(INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING)
LIZ TIGELAAR: We're here at Hulu today to screen
a couple scenes from the pilot Little Fires Everywhere.
ROY CONLI: This scientist works with some of the smallest animals
to save one of the biggest animals.
Today, DCappella is recording Eye to Eye from A Goofy Movie.
We're here at Hulu today to do something really cool.
We are going to screen a couple scenes
from the pilot Little Fires Everywhere for Celeste Ng.
And Celeste wrote the novel that our adaptation is based on,
and we're gonna get to see what she thinks.
The show is a one-hour drama
about a picture-perfect family, the Richardsons,
and what happens when this mother-daughter duo move into town
and kind of upend their lives.
I'm a bit late but we're hurrying and we're gonna see
if we can find Celeste.
-Hey! -Hi.
-This is the trailer. -You watching something?
(CHUCKLES) I know!
-It looks amazing. -It's your show!
-It's our show. -I know.
I know, it's incredible.
I actually can't stop looking at it.
I'm so excited to show you some of the pilot.
-I can't wait. -You wanna see it?
-Yes. -Okay, good. Let's go.
-A little thing about work... -"Hulugans at work"?
So, they call themselves "hulugans,"
they celebrate holidays like "Huluween."
There's a whole lingo here, it's very inside but it's fun.
This is where all the food is.
I feel like...
-maybe this is a good spot. -Middle?
Either here or here.
NG: Working with Liz was actually a real joy.
I feel like she came in and got the heart of the project.
She would come with ideas and say,
"We're thinking about the character, "so what's their background?"
And I'd tell her about what I had envisioned for the character,
she'd tell me what they thought,
and those two things dovetailed beautifully.
Okay, I'm super excited about this.
I know you haven't seen the finished product yet.
No, I haven't.
Hit it, Johnny.
(INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYING)
We loved having these headlines of Shaker Heights, like modern day utopia.
I love the props. That's a Shaker letter jacket.
I love this fortune cookie that's tumbling by on fire,
because readers will understand what it means in the story.
This is my first book that's been adapted,
so going into it, I wasn't sure what to expect.
And my friends who are also fiction writers were like, "Are you nervous?"
I really thought about it and the answer was no,
because I really trusted the team that we had.
TIGELAAR: We loved this scene from the book.
This culminating moment at the end of Act 4,
which is kind of building for the height of conflict.
When we shot it and cut it together,
we were like, "Are we really getting the full impact?"
(ORCHESTRA PLAYING)
-(WHISPERS) Why isn't she playing? -I don't know.
TIGELAAR: We were feeling like when we watched the first incarnation of the cut,
it wasn't landing as well.
You didn't feel what "not a puppet" was really about.
So we actually went back and did some reshoots to earn it.
What we first did was we added a scene before this
where Elena comes into Izzy's room and Izzy's getting ready to go to the concert.
What are you wearing?
I'm gonna button it.
No, just no. Where's the dress that I bought you last week?
-Mom, please stop. It's not me. -Here, put this on.
Put on the dress and brush what's left of your hair.
TIGELAAR: We had this idea where you felt like you could flashback
inside Izzy's memory and her head,
and so that's kind of the sequence we're building here.
We're gonna see Izzy,
-a little bit of her back story. -Yeah.
So you're seeing her pain in the bathroom.
The music starts, Izzy doesn't play.
Wait, what is she doing?
TIGELAAR: Elena's not sure what's going on.
And then we go back to her taking off this outfit that she worked so hard on
and put on this dress that we saw Elena hand to her in an earlier scene.
She's taking out a Sharpie.
TIGELAAR: By having her do this, we're keeping the story alive in a way
that it wasn't before.
-(WHISPERS) Why isn't she playing? -I don't know.
TIGELAAR: Finally, now she looks and we understand
where this "not your puppet" comes from, 'cause now we've seen the whole story.
I'm thrilled with the job you guys did.
I feel you took the book and took it two degrees
and you made it into something new.
And it's the analogy I keep saying.
I told you before, it's like a cover song.
You don't want a cover that's exactly the same as the old one.
You wanna hear the melody that you love,
you wanna hear all the things that touch you,
but you still want it to be something new.
And I feel like that's what you all did
and I'm so grateful to you for that.
It makes me so happy.
I'm Roy Conli, and I'm a five-year veteran of Disneynature.
I am here in Orlando today to talk with a scientist
who works with some of the smallest animals on Earth
that may just save one of the biggest animals on Earth.
JOSEPH SOLTIS: As it happened, I came here to study elephant vocal communication.
We learn a lot about wildlife here,
which can be used for managing animals in the wild.
We learn from the wild how to care for animals here.
I think it can be a mutually beneficial
-relationship going forward. -Right.
We use our labor and expertise to go into the field
and help on-the-ground conservation as well.
So we send our Cast Members to places like Kenya
to do conservation work.
I was lucky enough a couple years in to join the Elephants and Bees Project,
which was started by Lucy King in Kenya.
We are partnered with Disney.
They've been instrumental in joining our team.
They've helped us do detailed research, not only in Disney's Animal Kingdom,
but out in Kenya as well.
The elephants in Kenya roam free, and they come across small farms.
And we're trying to stop elephants from breaking into small-scale farmland.
SOLTIS: With help from Disney,
Save the Elephants started building beehive fences
around these local farmers' crops.
KING: We're using this discovery that elephants are scared of bees
to keep elephants out of the farms.
Right there within sight is one of the farms with beehive fences?
That's Jennifer's farm with the beehive fence.
ZAK GEZON: It's about the bees.
My entire Ph.D. is about bees, and bees are truly my passion.
When I went down there most recently,
we started the experiments and we got them going.
They build them and put them in the farms,
and then hope that wild bees show up and make use of them.
-How does a bee bother an elephant? -It is kinda crazy, right?
Who would think elephants are afraid of bees?
There were these trees the elephants visited.
They're big fellas, so they've destroyed almost all the trees.
Except for a few.
Conservationists were like, "Okay, what's up with that?"
Some of these trees are safe. The Samburu tribesmen said,
"There's beehives in those trees, and elephants are afraid of bees."
Well, if elephants really are afraid of bees,
then maybe, just maybe,
we could use them as a natural deterrent.
This is the fruition of all the research
that Disney and Save the Elephants did.
Lucy King, through a trial and error process built these beehive fences.
It's a man-made beehive, and they're colonized by wild bees.
KING: Having these interlinked all the way around the farm
really has a deterrent effect.
And what happens is if an elephant tries to approach the farm from outside,
pushing into the farm,
it actually causes all the beehives to swing.
And it releases the bees, makes the elephants run away.
The beehive fences are relatively cheap to build,
but they're also incredibly easy to maintain.
The farmers are managing their own deterrent system.
All they have to do is keep the post upright,
keep the beehive hung nicely and look after the beehive.
When I heard about the elephants and the bees,
I thought, "You're missing a piece of the story."
That's that you have bees next to farms.
And so, we went there, we did a study and we found that
significantly more pollen is being moved around
in the farms with beehive fences than without.
SOLTIS: So, it's pretty awesome. The bees deter elephants, they get honey.
And now we're looking in to see if we can maximize their use
-to increase the crops. -Crop flow.
SOLTIS: It all comes back to making life easier for the farmers.
And at the same time co-existing with these big elephants
-that are around. -Protecting elephants.
I'm so proud of the conservation efforts that we're involved in.
Sustainability is such an important part of the world today
and what we need to be paying attention to.
(ALL VOCALIZING)
(BEATBOXING)
(VOCALIZING CONTINUES)
(SINGING)
-We'll go from the top. -Cool.
-MAN: We'll do that. -Okay.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER)
-Hey. Good morning. -Good morning.
-Who do I get first? -Both.
ALL: Aw!
DEKE SHARON: So, today we're recording Eye to Eye from A Goofy Movie.
It's a great pop tune. It's kinda that throwback mid-'90s boyband vibe,
and it's the 25th anniversary of A Goofy Movie.
So the structure of DCappella is unlike your typical a cappella group.
Most of the groups you think of are four or five voices that are very similar.
The concept behind DCappella is the opposite.
Let's get people who are all rock stars, incredible singers in their own right,
and bring together seven very different voices and personalities.
And we'll have a super group
that's capable of singing in tons of different styles.
DCappella kind of formed through a big audition process.
There was a lot of callbacks and stuff,
but it happened very quickly.
We were all sitting in a circle, ready to do the last round of callbacks
and they ended up telling us that we were in the group.
Then we're like, "Oh. Okay."
An hour later, they handed us a binder of music,
and they were like, "We're gonna record an album."
And we're like, "Huh? What?"
KEENE: We've gotten so close really quickly. We had to.
You know, we recorded an album two hours after meeting each other.
DANI MARKMAN: Okay, so I'm playing back the video from Monday...
-Okay. -...of Eye to Eye.
ANTONIO FERNANDEZ: Awesome. Perfect.
MARKMAN: Would you do it? FERNANDEZ: Here we go.
I have a muffin in my mouth.
-MAN: One, two... One, two, three, four. -(MARKMAN LAUGHS)
(ALL VOCALIZING)
MAN: Hey.
KALEN KELLY: Eye to Eye was really special for me. I love A Goofy Movie.
The music is incredible. A great soundtrack.
(ALL SINGING)
(LAUGHTER)
MARKMAN: Kind of like that.
(MARKMAN LAUGHS)
I'm sorry!
RJ WOESSNER: We've only been working on Eye to Eye for a few days, honestly.
Most of what we do is learning our individual parts on our own.
When we come together, boom. You have to know your part.
Going into the key change, it'd be really cool
if the girls did a synchronized riff into that key change.
I think it would help us get the key change.
It would build better into the change.
-ALL: Yeah. -It would be a nice build.
JOE SANTONI: So, the process behind creating a song,
especially doing an a cappella, is one piece at a time.
Being the bass, I'm part of the rhythm section with Antonio.
Antonio holds down the beats, and I'm the bass that aids him,
to round out the bottom and to give all of our DCappella songs
kind of that big bass-y hit that you want.
(SANTONI VOCALIZING)
(BEATBOXING)
FERNANDEZ: For Eye to Eye, that drum beat is actually very particular.
It's not... (BEATBOXING)
It's this whole, like, syncopated drum pad type of thing.
I'm trying to literally be a sequencer.
A machine which is... (BEATBOXING)
(VOCALIZING)
KELLY DENISE TAYLOR: I'm the alto in DCappella.
The lowest part for the 3-part female stack.
And I'm the newest member, yeah.
It's been a couple days so far. (LAUGHS)
A lot of this has been very, like, "Go, go, go, go."
Today, we came in, we bash it out, we go note by note by note,
and we're like, "Cool." And then we go and record it,
change things around, like... It's an all-day process for just one song.
I wanna hear what Orlando's gonna do.
He makes really good choices
on embellishing and ornamenting the melody.
Play it back. Play it back.
(SINGING)
-Ooh ,okay, I like that. -Yeah.
Dope.
(BOTH SINGING)
-Oh. Okay. -Yeah.
KELLY: Seeing this all come to fruition and how we've been able to take this song,
put our own spin on it, being able to do all this stuff
with a song that means so much to me is really, really cool.
WOESSNER: We are the ambassadors of the Disney Songbooks
from 100 years ago up till now.
And we get to reimagine them in an all a cappella, all vocal way.
And that is an amazing thing.
And being able to do it with Disney is a dream.
(SINGING)
(ALL VOCALIZING)
(SINGING)
(ALL SINGING AND VOCALIZING)
-Dope. -(ALL CHEER)
-Yeah, that's it. -That's how you do it.
(PLAYS END NOTE)