On the International Day of Happiness, one University of West Georgia (UWG) student got the surprise of a lifetime. Sophomore Brandon La Sure said he was on the phone with a friend when he discovered that Pharrell Williams had selected his “UWG Happy” video to be featured on his website, 24hoursofhappiness.com.
Pharrell set up the website to feature his favorite fan-made videos that include his Grammy-nominated single, “Happy.” The single was originally featured on the Dispicable Me 2 soundtrack and later on Pharrell’s Girl album. Pharrell made history by creating the world’s first 24-hour music video to the single, which featured people from every time zone simply being happy. For the contest, the artist announced that he would also select a new video every hour by time zone to be posted to the site.
After hearing the song numerous times, La Sure decided to make his own video for “Happy.” When he was taking a break from work, he set out time to film people for 15-20 seconds at a time. Three days later, he had enough to edit together what we now know as “#HAPPYDAY: #UWG is Happy.”
La Sure said his mom showed everyone in the office his video and that is actually how he learned about the contest. He further explained that one of his mother’s patients had mentioned Pharrell was looking for “Happy” videos. From there, La Sure submitted the video without telling anyone that he had entered the contest. The next morning, he saw that his video had been selected.
The 19-year old explained that he was surprised when he saw his video on the screen.
“I was just clicking next,” said La Sure. “Then I saw my video. I was like ‘Pharrell picked my video!’ I didn’t even know I was going to go crazy like that.”
The video is posted on YouTube under the title “#HAPPYDAY: #UWG is Happy.” It was created through La Sure’s “Sean Louis Productions,” which is taken from his two middle names, Louis and Sean. He is also working on putting together another production team.
“I am actually going to come out with another thing pretty soon called Pairodox Pictures and the point of that is bringing different people together to create one project,” said La Sure.
Outside of his own projects, the student videographer said that he ultimately plans to work for Turner Broadcasting in the future. He also plans to continue to do freelance video on the side.
“It’s not going to hurt to do something on the side,” said La Sure. “I work on short films and stuff like that to advance myself. I might take a break from Turner for awhile to throw out a movie.”
La Sure also mentioned wanting to work on a movie that gets nominated. He added that the movie did not have to win the award and that just it being nominated was enough for him. Lastly, he joked about wanting to have a show on HBO for two seasons.
“I want it to have two seasons, get cancelled, then have the fans riot,” said La Sure. “Then when they finally say ‘hey, you can have your show back now,’ I will say ‘no I am not doing it.'”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTQ7Vs42Aqs]
