Rickroll Your Zooms

When everyone was all Zoom-fatigued out a few months into the pandemic, video calls became a bit of a snoozefest. We wanted to make Zoom calls fun again—and what better way to upgrade a meeting than having Rick Astley bust in with his trademark smoothness? 

How did Rick have time for this?

Our Creative Technologist sacrificed his personal Zoom account to make this magic happen. This meant changing his Zoom profile to Rick and setting up a ManyCam Virtual Camera with a looping clip of “Never Gonna Give You Up” as the media source. He switched his Zoom camera to ManyCam, so any meeting he joined immediately got Rickrolled to infinity by the man himself.

Here's how it worked: there was simple intake form on the website he set up that folks could drop their meeting invite links into. Those links were saved to a local database that our Creative Technologist, sorry, Rick, was monitoring. When Rick saw a new link come in, off he went to deliver happiness, smiles, and cybersecurity audits. Once rolling has been completed to Rick’s satisfaction (about 15 seconds) he’d check that meeting off the list and move on to the next one.

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He's Never Gonna Let You Down

But, unfortunately, Rick did eventually have to give up on rolling in Zooms. If you got to see Rick in one of your meetings, we hope it made you smile. If not, here's a quick recap of the fun:

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