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.
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.
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!
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.
Anyway, just for archive’s sake, I’ll uh, I’ll upload that here:
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.
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:
See where my mouse is? That’s when Freddie Mercury says “Mama…”
DON’T MAKE THE TEXT APPEAR RIGHT THERE!!!!!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The story here is similar to Raiden’s Wooly World, but long preceding it.
One of my friends was playing The Last of Us, and he was getting rocked by the stealth section pictured in the video. His attempt ended with every zombie on the map swarming him at once, and the scene reminded me of a bar brawl in a western.
So I pulled out my iPod
–which at the time had the entire Super Mario Galaxy 2 OST on it–
and cranked Puzzle Plank Galaxy. It was a beautiful little moment, and it was difficult to recreate it in this video. I had to scour to find enough footage, but I’m cool on the result.
Bonus: There is a yet unreleased narrated version of this video that I made at 3:00 AM on 1 Aug 2015. Performed in one take with a $10 mic, not funny, and obviously ripped off from Dunkey, here it is:
Not much else to say, but I bet you didn’t notice it switches from Last of Us gameplay to Last of Us Remastered gameplay!
Now we’re goin’ back. I had the idea for this video in 2013.
This mashup is to blame. Once I realized that the Mario 3D World theme was so similar in composition to Bob-omb Battlefield, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. But when I finally got around to editing the video, it didn’t 100% work, so I fudged it and made a few minor edits:
There’s a fade at 0:20, immediately followed by a suspiciously long power-up animation (I just looped the animation to adjust timing for a later part of the video). If you’ve played the game it’s a rather glaring edit, and I probably could have found a better option.
Obviously I added the big “HERE WE GO” at 0:55, and again, in retrospect I would have preferred to do something less tacky.
Other items of note… I’m no longer a fan of the zooms at 0:02 and 0:37, and I don’t know why I chose to start fading the video right as Mario touched the flagpole instead of after 1:35, when the logo slides in time to the music.
In the end, I consider it one of my weaker videos, but a good learning experience.
My masterpiece. This entire video was based off a moment I had on Christmas morning 2014. I got a copy of Smash Bros Wii U and a PS3 for Christmas that year. Naturally, I had to plug in the PS3 and try it out, and the first thing I downloaded was the demo for Metal Gear Rising.
I played that demo maybe 30 times over the next couple of hours, until I could S-rank the Blade Wolf boss fight no problem. At that point, I turned off the in-game OST and put on my own music. Namely, I turned on the Music Player app in Smash Bros Wii U and started playing Smash tracks.
Lo and behold, Yoshi’s Wooly World came on while I was doing that Blade Wolf fight, and I knew it was meant to be…
Fast forward 6 months, to 30 July 2015, when I posted both Majora’s Third Impact and Ode to the Enders. I was exhilerated, having finally posted some videos to Youtube, and I knew I had to continue. It didn’t take me long to settle on a subject matter.
