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).
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.
