Tag: brettimaeus

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…

Son of Kong

Created: 30 August 2015/29 October 2015

Now, that creation date might be a bit surprising. I started working on this video 2 months before it fell into it’s final form (or rather, I started working on the mashup for this video). Back in August, I thought it would be funny to combine the DK Rap with Son of Man from the Tarzan OST. But it didn’t work at all, and I couldn’t figure out why. I tried some other alternate tracks, like the Thomas the Tank Engine Theme and even We Didn’t Start The Fire, but I couldn’t get anything to work with Son of Man.

So I gave up… Until, in late October, I listened to Mouth Sounds by Neil Cicierega. Blew my mind. I didn’t know mashups could be anything besides Space Jam memes! I explored Soundcloud further, and found this masterful Undertale mashup, back when it only had a couple thousand plays.

I started to understand what I’d been doing wrong. You need isolated vocals, and song stems! I had been
using this, when I should have been using this. It was a revelation! I knew what I had to do. I downloaded a couple tracks, and made Tem Eastwood, quick and dirty. Look at how simple it was to make:

image

Pictured: Track 1 (Blue) = Vocals. Track 2 (Red) = Drums. Track 3 (Cyan) = Tem Shop. Easy stuff.

With that practice, I felt confident enough to give my previous idea another shot. The night of 29 October quickly bled into the 30th.
Because there was no instrumental version of Son of Man, I had to manually loop a part of the song to use throughout the mashup. Then I had to respace the vocals of the DK Rap to fit in time to the music. It was an order of magnitude more complex, and I ended up pulling an all-nighter:

image

Pictured: Track 1 (Blue) = Son of Man. Track 2 (Purple) = DK Rap. Track 3 (Red) = He- He- Here we go!

And once that was finished. I decided I needed to put this on my Youtube channel too! WHICH BRINGS US BACK TO THE ACTUAL VIDEO.

I freakin’ nailed it huh? I’m honestly not the biggest fan of the mashup at this point, despite how much work it took. But who cares, the end result was this video, and this video is perfect. All the footage is from the actual scene in Tarzan that uses Son of Man, with NO footage left over. It all just fit into place.

So in the end, this idea survived 2 months of development, led up to this whole ordeal, and ended up launching my lucrative mashup career. By which I mean only Tem Eastwood was lucrative.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuyghh9yX_k

source: https://soundcloud.com/brettimaeus/son-of-kong

Good Educational Video

Created: 17 October 2015

Our Psychology class was assigned to write a narrative using all the parts of brain and nervous system…

The vocab words in order of appearance:

  • Sympathetic Nervous System
  • Parasympathetic Nervous System
  • Autonomic Nervous System
  • Somatic Nervous System
  • Peripheral Nervous System
  • Spinal Cord
  • Hind-Brain
  • Mid-Brain
  • Fore-Brain
  • Medulla
  • Cerebellum
  • Pons
  • Thalamus
  • Cerebral Cortex
  • Pituitary Gland

…And that seemed like such an arbitrary and farcical thing to base a
narrative on, so I decided to write mine in the most contrived and
ridiculous way possible. So if you ever watch the video and feel your brain repulsed by the force with which the “educational” material is dumped, know that that even happens to me when I try to rewatch it. My goal was definitely not to make the subject matter palatable; if I’d managed to do that, it would be called something less ironic.

Here’s the unaltered text which I turned into the teacher (and got an A+ on).

Bram approached the large glass window with determination evident in his face, staring outside at the impending alien invasion. Mankind didn’t yet know what advanced technologies might be trained on them, but they were confident in their ability to turn the tables.

But a brain-beam hit Bram, breaking all his barriers, blocking behavioral bodily balance, and basically beginning the battle.

First, Bram’s Sympathetic Nervous System was corrupted, disabling his fight-or-flight response. Following shortly was his Parasympathetic Nervous System, as Bram’s carefully trained heart-rate beat out of control. With those two components out of the way, Bram felt his whole Autonomic Nervous System sputter, not to mention a bowel movement like nothing before.

As things picked up speed, his Somatic Nervous System was the next to take a hit. His limbs each twitched briefly as he lost control of them, falling to the floor. His entire Peripheral Nervous System was now out of commission.

Thinking perhaps that could be the end of it, Bram sighed in angst. Little did he know his very thoughts and knowledge were next on the chopping block! His Spinal Cord promptly deactivated and retired, leaving Bram paralyzed from the neck down, little more than a functional brain. Not functional for long though.

His Hind-Brain, Mid-Brain, and Fore-Brain all switched off in quick succession.

He’d been breathing steadily up ‘til now, but without his Medulla to regulate, he began to pant. The loss of his Cerebellum did little to phase him, as his muscles were already unavailable, and with no lower brain left, the Pons had no good reason to stick around. Although there was still function in his eyes, the subtraction of a Thalamus meant he was no longer receiving info from them, rendering him blind.

Bram didn’t know what to do now, his training never prepared him for such an onslaught. Oh, and there goes his training. The climactic defeat of his Cerebral Cortex signified the shut-down of all four of his lobes, incapacitating any ability to hear, touch, learn, remember, speak, process anything, or even to think.

In this, Bram conceded defeat.

But the joke was on him, the beam was just deactivating his bodily/mental functions to prepare him for the real part! Bram didn’t -couldn’t- feel it at this point, but the beam now targeted his pituitary gland, not to deactivate it, but to release hidden hormones to TURN BRAM INTO A BABY. Yep, that’s right. The aliens were the ones from Mars Need Moms, but now there were too many moms so they needed kids too.

This has been  Mars Needs Moms 2: Mars Needs Kids  with your host Bret Huston.

Shortly afterward, I decided to recycle this essay as a script. I read it out into my crappy $20 mic, rewrote the whole thing in text boxes in Vegas, and added some choice midis.

Interesting notes:

  • I actually had those midis lying around because I’d already started working on Kidneyworld.
  • The name Bram comes from a character I created nearly a month before this, for another class, Business and Personal Finance. We were tasked to come up with a budget for a fictional character, and Bram Bernstein was born. He was a a “rich successful screenwriter,” who got his first name because I was reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula at the time, and his last name from a discussion about the Berenstain Bears I think?
  • It’s also worth noting that I came up with a second accompanying character, Nikki, who worked as a wrestling referee because that made for a more interesting budget plan (because she was supposed to be super poor). Anyway, might come up later.

source: http://www.midiworld.com/files/1132/

A Space Fontasy

Created: 8 September 2015

Originally titled: A Space Fantasy

I am a habitual font-er. I binge-download fonts by the dozens. So of course, I have to have somewhere to try them out.

image

So I have this huge Word file on my desktop with pages and pages of different test fonts. I’ve had the doc file since June 2015 at least.

And one day I was staring at the phrase “A Stanley Kubrick Production” written in all these hundreds of fonts, and I wondered what Stanley Kubrick would think. Then I wondered if Stanley Kubrick ever had to do something similar in order to pick which font he actually ended up using in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Gill Sans MT). And it all seemed so narcissistic to me that I just started laughing.

And then this video was made. I was as simple as copy-pasting fonts from my Word doc into Vegas, and then timing them to the music.

I still think it’s hilarious.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-QFj59PON4

evangelion in a nutshell

created: 30 august 2015

i saw a mario kart webm in a thread and saved it because i thought it was funny.

then i listened to the evangelion soundtrack for the 10th time.

get it when? the music changes the joke is that the bullet bill is an angel.

interesting note: was for a long time the only video of mine to have a dislike.

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

Bert in Colon Part 2

Created: 20 August 2015

As has been established, there was honestly no good reason to make this video, except that I had leftover vacation footage. Of course I couldn’t let that weird Samurai Champloo restaurant go to waste!

image

But I probably should have just made a transition from Skeletons to Love Rollercoaster, and kept it all as one unbroken piece.

Interesting notes:

  • I have no clue why my $20 mic sounds so much worse in this video.
  • I actually have a 45-minute recording of that organ concert I mention at the end. It was recorded moments after the final shot of this video, on my gen 4 iPod, which I stuck in my front shirt pocket for the duration of the concert. Also I fell asleep 5 minutes in.

Yeah.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VH6yD8zobM

Bert in Cologne

Created: 12 August 2015

From 9-12 August 2015 I went to Cologne, Germany with my family.

Hilariously, we showed up just in time to find out that Gamescom was ending. My hands will constantly grasp at a Gamescom MGSV demo that will never be there, and my river of tears is never-ending.

Anyway, I took video footage of the whole trip (I actually always take video on trips, but nothing usually comes of it). In this instance, I had an aneurysm on the final night of our stay (11 Aug.), whipped out my laptop in our hotel room, and decided to spend the entire night editing the footage. I knew just the song to use, so I downloaded an mp3 of Skeletons  by Stevie Wonder from youtube, and a vacation video was born!

Not Bert in Cologne! This was just footage set to music. I uploaded it unlisted at 9:30 AM that very morning, with the intention of it only being seen by my immediate family.

Then a couple days passed, and on 16 Dec. I watched Demolition D’s vacation video at 3 AM, and on the spot decided to narrate my video. If you actually watch the un-narrated version, you can see that a lot of the jokes were in there from the start, like all the “otaku” stuff. The gestapo lines were quoted directly from things I said while recording in the museum.

I did one take all the way through and said, “that was good except for the last part.” So I just rerecorded that section, without intending for the two takes to sync up. But then I played them side by side, and said “What how do these sync up so well?” Then I left both takes in.

And then I waited 10 days to upload it for some reason? In the meantime, I made Bohemian Rhapsody, which I uploaded right away.

And additionally, I had leftover footage from my trip, and wasn’t doing anything with it. So I thought it would be a good idea to do a Part 2 using a different song? Thus was born: Bert in Colon (Part 2)

I even went back to Part 1, added an end card with an annotation for Part 2, and changed the title card at the start to say (Part 1). It is worth noting that I flat out lied at the end about my “editing software” not being able to handle long videos. The only reason the parts were split was to use two different songs.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u94yWGkoA6o

Bohemian Rhapsody

Created: 17 Aug 2015

What’s that? Another video inspired by the splash screens from Evangelion???

As the description says, this video was prompted by those infamously crummy lyrics videos on Youtube. They’ve offended my sensibilities since long before I’d created a Youtube channel. “Surely there must be a better way to format these?“ I always thought.

At the same time, Kinetic Typographies seemed like overkill. Surely there has to be a tasteful way to format these. Plain text with no frills. But also in time to the music and with some attention to detail. Then I watched Evangelion, and found my answer.

I’m happy with this format, it’s what I always wanted, and I think it fits Bohemian Rhapsody in particular quite well. However, I didn’t hit it out of the park. The whole video needs a do-over in terms of timing.

Here’s a little secret for aspiring editors out there:

image

See where my mouse is? That’s when Freddie Mercury says “Mama…”

DON’T MAKE THE TEXT APPEAR RIGHT THERE!!!!!

image

I should have placed the text saying “Mama” a few frames ahead of where the audio says it, to better maintain the illusion of a sync. But I didn’t, and the whole video suffers for it. You may not have noticed before, but it’s been a glaring issue to me since the video came out.

It was still a major learning experience, and if I were to ever make another lyrics video (which I might), I’ll be more careful.

Rocket League Waltz

Created: 2 Aug 2015

Originally Titled: Blue Rocket Waltz

Secretly my most underrated video.

Rocket League Waltz happened when I watched Yahtzee Croshaw’s Let’s Drown Out of the game.
I was inspired by the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, wherein
“Kubrick made an association between the spinning motion of the
satellites and the dancers of waltzes”. I made an association between
the sporadic playstyle of Rocket League and the dancers of waltzes. So I took on the herculean task of applying The Blue Danube Waltz to a game, not chopped up like in Ode to the Enders, but the untampered composition.

I adore this video. I think it was a perfect springback after my disappointment with “Mario Kart 9″. Every time I watch it I’m amazed at how many subtle elements of the game match the music. From the boosting of the cars to the timing of the countdowns, everything does it for me. It may not be my most bombastic piece, but moments like 4:33 justify it’s existence 100%.

Interesting note:

Since it’s creation, this video has had numerous more successful “copycats”. As far as I can tell, I was the first one to do it though.

https://youtu.be/ma88Ls3zKIw

https://youtu.be/HXuAW1lCJYA

https://youtu.be/vjED12ax02Y

https://youtu.be/Fw0aTJiOvr8

https://youtu.be/mitrYrCcrj0

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x36mhbc_rocket-league-the-blue-danube-wocket-man_videogames

And mine’s still better anyway.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phw88josADE

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

Mario Kart 9

Created: 2 Aug 2015

Originally Titled: Grand Theft Auto Slide

This is where my excitement for video creation began to get ahead of me.

The idea for this video began in 2014, when I played Super Mario Galaxy 2. I sincerely disliked the remix of the Mario 64 Slider theme in that game, and it set me on a quest to find the best remix. Eventually I found Go Go Trolley! from Paper Mario Sticker Star, which is in my opinion the best version of Slider. So I listened to it over and over again obsessing over the compositional differences between these versions and what made them tick, and after so much listening, I had a mental image in my head that I couldn’t get out.

[read along here]

I imagined a family in a van careening off a railed ridge in the mountains and flying down the slope, the driver clenching his teeth as he dodges in between trees. Everyone’s pressed back into their seats by the speed of this off-road roller coaster, screaming for dear life as parts of their car get flecked off by passing branches.

[and scene]

So my first option was to use that scene from Are We There Yet.

So instead I used footage from GTAV. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find third person footage of anyone riding from the top of Mt. Chiliad, the best I could find was in first-person. I tried to make it work, but I’ll admit it’s quite rough. Almost certainly my weakest video, and a shameful squandering of what I still consider to be a hilarious idea.

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdrGPc0QjeI

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-JoAxp_xco