Two students at Point Loma Nazarene University recently parlayed a school project into an Internet sensation by combining two of America’s obsessions – Frozen and Starbucks – into one catchy video.
The end result – a musical parody on the hit Disney movie’s “Do You Want To Build A Snowman?” song called “Do You Want To Go To Starbucks?”
The two-minute video shows a young, wistful student prancing around the library asking her friends to accompany her to the local coffee shop, using slightly modified lyrics but the same tune, and including a video sequence that pays homage to the movie’s storyline.
In just a few weeks, the students have been on local news, national news, and their video has been viewed nearly 1 million times.
“I’m completely amazed,” said junior Olivia Mowry, who filmed, directed, and edited the video along with a cameo appearance. “It literally hit me last night that hundreds of thousands of people have watched my video and enjoyed it enough to share it with their friends. I don’t think I’ve ever made anything with that much impact before.”
Mowry, along with senior Jene Johnson – who stars as the video’s lovable crooner – created the parody song for a campus project.
“Jene originally came up with the idea and posted lyrics on Facebook,” Mowry said.
Then the students were inspired to pair the lyrics to a video and enter it into a film festival contest hosted on the San Diego-based private campus. They filmed it in the span of two weeks, and it ended up winning the top prize at the festival.
They posted it on YouTube, and within a few days it had received more than 100,000 views, prompting the students to be interviewed by everyone from San Diego’s News Channel 8 to Goodmorning America.
Mowry and Johnson said they believe their success can be traced to the timing of the video’s release – finals – when many students can understand the call of Starbucks.
Mowry admits she didn’t like coffee while filming the video. Now she’s a fan.
“My cameo appearance in the video where I say ‘I don’t like coffee’ was totally true until after this video was made. Now, I love caramel Frappuccinos.”
The women have agreed to make a sequel if their video if it reaches one million views. As of Thursday night, it was at 913,000.
Watch the video:
College Fix contributor Samantha Watkins is a student at Point Loma Nazarene University.
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