A month later, Krupnick and Marsen were on the early-morning Staten Island Ferry, along with two other dancers and Krupnick’s wife, carrying boomboxes and cameras and ducking security guards, shooting guerrilla-style test footage for “Girl Walk//All Day,” which Krupnick describes as “an epic, 71-minute-long dance-music video” in which Marsen will dance her way through the entire Girl Talk album and up the island of Manhattan. By the end of the day’s shoot, they had eight solid minutes, which Krupnick cut together and tossed up on Vimeo as a kind of trailer for the full movie, to see if anyone noticed. The first day, 11 people watched. On Day 2, six did. Then on Jan. 12, Gothamist posted the video, and an hour later it appeared on The Huffington Post home page. By day’s end, more than 17,000 people had seen it. On Jan. 28, Krupnick put up a donation page on Kickstarter, hoping to raise $4,800 from strangers to help him and his collaborators make and distribute the complete video. They gave themselves 45 days to meet their financing goal. It took six. By Valentine’s Day, they raised $12,000, and the trailer had been seen almost 60,000 times.
Girl Walk / All
Girl Walk // All Day from jacob krupnick on Vimeo.
And now for the most interesting part (something the agency T-Mobile uses could learn from):
It is no surprise that people go nuts for the trailer. It is weird and joyous, popping with youth and energy. At first, Marsen looks more like an enthusiastic and slightly dorky amateur than a trained dance pro. She wears regular tennis shoes and worn gray cords and an oversize, multicolored jacket, and at one point she falls off the railing of an escalator. It’s not until a minute or so in, as she twirls and gyrates through the ferry’s upper level, staring down the camera with a sly smile on her face as sleepy commuters pretend not to notice, that you start to suspect that you’re watching something more than a little magical.
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