Somewhat recently, I had a laugh and an enjoyable conversation with some old school friends regarding one's sense of humour, inspired mostly by me randomly linking them my first Youtube video ever. This video title 'Warrior and Rogue Live Action PvP' was a video published in 2008, but was actually created the year before I even made a Youtube account. This video is incredibly violent and stupid. It uses footage from Braveheart, audio from Unreal Tournament (though people still think it is from DoTA!) and text from World of Warcraft, composed to be what the title suggests, a live action player versus player video. It was created for the purposes of comedy and I remember having a jolly time editing and releasing it back in the day.
Strangely enough, watching it again 12 years later, it had not lost its charm. It was still as ridiculous and horrible as it was when I was a younger man. The only difference is that I am somewhat embarrassed about it nowadays. The content is something I would never show someone off the cuff as I think it points directly at my still incredibly dark sense of humour, inspired by Ren and Stimpy, Monty Python and other politically incorrect media of the 80s and 90s. My sense of humour is about the last thing that I ever actually reveal to people and this video was much too forward for modern day discourse.
I was also embarrassed because the quality of the video is absolutely rubbish! I am sure at the time both myself and the Youtube Gods thought it was state of the art, but at just 480p and 25fps, I knew this treasure would not age well. So, I had the grand idea of completely recreating it from scratch, being my first ever 'remaster' of an old video. During this process I rediscovered just how much effort went into even this first publication, as it took almost an entire day of straight editing to get it basically 99.9% the same as the original, but this time in glorious 4K (2160p) at 60fps. Behold!!
Something I realised while re-editing this is that the original footage I was using was not at 25fps, meaning I must have forced this during my 2007/8 rendition. This caused a variety of syncing issues that needed immaculate attention lest footage went out of sync with the original (but also remastered) audio sequence. Every 5 seconds I needed to cut frames, increase or decrease playback speed and resync in order to get the new and old footage to roughly line up. This took a long, long time. In addition to this, I decided to render the whole new composition at 60fps using a frame blending technique called Optical Flow. This has a tendency to create artifacts, particularly early on in the video, when the sampling has not had many frames to work with. You can definetly notice this in the opening sequence, but it quickly dissipates. I guess every video will have its quirks, and this is one of them.
Anyways, part of the reason I did this was because the conversation I had with friends was around the idea of whether or not I would ever make something like this video again. The truth was that I actually would, and to prove my point ... I simply remade it again. That probably seems like a waste of time, but for me it immortalizes something about the era I grew up in, what I found funny and honestly still find comical today. In a time where I find myself laughing less and less often (for various reasons), having something like this in my skeleton closet is reassuring. Even if it is quite embarrassing.
