Tag: kittens

Animal Memes History Lesson

Created February 18 2017

I had an idea stuck in my head that I couldn’t get out. A matter of perspective I wanted to bring to the world on an everyday subject matter:

I wanted to make people see animal memes as a natural extension of our history with them. Being the only intelligent creatures on the planet is lonely, so animals are best served as our doofy supportive friends we can make fun of in good jest. Animals really have always been a core part of the lens through which we view the world; in the olden days that manifested as legend; these days it manifests as Pixar movies. And memes.

In the interest of expressing that idea clearly, I cut out a lot of extraneous fat. I originally wanted to show the evolution of animal memes in a more detailed timeline.

But I favored a triumphant conclusion over drawing it out.

I was somewhat intimidated by the idea of actually writing a script with some semblance of structure, so I sat on the idea for a good six months before I sat down and wrote the script in a single hour, back in August. Then I waited another month before sitting down and editing the video in a single evening. Moral of the story is, if I just sat down and put my mind to stuff more often, I could probably crank it out. But taking long breaks to let ideas turn over in my head is the Brettimaeus standard! :/

Turned out fantastic, and I’m proud to have edited the whole thing in Premiere!

Script here: https://brettimaeus-writes.tumblr.com/post/165199064094/animal-meme-history-lesson

Animal Meme History Lesson

Week #2

Script for an upcoming video. No one will ever know I posted this beforehand.

Since the dawn of time, animals have
been the butt of the joke. It goes without saying that humans have
always toyed with the idea of animals possessing a greater intellect
than they actually do. In this way, it’s always been a great source
of humor to explore the hysterical lack of self-awareness inherent to
animals.

In pre-history – despite the fact that
animals showed no understandable intelligence or communicability –
ancient peoples recognized a method to their instinctive madness,
which compelled them to characterize these creatures with grand roles
in mythology that accentuated their mysterious quality and set them
up as metaphorical representations of forces in the world.

But as human intelligence and knowledge
of the world increased, we slowly realized more and more that the
“intelligence” of animals was merely a projection. We were unable
to interpret any communication because animals were actually just not
capable of communicating with us because most of them are honestly
pretty dumb lol.

But that didn’t stop us. Despite
understanding the nature of animals better, we continued to
characterize them in this way, allowing them to represent new forces
in the world: Political powers, political satires, and of course,
child murder.

Animals themselves started to become
a joke. The age of scientific
discovery fully illuminated the simplicity of their psychology, and
now that we kept them so commonly as pets, and constantly
interacted with them, we could only become more intimately familiar
with their frankly hilarious quirks.

In the first days of photography, the
great innovators of the artform (well ahead of their time) knew that
the finest memetic content could be carved out of their pets (who
couldn’t do anything to stop them for the record, which is awesome).

In particular, the 20th
century was a turning point for animals, as they became a core tenant
of the rising wave of pop culture…

…For it was by this point that humans
understood that we were, in a way, alone in the world. No
other creature would ever be able to compete, and therefore we would
be better off filling in the gaps with our imagination, knowingly
this time. We’d shifted, from giving animals more credit than they
deserve because we didn’t understand them, to giving them more credit
than they deserve because it’s more fun that way.

And yet, dear friends, do not take this
as a disrespect to animals. If anything, our respect for them has
been healed by this slow slow discovery. Our relationships with these
lovely creatures are beautiful. These days, everyone is in on the
joke, and happier than ever to treat animals like kings.

Nowadays, animals
represent less so the grand philosophical concepts of old, and more
so the removal of the human ego. In an age of nearly oppressive,
overwhelming self-awareness, an opportunity to look at the world
through innocent eyes that utterly lack self-awareness is a daily
blessing. We need not feel alone in the world when there are, in
fact, infinite sources of companionship everywhere.

In a way, we have evolved from wearing
their skins as comfort from the crushing cold of the physical world,
to wearing their skins as comfort from the crushing cold of the
universe.