Fruit Ninja: Taking Someone Else's Idea Done Right

It is very difficult to come up with a novel idea that becomes successful. For every successful channel such as Freddiew and FinalCutKing, there are thousands of imitators who attempt to emulate their traits with little success. One of the most popular and imitated videos on Youtube is FinalCutKing's "I am Fruit Ninja" with over sixty video responses. Our team wanted to take advantage of the popularity of the video and game without looking like another cheap carbon copy.  The video ended up being the most liked, viewed and commented video response by far. How did we do it? The first thing we did was study all the differences we could find between the original video and the video responses. Such differences included camera placement, background, presentation, acting, pacing and seemingly trivial details such as size and color of the fonts.  The next step was to figure out how we could make it better. First, we realized that all the backgrounds were either black, a hastily photoshopped image or took place in someone's living room. We set to find a background that could pass as a place in which a Ninja would train. More importantly we noticed that not a single video out of all the video responses had martial arts, which is one of the most known characteristics of the ninja! Luckily for us, we had martial artists in our team. Good things can happen from taking someone's idea, but only if you put the effort in to contribute your share and make it better. After all, it's not just the idea that brings success, it's the execution. I'm certain we all know plenty of people who could learn this.