The Making of Best Chadwarden Parody Moments REMIX
It finally went out on the 14th March (13th March in the USA - not the release date I was hoping for), but I have to share with you guys what Danielle Kennedy referred to as "the agony and the ecstacy" of my latest YouTube video: Best Chadwarden Parody Moments REMIX.
It took roughly three weeks to produce, which included:
- watching and downloading as many Chadwarden videos as I could;
- grabbing all the funny [enough] parts in Premiere;
- deciding on the order;
- making all the titles in Flash, complete with sounds;
- customising and rendering the model of the "PS Triple", from six different angles;
- so and and so forth.
Everything was ready to go on the 11th, which admittedly left me with an empty feeling inside. I really felt that the already 25-minute long masterpiece was missing something, maybe a more personal touch.
But at the beginning of the final render, little brother cracked a line from another YouTube video that we’d recently seen:
"There’s more!"
and the saga continued, as I struggled to put together some extra footage. I spent the entire day on the 12th trying to think of some funny clips I could make. Because of sudden commitments, I was unable to make a start that same night; it would have to wait right up until release night.
Have you ever desperately wanted to get something done, but there’s a billion things literally standing in your way? Things like spending/wasting nine hours of your day at work, with two hours of travelling in one direction?
Well, of all days, that’s exactly what happened.
First thing was, I was late to work. (I think it was an hour late.) This place where I work at the moment, they’re very anal about spending nine hours locked up in an office, regardless of whether you actually have anything to do.
Leaving work at around 1830, it was time for the journey home. Funnily enough, the second train I’d intended to catch had been cancelled. That’s never happened before.
After catching the next train, it was reliance on an unreliable bus service to get home. I sure hope the [dumbass] people of London have the sense to vote Red Ken out this May.
So I got home, but little did I know the fun had just started.
I’d spent around two hours solid putting together the clips, disappointed that YouTube was being anal and not allowing access to a video I’d really wanted to use. That was the relatively easy part.
I began the final render, which for some unexplained reason stopped at around 80%. I soon realised that the partition was low on space, so I rendered again to another. After about 30 minutes, the video was rendered. It stood at a massive 5.44 GB.
Obviously I couldn’t upload something that big in a million years, so the next step was to shrink it. I used MediaCoder for the job, which did a faithful conversion in around 20 minutes, but again not without some hiccups.
The time was just before midnight, and I thought I’d made it.
But no! On the uploading page for YouTube, I discovered that my videos were restricted to 10 minutes only. On further discovery, I found out that they’d disabled the privilege for newer YouTube members, regardless of their account type.
How fucking anal; though they claim it’s to deter copyright infringers, for bona fide directors and filmmakers it’s nothing more than an inconvenience. James Rolfe (aka The Angry Video Game Nerd) was able to upload a 20-minute video not so long ago, so at the time I put it down to sheer favouritism.
But it doesn’t stop there!
Frantically searching around for a program that split movie files, the computer caught a very annoying worm. Some of you might have experienced the same one: on execution it immediately disables your firewall and any antivirus programs you may have, as well as Spybot S&D. It also prevents you from installing such programs to get rid of it, though an online scanner would probably work.
I eventually found a working program, which split the video successfully into three parts. It was around 1am, and I was pissed off at YouTube for inadvertently destroying my Windows installation.
The rest of the night was spent uploading two of the parts to YouTube; the third was uploaded later on in the morning.
So far I’ve had nothing but rave reviews on the video, and I am extremely proud of it. It was meant to be my last Chadwarden video - having made a total of nine altogether - but I am extremely tempted to come out of retirement.
