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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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).
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…
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 coupletracks, and made Tem Eastwood, quick and dirty. Look at how simple it was to make:
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:
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.
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.
