The 2nd video I ever uploaded to youtube is by far my most popular. I was learning After Effects in school at the time, and for some reason happened to have a See and Say lying around. I uploaded the video in 2005, shortly after discovering the site (and only 9 months after youtube actually launched. I’m an early adopter!) I’m not particularly proud of the piece. It feels like I made it a lifetime ago, and it was only really an exercise. But I’ve kept it up on youtube because I accidentally tapped into a strange universe of vintage toy collecting/cataloging/archiving. There are tons of videos on youtube of people showing off their rare See and Says, and my video shows up as a related video to the enthusiast video. My video has been watched over 300k times. I know that’s not much by “viral video” standards, but this is far more than all of my other videos combined.
My video has become so popular in fact, that someone (youtube user mrman91500) has made a bootleg of it by filming their computer screen and posting it back onto youtube:
I think I love it because it’s so close to something I would have made, but didn’t. The lateral, shakey-cam movement is the perfect accent to the radial spinning in the video, adding this extra layer of nausea to that manages to somehow bring you deeper into it while making you more conscious of its bounds. I love the blurry, ghosting effect that you can only get by filming a screen, as well as the absurdity of uploading the whole thing back up to youtube, like a xerox of a xerox.
I honestly don’t mind that this (clearly VERY YOUNG) kid didn’t credit me or anything like that, I just find the whole thing is just super strange.
Is he attempting to pass it off as something he made? Is he paying tribute? Is he creating an iteration of the work by adding his own commentary to it ? (the commentary in this case being “let’s spin!” “oh no wha happened?” and “see you next time!” ) Is he adding an additional layer of mediation to comment on the fluid nature of digital intellectual property?
Or, is he just filming his experiences without any particular concern for the ideas of authorship, curation, remix, commentary?
here’s a picture of him from one of his other videos.
Messing around in unity. I actually started out trying to make a physics-based thumb war game, but I got frustrated and then somehow it turned into this. Slick, though a little screensavery (read: too easy, too pretty.) control w mouse/keyboard.
