SameOldShawn: Probably my favorite one was the Ken Burns/50 Cent piece. I really loved that one
Eric Rosenthal, ItsTheReal: That was a lot of Photoshop.
SOS: I believe it! Can you talk a little bit about making that one?
Jeff Rosenthal, ItsTheReal: We were still living at home
ER: That was early
JR: Yeah. That was September 11th, 2007.
ER: Because that's when Kanye and 50 Cent released their albums on the same day. And the funny thing is that we always believed that any of these rappers who showed their full personality in good ways or bad...if you're true to yourself, I think people are going to support you because they want to invest fully in people, right? If I want to invest in you, you have to give me everything you have back. And I think Kanye is proof that that really works, because he's given his all, and people are like, yes, I'm gonna buy your album. I'm gonna buy your album, and I'm not gonna invest in 50 Cent, who's giving me a portrayal of what he might have been, and that's why Kanye sold more. But, in any event...
JR: Well, also, the songs were just better. But I remember that video being so much Photoshop. I remember us staying up so, so late. I think we came up with the idea sort of late in the week
ER: Probably
JR: Typical us
ER: And we would run around to all of our friends and be like, hey, can you play this? To our dad, hey dad, can you play a historian? This whole time, we worked with our best friend, Greg Mayo, who produced most of the tracks on our mixtape, but also did all of the music we would use that was original in ItsTheReal videos
JR: What was the song that we played in the background of that?
ER: We didn't -- Greg did all original stuff
JR: That's what I'm saying
ER: So we're like, let's sit down at the piano. We need something that sounds like this. Or we're like, Greg, we need some sad violins right here. We wanted to do everything in the vein of a real Ken Burns video. We wanted to have the Ken Burns zoom, we wanted to have pictures that were of the time, and we wanted to tell the story of Billboardsburg, of this fight between Kanye and 50. And the way we wrote it, the way we voiced it, it really turned out pretty great, and we were very proud of it. I mean, that was very early. That was a couple months in
JR: That was like our fourth or fifth video