I discovered there’s a handful of small Youtube channels working to give the Mouth Mashups their own music videos. Going through them, some videos were quite impressive, and inspired me to take a shot. Annoyed Grunt was my favorite mashup from Mouth Moods, and I’d been listening to it periodically, so I checked to see if a video already existed, and couldn’t find one. Thus I set to work…
…And didn’t stop working for about 10 hours. It came out great! This was probably the largest amount of disparate elements I’ve had to track down and edit together for a single project, but I’m satisfied with the way everything flows in spite of that. I hope Neil sees it to be honest.
Interest notes:
At 0:39 it looks like Tim is the one making the grunt noises, ha.
I noticed the majority of these music videos were horribly low-fi, and I decided to roll with that aesthetic.
I tried to make the entire thing 4:3 at first, which immediately started to look stupid once I introduced 16:9 clips. In the end I just had to accept that there would be wildly varying aspect ratios throughout, and that no one would probably care.
Similar to the story of the first Bowling video, my friends and I had been separated for a long time. Evan and Zach, for instance, had been away in the U.S. for college. However, at the time of recording, everyone was back together again for Christmas break, so this set of games was our way of hanging out.
This time however, things were a bit crazier. The sitcom intro was requested at the time, on camera, but I left it out to maintain the comedic contrast between the horror angle. We really did have problems getting the pins to set in our lane. The slav squat protests went on for 5 or so minutes before we got the assistant to fix it for us, but it just kept happening. Unfortunately, there was a lot I couldn’t catch on camera because my phone had so little battery.
While I was recording, I genuinely thought that I wasn’t going to make anything out of it, because I expected it would just be a rehash of Ultimate Bowling. It was only when someone pointed out that I could take it in a horror direction that I felt the inspiration to follow through.
Interesting note: The intended release date was February 1st, but a copyright issue demanded I pull it down and do a re-edit. I think the video might be stronger for it in the end. It’s hard to say.
Neil Cicierega’s third mashup album Mouth Moods came out yesterday, featuring a mashup with Stand By Me. This reminded me that Final Fantasy XV had used Stand By Me in its opening, so I went and watched that. But then I realized it was a weird cover of the song I didn’t like very much, so I looked for an edit where someone had reinserted the original Ben E. King version from 1961. I couldn’t find one.
It was a simple fix obviously, but I did find a few ways to busy myself, such as by adjusting some levels on the dialogue and expanding the weird sound stage of the original song.
Note: I don’t really dislike the
Florence + the Machine
cover that much, I just think the original is more friendly and appropriate for this scene.
I don’t care what anyone says that hot cocoa gag makes ME laugh every time I watch it.
So yeah I thought of this in the middle of November while feverishly working on JoJo’s Bebop Adventure. It was a fun little break, and I thought it was just generally a cool thought experiment to write and film an ‘update video’ months before the context in which that update video would make sense.
In addition, it doubled as a self-imposed deadline. If I hadn’t gotten JoJo’s Bebop Adventure finished in time, this video wouldn’t have made sense and I wouldn’t have been able to release it… Unfortunately that was all a bit too much unnecessary pressure that I probably would have been better off without.
Here’s the script, which appears on my monitor during the end credits.
Hey everybody, it’s Bret here.
So it’s been about a week since the release of JoJo’s Bebop Adventure, and obviously that’s the most work I’ve put into a video, bar none, even including Kidneyworld which was 40 minutes. I put more work into this minute and thirty second video, and I’m very proud of it. And it actually means a lot to me, because it was the first video I ever started working on for this channel. And I think it came out great. Actually, there’s more info on the development of the video in the big Tumblr post I put up alongside it. In fact I’ve been putting up lots of Tumblr posts about the development of all my videos (because where else would I post that stuff), and I think most of them are quite interesting and worth a read, especially if you’re new!
Which brings us back to JoJo’s Bebop Adventure. Like I said, I was banking a lot on that video finally garnering some viewership to the channel, and so far it looks like doing pretty well.
So I just wanted to say to all the new viewers who watched that video and enjoyed it, thanks, but the joke was on you. I’m recording this in mid-November 2016, here’s my Christmas tree for proof.
“Hey wait, you could still have your Christmas tree up, it’s only been like 2 weeks since Christmas!”
Yeah but here’s a picture of me on Christmas morning. I got a haircut doofus.
I’m currently writing the Tumblr posts, with the intention of releasing them in a big month-long build-up to the release of JoJo’s Bebop Adventure (which gets an extra big grand finale post).
“Hey,” you shout, “why are you even making this video?” I’m glad you asked! Because I’m gonna upload it privately and only unprivate it in two months to prove how smart and cool I am!
Now all my new viewers will know that I am not some simple small fry channel. I am a force to be reckoned with. *cut* So welcome to the channel. I encourage you to click the playlist entitled MY BEST because I love those videos and I want you to watch them and enjoy them.
Interesting notes:
Reshoots happened, which is why the focus goes to crap on the line “especially if you’re new”.
The very last shot may be familiar because I stuck it in the Channel Trailer, which was in fact made after this video.
I actually had the idea for this one back in 2015 when The Force Awakens came out, but there was no way to make it until the movie came out on DVD and Blu-ray, so I saved the idea as a Christmas present for 2016. I’ve always thought of Star Wars as a Christmas tradition, plus the video and song are both snow-themed!
The actual edit of this video took very little work for how good it turned out. Seriously, I love this video. It’s still technically a meme because of Snow Halation, but it’s a classy meme.
Interesting notes: It was copyright claimed to hell by Disney. So it’s only available on Vimeo. :/ :/ :/
Edit: The benevolent gods at Disney have graced me with a resolved copyright dispute. Merry Christmasss!!!!!
Oh my god. If you’re reading this, I did it; against all odds. Strap in for the long haul…
It all began in April 2015, while JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders was still finishing up its second season. I had the horrible idea to make a Cowboy Bebop OP parody like so many others before me. I was working in Sony Vegas Pro, which is suicide for a project of this nature.
This was the first thing I made. It’s been my channel avatar since the day I started the channel (22 July 2015), as a constant reminder that this project is technically older than the channel itself.
Similarly, this has always been my channel header:
I started off making simple backgrounds and static shots in Adobe Fireworks, because I hadn’t learned Photoshop at the time. It’s probably for the best that I kept it simple and static, because as soon as I added moving parts, this early version of the project fell apart.
Pictured above: An early draft of the endslate, later to be replaced.
Pictured below: What replaced it.
It was also during this period in the project’s lifespan that I wrote all the text that I would be sprinkling throughout the video. I transliterated the lyrics of all 4 of the JoJo opening themes, then purposefully worsened the translations in order to mimic the goofy english text in the Cowboy Bebop OP
Phantom Blood:
JOJO
JOJO JOJO
Two
twin stars, in falling from the heavens, are swallowed by a surface
of both light and darkness. Their
ripples move outward, pulled toward each other. The
sun will guide those men who walk the path of honor, demanding a
sacrifice from all who pursue their ambition.
JOJO
JOJO JOJO JOJO JOJO
With
pounding hearts and burning will, with thundering fists and
overflowing bravery… These
men bravely step forward, free of doubt. For
it is this fate to which that blood is condemned.
Battle Tendency
From
the silent depths, awaken the ‘Pillars’, beyond their time. Crimson
blood now summons the valorous to stand up. That
love, which must be inherited, is known as ‘fate’. Forward,
steps are now taken, with smiling eyes. Mystifying
the darkness, dodging in mere blinks, slipping through their blades,
and finding an opening to strike. Conviction
tested opens the way to the future.
LIKE
A BLOODY STORM. HOT
LIKE A BLOODY STONE.
Destiny
is written into that man’s veins. The
undying bonds of honor arise. They
will be taken hold of.
Stardust Crusaders OP #1
And
now these gathering stardusts, summoned in the awakening of a century
old catastrophe. All
these brave men must face now a race beyond the sands of time with
this journey. Entangling
all like a chain, karma intertwines them. With
one’s fate shrouded by the platinum.
STAND
UP, STAND UP, STAND UP. Shooting
across, and beyond.
ALL
RIGHT NOW, ALL RIGHT NOW, ALL RIGHT NOW. It’s
a vigorous bullet.
JOJO
JOJO JOJO
BREAK
YOU DOWN, BREAK YOU DOWN, BREAK YOU DOWN.
And
those fists will fly free. With
this hallowed vision, STAND PROUD.
Stardust Crusaders OP #2
A
tale, long left asleep at the deep sea. Heat
now rises… from rippling sand. The
call of destiny… echoes once again. A
glowering inferno scorches their destination. The
power of the gods has been assembled. Pierced
by a blade that knows no fear. Where
they are headed lies a fate yet unknown. But
their final battle swift approaches.
But
the one who will type that period is… STAR PLATINUM.
Their
story has begun. Their time is running out. They
will finish this. They won’t stop. CRUSADERS. He’ll
take the blank last page and plant his fist through it.
END
OF THE WORLD! That blood’s memories.
オラオラオラオラッ!
オラオラオラオラッ!
オラオラオラオラッ!
オラッ!
Here’s the earliest existing clip of the video, rendered from the .veg file on 12 April 2015. Created by meticulously keyframing 4 copies of the same yellow line. Notice that it’s in 16:9 instead of 4:3, because I didn’t know enough about aspect ratios to realize that would be a problem.
Later on, I had to frankenstein these black bars onto the edges of the video to approximate 4:3. …It didn’t work.
Here’s an early version of the Joestar Family Secret Technique, which I tried to rotoscope from this crappy video. Jesus christ nigeru da yo.
“OH NOOO! This version of the project will never work out!” -Me, June 2015
Long story short, I worked on and off for a few months, but eventually Sony Vegas killed the project, and I realized I would have to start from scratch in another program. Which would mean rebuilding a lot of assets from scratch. Which put me off the project for a long time. In the meantime, I’d thoroughly learned my way around Vegas, and had started making other, simpler videos, where I didn’t have to make my own assets.
But early 2015 passed into late 2015. Late 2015 passed into early 2016. And slowly 2016 began to come to a close. In October I started to feel the itch to get back into making content. I pumped out an hour-long Battlefield 4 LP just to warm up, but I really felt like I needed some motivation.
Would you believe that Steven Universe is what did it? I watched the left over episodes from the Summer of Steven, and inspiration hit me like a truck. I started delving into behind the scenes stuff from the creators of the show, and found this series. I didn’t actually do the 4-week program Ms. Sugar describes, but the kick in the pants was all I needed. There was also a great quote from an AMA, where she said: “Rest of life? Outside of my work? What is that??? I love working. I love working so much. I feel awful when I’m not
working.” …I decided to roll with that motto.
So yeah, Rebecca Sugar is pretty much the central reason I produced so much content in November and December this year. I made about
4 mashups, 31 tumblr posts,
and 12 videos, not including JoJo’s Bebop Adventure, which took hundreds of hours by itself. Much of this time was spent listening to this playlist. You can call that cheesy, or nay-say Steven Universe all you want, but without it JoJo’s Bebop Adventure probably wouldn’t have happened.
But back to JoJo.
On 7 Nov 2016, I created the final Adobe After Effects file that the finished product would be rendered from. My primary source of inspiration in this fresh start was EvaBebop. (Go figure that I would take inspiration from Evangelion of all places). In some ways, I consider JoJo’s Bebop Adventure to be a cosmic successor to EvaBebop, linked across time and space by common tastes. You’ll notice that the two videos even use the same font for the credits, despite being made ten years apart.
Now’s as good a time as any to talk about the credits. I had to combine a lot of different sources, which was frustrating because I felt like I couldn’t be 100% confident in my accuracy. It doesn’t help that David Production made the official credits list on their website a jpg that I couldn’t easily translate!
Anyway, here’s the credits as I arranged them:
Planned
by LUCKY LAND COMMUNICATIONS
Original
Story Hirohiko Araki
Manga
Published in Shonen Jump/Ultra Jump
Character
Design Masahiko Komino
A
Production of Tokyo MX,
MBS
Assistant
Directors Jiro Fujimoto, Toshiyuki
Kato
Animation
Director Kentaro Tokia
Key
Animation Eiji Komatsu
Series
Composition Yasuko Kobayashi
Script Shinichi
Inotsume
Music
Composed by Yugo Kanno, Taku
Iwasaki, Hayato
Matsuo
While we’re on the subject of David Production, I just want to take a moment to express what a bunch of hacks they are. This might not be a controversial or revolutionary statement, but the JoJo anime has horrendous animation. Why actually animate anything when you can move the camera to make it seem like you animated it? I rewatched so many episodes of Stardust Crusaders with a fine-tooth comb looking for a good clean full-body shot of a stand appearing next to someone. There aren’t any! I ended up having to use more shots from the JoJo OPs than the actual show, because they’re superbly animated.
So for anyone wondering why there’s a disproportionate amount of Joseph in this video, it’s because Battle Tendency just had more usable footage. Plus, JoJo parts 2 and 3 both fit the tone of Cowboy Bebop better than parts 1 and 4.
And now that we’ve established ALLL THAT, let’s talk shop. If you’ve stuck around this far, you get some real behind the scenes.
I basically had to learn all of After Effects in the span of 2 months in order to complete this project by the end of the year. Once I got into the groove, my workflow went a bit like this…
Pick a shot from the Cowboy Bebop OP.
Open a new Pre-comp in After Effects for just that shot.
Export a single frame of the shot into Photoshop:
Break it down into a transparent foreground:
And a colored background:
Now bring these new assets back into the Pre-comp in After Effects, and fill the shot with appropriate footage from JoJo. Again, possibly the most difficult part was finding appropriate footage.
Let’s take this shot for example:
Here, I had to first create the foreground and background assets.
Then, I skimmed through several episodes of Stardust Crusaders looking for footage of someone running around, until I found a good clip of Joseph in Episode 12, when he has the Empress stuck to his arm.
Then I went frame by frame through the whole clip, rotoscoping Joseph by hand.
Then, I had to color correct him to look cel-shaded. This took me ages to figure out. To get it to look right, you have to use the ‘Change to Color’ effect (Effect>Color Correction>Change to Color).
First pick a very common color in the shot (i.e. Joseph’s yellowish shirt color, as seen in the above image). Then change it to be the same color as the background. Important: Select ‘Hue and Saturation’ from the drop-down menu, and crank the ‘Tolerance>Hue’ to 100%. The rest of the Tolerance settings can stay at their default of 50%. This will make it look okay, but we’re not done.
Next step, pick a dark dark tone (i.e. Joseph’s wristbands as seen in the image above), and use ‘Change to Color’ to change everything of that color to pitch black. This time, select ‘Hue, Lightness, and Saturation’ from the drop-down menu instead of just ‘Hue and Saturation’, and set the ‘Tolerance>Hue’ and ‘Tolerance> Lightness’ settings low, around 5%. You will have to manually adjust this, because every image is a bit different. You should now have something that looks terrible, like the image below. But it serves to bring out the shadows in the piece, which will help with the cel-shading.
Finally, select a light tone (i.e. Joseph’s shoulders as seen in the image above), and use ‘Change to Color’ to change everything light in the image to the same color as the background. Again select ‘Hue, Lightness, and Saturation’ from the drop-down menu, and experiment with the ‘Tolerance>Hue’ and ‘Tolerance>Lightness’ settings until you get the cel-shaded look depicted below.
What you’ve essentially done is changed all the shadows to a single block of black, and all the light parts to the color of the background. It looks great!
Now you have to stick everything else in the shot, like the text.
Above: Every single layer marked with red is a piece of text in the background behind Joseph.
And that was my workflow for almost every shot in the video.Arduous, slow, and probably more labor-intensive than it needed to be.
I don’t know if I’ll ever make something like this again. I’m too much of a perfectionist for a project where the focus is on creating new assets instead of editing together pre-existing ones. It just doesn’t play to my strengths.
I’m very very proud of how it turned out, but another project of this nature would have to be significantly scaled back, or at least make use of subject matter with better animation.
What is there to say? I was on /wsg/ on 4chan, I said I was up for requests. Someone requested that I combine the Attack on Titan opening theme with the Ghost Stories OP. I like a challenge.
Interesting notes: Some of the clips aren’t actually from the Ghost Stories OP, they’re from the final episode. And I knew to look to the final episode for extra shots because I’ve seen all of Ghost Stories.
Somewhat miraculously, our Psychology teacher assigned us a third and final narrative project, making all my dreams come true. I wrote the thing in under an hour, practically in a stream-of-consciousness.
The character of Nikki was taken from a Business and Personal Finance simulation project, where we had to put a character in a city and manage their schedule and cash inflow. Nikki was created to be the poorest, most miserable character possible.
The brief quip in this video about her being “
too deep in debt from the apartment rental bills and car lease”? Those were real things that happened, so I just cannibalised them into character lore. Even the line about Bram being going into the screenwriting industry was a reference to an early draft of a budgetary plan I made for the character.
I did have to abandon some of the running gags for this one, namely the absurd alliteration at the start, and the Mars Needs Moms joke at the end. but I think what replaced it was strong enough to draw attention away from that.
Now, why it took me a year to release this video is anyone’s guess.
As Nikki approached the large glass framed photograph, she felt absolute despair. The portrait hung crooked on the wall; her from all those years ago, actually enjoying life with her best friend Bram. Now she didn’t want to touch it, because that would mean touching her own hideous face.
The doctors had diagnosed her with what they called “Body Dismorphic Disorder,” simply meaning that she saw a distorted version of herself that others couldn’t imagine. She forced herself to continue looking at the portrait, despite her repulsion at it. It should have been a solitary beacon of hope in an otherwise dismal situation. Both the figures in the portrait were smiling and in good friendly spirits.
But the joke was on her: Both those figures had long since turned sour in her memory. She herself had become an ugly monstrosity, even her past retroactively made to suffer under the illusion. And Bram had long since abandoned her for prosperous prospects in the “screenwriting industry”.
The smile on her picture’s face seemed warped and elongated, like it shouldn’t fit. Her eyes were wildly different sizes, reminding her for the hundredth time of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. The phone rang. It was her mother. She hesitated, then answered it.
“Oh my god, an alien just broke into the bunker and killed your father. Listen, it won’t be long before they start showing up in your city, so please darling, get out of there. Go somewhere unpopulated out in the countryside. Just, do it for m-” And the phone line went dead.
Nikki understood her mother’s concerns regarding her choice in housing, but it was far too late. She was too deep in debt from the apartment rental bills and car lease. All she could do was go to work and carry on her miserable existence.
She donned her referee uniform and cap, heading for the door, but not before taking one last piteous, disgusted, look at the photo on the wall. “I miss you Bram.” she muttered. She walked down 37 flights of stairs and exited out the front of her apartment building, getting into her car and driving off to the wrestling stadium. As she drove, West Side City could just be made out on the horizon, being ransacked top to bottom by alien scavengers.
She arrived at the Kekan Memorial Wrestling Stadium with little time to spare, stepping out of her car and rushing past the swarm of sweaty fans to get inside, so she could referee the match. Her manager wasn’t mad, he simply told her to get out there so the match could start.
Her thoughts were elsewhere. They reflected all the worst of what had happened to her: Losing the battle with alcoholism. Losing many of her possessions to the IRS for accidental tax fraud. Losing her appearance to a worsening Somatoform Disorder… And losing a good friend… A low rumble built up within her.
BUT THE JOKE WAS ON HER. That rumble was actually an enormous object entering Earth’s atmosphere just nearby the stadium. With the unimaginable force of a quadruple-sized elephant, an alien ship came crashing at an angle through the roof of the stadium. “Ah man,” thought Nikki, “Not here. My job is toast now!” What would she do without pay? What would she do without a reason to get up in the morning?
But the “joke” was on her. Out of the ship crawled a baby with an M16 rifle. Nikki would have recognized that face anywhere. She’d seen it in a baby photo, shared in a moment of tenderness.
“Bram!” she cried in joy and relief, running over and picking him up like a sack of potatoes.“This isn’t quite what I imagined when you said "screenwriting industry.”
…Bram was literally speechless, but he gave a knowing look that said everything an infant couldn’t.
Both had had their share of psychological trauma, but now reunited, they could work together to heal not only their own ailments, but those of the planet Earth.
Interesting notes: This was read out loud, in its entirety, in front of the class.
Here we go! The longest gap between creation and upload by far.
Back in December of 2015, I wanted to make Snake Eater mashups. To do this, I had to retime the shortened acapella version of Snake Eater (from the ladder section) to actually follow the timing of the original song (which it doesn’t for whatever reason). So I ended up with a corrected acapella and an instrumental. From these two tracks, Spook Eater was birthed in anguish.
I experimented with the vocals first, and ended up with the weird ghostly up-and-down pitching. Then I just went crazy with the instrumental, adding every spooky audio effect I could find. Once I knew what I was going for, I mixed in a couple Halloween sfx (linked below), and a hint of Resident Evil Basement Theme. Then I rendered it and let it sit in hiding on my desktop for 11 months.
The video was unexpected. Upon digging up the Spook Eater mp3 on 25 Oct 2016, to get it ready be posted on the 31st, I realized that I could do something akin to Son of Kong. It took some fudging, but I somehow managed to make the famous MGS3 Graveyard scene look like it had Snake Eater from the very beginning. It’s a masterpiece.
All the ghosts depicted at the end are from the Metal Gear Solid series of course. I have only Kojima to thank for making my job so easy.
Edited entirely on my Grandpa’s computer in Oregon, while on Summer vacation.
As soon as Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared 6 came out on June 19th, I knew someone had to stick them all together. And of course there were [1-6 COMPILATION HD] videos uploaded immediately, but I wanted to take it a step further.
Of course someone beat me to the punch, but I didn’t see so until I was 60% done. It’s actually quite interesting to look at the different approaches we took to the task. We had a lot of similar ideas, like the use of TV static in reference to DHMIS being a children’s show. He actually cut off the top and bottom of the video to make it cinematic.
I actually went through all credits of all the episodes to make the big credit at the end there. Took ages. But then!!! My file corrupted! The .veg file for this project no longer exists, so I can’t show you any of the details. All I was left with is this poor quality render that makes the credits look atrocious!
Anyway, the thumbnail was also a challenge because my Grandpa didn’t have Photoshop. So I had to combine this promo image from the Kickstarter with this promo poster, in Sony Vegas. Even though they’re colorized differently. I ended up with this weird Frankenstein poster.
But luckily, thanks to some careful cropping, you’d never know that the difference in colorization wasn’t my intention unless you read this Tumblr post.
Interesting notes:
A lot of the audio effects I used to spruce up the transitions were learned from making Spook Eater.
This final frame was a real, unintentional video glitch (further proving how terrible this render was). But it is thematically appropriate and makes me happy.
