D.R.E.W runs 1:50, credited to an anonymous writer and released on Spotify as Drew S.I. The song came first and the film was built on it. This page is how the song became the 26 shots of the film, and how to do the same with your own track.
Read the song's map
Every line of the lyric has a start and end time (here, read off the film's own subtitles). Lay them out and the structure is plain:
| Part | Time | Lines |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | 0:00 to 0:05.5 | none |
| Hook | 0:05.5 to 0:16.5 | 3 |
| Verse 1 | 0:16.75 to 0:49 | 12 |
| Hook | 0:49 to 1:00 | 3 |
| Verse 2 | 1:00.25 to 1:27 | 10 |
| Hook | 1:27 to 1:38 | 3 |
| Outro | 1:38 to 1:49.5 | none |
31 lines in all, most of them about 2.5 seconds long. The hook is one fact said twice ("Moon on my neck, now the chart match it") around a second line ("Wore it 'fore it moved, now they all asking"), and it comes back three times.
One line, one shot
The record's rule: each lyric line gets one shot, and each shot is one of two kinds.
- Performance. He raps the line to camera. Eyes on the lens, hands talking, head nodding on the beat. These need lip sync.
- B-roll. The world the line is about, with him in it or not: the penthouse, the garage, the car, the roof. No lip sync; he doesn't look at the camera.
Let the line pick the picture. What the film put under its lines (checked against the film):
| Time | Line | Shot |
|---|---|---|
| 0:05.5 | Moon on my neck, now the chart match it | performance: the penthouse, green charts behind him |
| 0:19.25 | Funny how the chart started looking like what's on my neck | b-roll: macro of the pendant |
| 0:22 | Blue loc, silver cuff, I don't do two | b-roll: macro of the cuff on the blue loc |
| 0:32.75 | I don't do interviews, the chart do the talking | performance: the garage, cars behind him |
| 0:41 | S.I., not A.I., and I ain't here to discuss it | b-roll: macro of the watch |
| 0:46.25 | I'm up at four with the moon on, I ain't gotta post, it's known | b-roll: the terrace, the robe, a full moon |
| 1:11 | Orange when I want it loud, silver when I'm low key | b-roll: the silver car on a wet street |
| 1:13.75 | Claudia only ride the orange one 'cause it match her hair and tee | b-roll: her in the passenger seat |
| 1:19 | Now they want the entry like I'm handing out keys | b-roll: the orange car, doors up, a crowd behind ropes |
| 1:27 | Moon on my neck, now the chart match it | performance: the roof, his name in bulbs behind him |
The pattern: the hooks are performance, rapped to camera, in a different place each time (penthouse, hotel lobby, the car, the roof). The verses are mostly b-roll, and the b-roll is literal: a line that names a thing gets a close-up of that thing.
The finished cut has 26 shots for 31 lines, so in the end some shots carry more than one line. Write the list one line per shot anyway; merging is easy in the edit, inventing a shot late is not.
The shot list
One row per line. The columns that matter:
| Column | Example |
|---|---|
| Time | 0:32.75 to 0:35.5 |
| Line | I don't do interviews, the chart do the talking |
| Kind | performance |
| Place | the garage, the cars behind him |
| References | his face sheet, the garage, the coat |
| What he does | raps to the lens, hands talking |
| Prompt | the performance recipe with the line in quotes |
Write the whole list before spending anything. Read it top to bottom with the song playing.
Timing the lip-sync pieces
Seedance can't lip sync to a song, so each rapped clip is made silent and then synced to the real song with Sync Lip Sync 3. That needs the song cut to the clip's slot. The film's rapped shots use 7-second pieces. To cut one:
- Find the first line's start time and step back half a second, so the clip can start still before the first word.
- Add whole lines until the piece fills the clip. End it in the gap after the last whole line.
- Write the exact words of those lines, in quotes, into the prompt, so his mouth moves the right way before the sync pass.
- Run the finished clip and the piece through the sync pass. See Moving shots.
Why the song isn't the Seedance audio reference
The first try gave Seedance the song as an audio reference. It kept the beat but dropped the vocal and rapped its own words about 3 seconds late. So the film's clips carry no sound, the lips come from the sync pass, and the real song goes back over the cut. claudia.gallery found a different route for her songs, giving Seedance the vocal stem alone (Lip sync from the song's own vocal). Drew's film did not try that.
Writing your own lines for him
If you write the song too, write it the way he talks (see the character): short plain lines, flexes stated as facts, concrete things that can be filmed. A line that names a thing (a pendant, a sign, four cars on P3) gives you a shot for free. A line about a feeling gives you nothing to point the camera at.