Ultimate Bowling

Created: 11 June 2016

The story is right there in the first two seconds, albeit cut short a bit.

At the time of filming everyone was just getting into Summer vacation. We’d all been talking on our Discord daily, but hadn’t seen each other in person for a while, so I knew that this explosion of memes had to be caught on film. Every second I wasn’t taking my turn to bowl I was recording, and I was so happy with what I was getting.

For the record, Overwatch had been out for a week or two and that’s why no one shuts up about it the whole time. Plus I was the only one who didn’t have the game, so I’m definitely not salty about that! Also for the record, I effortlessly obliterated everyone and won that game super hard, despite rarely bowling. SO there.

I’m still not sure if it was a good decision to include the jazz music. I wanted to make sure there was something to give coherence to this destructured mess, but I still worry that it might conflict with the terrible bowling alley audio, because the bowling alley was playing music, and at points my friends were playing their own music too (vaporwave of course because of course).

About the intro. As soon as I saw Luis (that’s the vape nation guy) pull that ridiculous gutter ball, I knew it was the highlight of the evening. I really have to thank him for perfectly pacing out his movements to deliver the punchline. It’s beautiful. But I deliberated about how to incorporate it into the video. The “To Be Continued” meme was still around at the time, but cooling off for sure. So I decided to double down, and use an actual dead meme, “MLG Parodies”. So then I decided to triple down, and use the hottest, freshest meme on the block, “Play of the Game”, which had only been around for a week or two (guess why). Overall, a magical trifecta of now-dead memes, connected perfectly by a timeless dab.

Interesting notes:

I had the video 100% done and rendered 2 weeks before I uploaded it on 27 July, because I finished editing it while on my month-long Summer trip to the U.S., and I wanted to post it as soon as I got back to Belgium.

Portal pt. 1 (FINAL)

Created: 12 May 2016

Originally titled: T O O L  A S S I S T E D

Well, I watched a tool-assisted speedrun of Portal, and suddenly had the idea to present it as a straightforward Let’s Play. Simple enough.

Which is why I guess I felt the need to add another layer of irony to this cake. So I presented it as a Let’s Play from 2007. It might go over some people’s heads when they watch the video, I didn’t actually do a good job communicating it, but I think the description sells it.

Please read description bellow =)
And spoilers a little bellow.
________________________________

Hello and thank you for clicking this link.

If you found this video, maybe you already know what Portal is.
For those that don’t know… where have you been?

This is overall a quick video I decided to make because of Portal is made from pure awesome awesomeness.

I’ll
try not to tell you the plot, since it’s better a person experience
slowly by watching this video or just play by themselves.

What I can do, however, is to explain WHAT kind of game is it:
Basically, it’s a puzzle game with portals (wait, ain’t the name of the game Portal?)
It
haves a nice learning curve. For me, since I pasted this game and know
the puzzles, it ain’t hard at all now (if I play slowly and actually
listen and re-live things slowly, the game is quick… 1 hour long).
Still, the first time, without a single clue… it took me 4 hours.

But now since you read all of this (hopes, probably not fulfilled), I’ll keep you in mind with a few rules:
–
This ain’t about skill, I didn’t made this to show off my skills
because if I did, I would cut most of the plot and that ain’t fun for no
one… Valve wasted time making a great game and story, passing it like
it was nothing and complain that the game is short ain’t my style.
– Do not reveal major plot on the comment section.
– Don’t forget to rate 5 stars and well, if you have nothing nice to say… you know the rest.
– Have fun and thank you for watching this video.

Unfortunately, I’m not great at commentary. Once I ran out of stuff to say (about a minute and thirty seconds in) I tried to pad it out, but quickly gave up and decided to stick a very unnecessary and jarring montage in. I think my idea was to showcase all the crazy bullcrap that happens in a tool-assisted speedrun, without having to come up with stuff to say about it. I really should have just hard cut through a few highlights and passed it off in my commentary as an “editing glitch” or something. It’s a shame, because I think the ending is very strong even though I improv’d it about a month after everything else in the video.

I capped it all off with a classic line that I will never let people forget they thought was funny.

Interesting note: I was originally going to overlay other tool-assisted speedruns during the montage, like this one, but it was a heckin’ mess.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9gxFkOz2_4

Statistically Comparing Grocery Store Prices

Created: 29 March 2016

Wait? An actual educational video? Okay.

Since this project was the final exam for an AP class, I decided to take it seriously. It helped that I’d been marathoning Superbunnyhop videos, so I was in the mindset to make some wholesome educational content. You can actually hear a lot of George’s intonation in my voice in this video.

In truth, I barely remember what I’m talking about in this script, and I absolutely wouldn’t expect anyone who’s not versed in Statistical terminology to follow it. It was intended exclusively for my teacher.

Of course, I couldn’t leave all nerd-dom out of a video, so what you’re
hearing is the gorgeous Nichijou OST, which I think in conjunction with
my paced delivery and slow-fading text makes for a very relaxing video. I figured if I couldn’t rush through the topic at lightspeed, I might as well slow it down to a nice stroll.

Here’s a couple assets I guess:

image
image

And here’s some timeline porn I guess:

image

Interesting Notes:

Don’t take an online Statistics class.

90 to 5 Challenge AD

Created: 17 March 2016

Our French IV class had an assignment where we had to research a contest we’d personally like to participate in, and create a written advertisement for it. So I found this awesome thing called the 90 to 5 Challenge, where video editors are tasked with cutting down a feature length film into 5 minutes.

So naturally I had to make play along and make my ad a video. I even tasked myself with keeping it under 30 seconds to keep in line with the spirit of the contest. I was under some time pressure, and when I’m under time pressure on a creative project, what do I do? I turn to my favorite media for a crutch inspiration. That’s how you end up with a video featuring 2001: A Space Odyssey footage, set to the Evangelion OST.

I hope to someday participate in this contest, and it might be worth it to rejigger this ad with English text (and perhaps a different song and different footage to avoid copyright problems? seriously IDK).

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWSYBWmrB9w

Huey Lewis and the Snake Eaters

Created: 14 February 2016

Snake Eater is baaad for mashups. Did you know?

This was a continuation of my plan to set up for Spook Eater, and nothing more! I made it in less than an hour, the same day I posted it. Ha. I’m a genius.

Suicide Squad Anime OP #1

Created: 23 January 2016

Funnily enough, this one was inspired by a tumblr post on this very blog! I was so excited by this Star Wars OP…

…that I had to do one of my own. I stayed up and completed this at 1:00 AM the next night, and immediately uploaded it without spending much time to mull it over. Unfortunately a lot of the trailer footage I used was needlessly low quality, and I feel it detracts somewhat.

I still really like it! Especially the credits from 0:30 onward. All the credits were painstakingly translated to the end that a Japanese person wouldn’t find them too egregious. I even checked the films cast and staffing on wikipedia.jp.

Here’s some translations for you gaijins out there:

監督 = Directed by

出演者 = Actors

DCまんがの適応 = Adaptation of a DC manga

Other interesting notes:

  • There was a version using Renai Circulation instead of Groovin’ Magic.
  • There was a version which included an anime-style sponsorship roll.
  • I’m not done with Star Wars anime videos yet…

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Ca_E_-IVE

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WWzgGyAH6Y

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fis-9Zqu2Ro

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkdGn98rJ0g

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmRih_VtVAs

kidneyworld

Created: 28 September 2015

That’s right, I started this 3 months before it came out. It was intended from the start as a sequel to my Cologne videos, but an order of magnitude larger in scale.

My entire senior class was scheduled to take a day trip to Disneyland Paris, so I brought along my camera and recorded everything I could think to. I got probably 2-3 hours of footage, but the whole day I was thinking about how I could turn things into bits for the video. A lot of the video arose out of ideas or jokes we had while talking at the park (for instance, I was dared to do make that illuminati joke on the spot, which was before I could have known that you can’t really see the triangle on the cart, dangit).

But I didn’t tell anyone who stars in this video I was making it. I wanted to get it done quick and surprise them, but I quickly realized that would not be happening. It kept getting pushed back further and further until December rolled around and I had to buckle down and commit to finishing it as a Christmas surprise. I ended up working until Christmas Eve to get it done, and then it took all of Christmas morning to render.

As I mention in a comment on the Director’s Cut this version was trimmed significantly in an attempt to make it watchable by someone who doesn’t want to hear my friends and I spout memes (and doesn’t want to watch us meander down a street from the corpse of a broken ride for 10 minutes).

kidneyworld (director’s cut)

Created: 28 September 2016

What do you do when you feel the need to artistically compromise your work in order to appeal to viewers, and avoid inconveniencing them? Easy! Create two versions of your work to ensure that neither stands as the definitive one!

I kid. It was an easy decision to split this up because I knew the exact scenes that were giving the video such a long run-time, and they could be cut without confusion. Not only that, but once I was sure that only my friends would end up watching it, I felt comfortable unmuting most of the footage. This was not my original intention, and you can tell by how often my sentences get cut off in this version.

Would you believe the peanut scene starting at 2:51 is a reference to a culture festival a month earlier where I ate a peanut butter cupcake and had a horrible allergic reaction? Well there’s coincidentally footage of that exact cupcake prior to the incident in that scene! You’d never know that unless you were there at the time!

Heart Eater (Christmas Snakes)

Created: 21 December 2015

I always feel tempted to start off these posts with, “here’s a weird one,” because all my projects are weird. This all started with the desire to create Snake Eater mashups. Obviously. But to do that, I had to put a lot of work into making my own assets (which I will go into in the Spook Eater post)

Anyway, I had those assets made, and I wanted to do something with them, so I thought of a genius plan. I would take out several birds with one stone: Making holiday content. Making use of those Snake Eater assets. And setting up for Spook Eater to come out next year (I was honestly thinking that far ahead).

I made the Heart Eater mashup in probably an hour. The image in the video was supposed to be the Soundcloud album art 
–I just slapped the same santa hat png I use for my avatar every December onto Snake– but the mashup got blocked on Soundcloud! So I just recycled it into an mp4, uploaded it to Youtube for the heck of it, and found it wasn’t blocked. Cool!

Better Educational Video

Created: 28 Oct 2015

Believe it or not, our Psychology class was assigned to write another narrative. I was instantly struck with giddiness. I knew I had to fashion a wretched continuity out of this senseless storyline. The words flowed from my fingertips without resistance that night.

I got an A on this one too.

Bram awoke, aware not of his situation, but of his burning desire for revenge. Were his brain not that of an 18-month-old baby, he would have been awash with humiliation. A defender of humanity such as him, reduced to an inept child in what might have been his finest hour.

None of these thoughts occurred to Bram of course, there was nothing but primitive vagueness inside his baseball-sized brain, jumbling around. All he was aware of, as he awoke, was his burning desire -no, lust- for revenge.

However, a headless humanoid hologram hovered close at hand, hankering to help like a happy high-minded handyman.

First, the alien-mom scientists requested a computerized scan of Bram’s infant mind, hoping to find a possible Unconditioned Stimulus to put to work. The hologram quickly identified Bram’s want of revenge, isolated it, and sent the data back for approval. The scientists, curious and frightened, reserved the go-ahead, thinking it would be quite unwise to use a hostage’s hatred to Classically Condition them.

So instead, the hologram calculated a more appropriate method to elicit an Unconditioned Response, and settled on letting Bram eat a cupcake. On the opposite end of the laboratory, an advanced 3D printer printed a delicious chocolate cupcake, and a gun. A mechanical arm carried both across the room to the examination table.

Sure enough, as the cupcake was dropped into Bram’s mouth, he smiled. That was more than enough evidence to continue, so they quickly had the Neutral Stimulus, the gun, placed in his right hand. This time, as they fed Bram a cupcake and he smiled, they also had him fire the gun. The pastry-induced smile lingered on his face as he shot at the impenetrable ceiling.

The first Trial was a success, so the scientists all nodded pleasantly, positive that after several thousand successive Trials they would soon have a baby that really liked shooting things. So they totally left him alone and said they’d check back on him later. Days past, unchanged…

Finally, when satisfied, the scientists returned to check on Bram, hoping to find a kid who could defend himself with a gun and won’t need so much supervision, y’know? They did not give Bram a cupcake this time, just the gun. They waited with baited breath to see if firing it would cause Bram to smile, just as if he were eating a cupcake. Sure enough, he fired once, and a grin broke across his little face. The Acquisition process was a roaring success!

But the joke was on them! They didn’t correctly follow the steps of Classical Conditioning; they skipped making sure the Neutral Stimulus didn’t elicit an Unconditioned Response.

Their lazy scientific method would be their downfall! It turned out that Bram loved guns the whole time anyway. You can take the age- out of an agent, but you can’t take his weapons training!!!

Bram’s baby mind now had both the vengeful drive, and the capability to take back everything that had been taken from him, everything he could still feel at night.

This has been  Mars Needs Moms 3: Mars Needs Help Now  with your host: Bret Huston.

There was a spark of hope in my mind that the trilogy wouldn’t end here. But that’s a story for another day…