper named Lil’ Dicky (Dave Burd) was making a ton of noise on the internet with his viral hit “Ex-Boyfriend” and was about to drop his first album “Professional Rapper.”  It was a perfect collaboration of two very different personalities.

I got a call from the Feature Producer at ESPN to ask if I could setup a system in the JW Marriot at LA Live and turnaround a feature edit in 48 hours.  The concept was incredibly clever “The Truth About the Ball Brothers’ Unknown Sibling Lil Dicky”.  I was excited for the opportunity.  It was going to be shot on the Arri Alexa, Lil Dicky and J Will were involved.  Let’s go!

I loaded in with a maxed out Mac Pro, calibrated display and reference monitors to push out an edit that would be creative, but also meet broadcast spec.  The edit went about as smooth as possible and we had a rough cut by the end of the first day.  The next morning Lil Dicky (Dave Burd) came by the room to watch the first cut.  The Feature Producer and I were confident with what we had, but Dave came in and elevated the entire thing.  His comedic sense was incredible.  He saw things and made suggestions that we never considered and after a few hours of working through it, we had a really solid edit and it was genuinely very funny.  The first version was sent out for review and after some minor revisions we delivered a final ProRes version to the truck ahead of schedule.

I remember watching it on the broadcast and then seeing the web version go up on the ESPN YouTube channel.  What a rush it was.  But then it completely blew up!  Within 24 hours it was the highest viewed video on the ESPN YouTube channel and the comments were flying in.  The video was a huge success for ESPN and Lil Dicky.  Today the video has over 12 million views and Dave Burd has gone on to huge success with his show Dave on FX.