Key & Peele - Obama: The College Years
Shooting this sketch was a ton of fun. Our art department put together a fully furnished period-accurate late ’70s / early ’80s dorm room, and we had a bunch of great background actors in period clothing who all had a backstory that we’d made up for them. We had some scripted lines we wanted to hit, but I also spent a lot of time letting Jordan just play and improv lines in the scene, and to make it feel as authentic as possible I walked around shooting everything on an early ’80s Magnavox Newvicon camcorder that our DP had rigged to record to a hard drive. There’s a bunch of extra footage that I really love, but we didn’t use it because we were tight on time and didn’t want the sketch to drag, so at some point I’ll definitely put out a longer director’s cut of this one. A small piece of trivia: because of the drug / sex references in the sketch, Occidental College wouldn’t let us use their name, so the sweatshirts in the piece are from “Accidental College.”
