From Brainwashing to Funny to Annoying: How Much Can You Survive?

Statement

For most of the time, we are looking for meaning in all the videos we see and music we hear. " What is the purpose of this video?", "Why am I watching this?", "Did you learn a lesson from it?" However, it's often the ones without deep meaning that goes viral through the internet. I wanted to create a mashup that includes a lot of this kind of videos to contrast with the fact that even though we emphasize "meaning" a lot, it doesn't really require meaning for a media to become popular. And of course, this video I created has no deep meaning as well. It is just a bunch of brainwashing, funny, or annoying videos that were categorized into these three different types and put together to see for how long can people stand with it. While each one of them is popular by itself, together the outcome could become unbearable; so this is a challenge: Can you bear with a 4-minute compilation of meaningless?

Context

Inspired by Pogo & Skye's Time Machine, I decided to do a mashup. I would love to create something similar, but sadly my lack of skills and patience killed that potential project. I was deeply amazed by how detailed and well edited their mashup was, so I focused a little bit on transitions of lyrics from one song to another in my own video just as they did for the movie. For example, I replaced some part of The Fox with clips from PPAP to mess with both songs. 

Process

It took me a long time to collect all the videos I wanted to include, especially when I wasn't familiar with any of them. After spending couple hours googling brainwashing, annoying, and funny videos, I picked 27 of them and decided to do a mashup using Adobe Premiere Pro. The process of deciding which clips to be used where was also very time consuming because I couldn't just place them randomly without considering the most annoying way possible they could be arranged. I decided to start with PPAP because it is one of the most popular brainwashing videos recently, and also it is one of the most meaningless videos I've ever seen.

Product

My outcome is a 3 minutes and 46 seconds long video that goes from brainwashing songs to funny YouTube videos, and finally ends with annoying songs or sounds. Each clip was cut out from an original video where I think can continue the idea/rhythm/lyrics from the previous clip the most smoothly, or can change the tone of the video a bit to keep audience from getting bored. I also added titles for every clip so that it shows levels of how brainwashing, funny or annoying the video is. 

Critique

I have to be honest that I struggled with this project a lot because even though our daily life is full of memes, popular media, and everything that goes viral suddenly, I've never thought of creating one myself. So I think I failed to make this video interesting, but succeeded in making it meaningless. However, meaningless was the goal I was going for, so in a way I think I did a good job. If given more time, I could have thought it through more carefully before I started, and really try to ponder through each word and each note how this mashup could have turned out better. 

Personal Reflection

I love and hate this project at the same time because from one hand it teaches me how simply we can access media and manipulate it to make it our own, from the other it takes a huge amount of time to come up with an idea and bring it to life. I've never before thought of these videos and audios, even images that went viral as a form of art, since it is deeply rooted in our life. But now I know art exists everywhere, it's just hard to notice; even small alterations of an existing media can be called art, and it sometimes doesn't even need an explanation or justification. 

Sources

PPAP - ピコ太郎

Never Gonna Give You Up - Rick Astley

Hello Kitty - Avril Lavigne

Let It Go - FROZEN Disney Official MV

Let It Go Cover - Grace Lee

Barbie Girl - Aqua

The Fox - Ylvis

Another Car Ride with Motoki - Moretoki

Countdown(Snuggie Version) - Ton Do-Nguyen

【進撃の巨人OP実写化】進撃の魚人 - 水泳部員

India Apple! 【インドx Bad Apple!】

女の子のスカートが突然捲れたりしないかな - ヤマイ

Gangnam Style - PSY

Dumb Ways to Die

Nyan Cat

The Duck Song - Bryant Oden

It's Muffin Time(Song with samples from asdfmovie8) - Roomie

Minions Banana Song

Chinese Little Apple Song - Chopsticks Bro

SpongeBob screaming video

Narwhal Song - Jonti Picking

Chinese Chick Chick Song - Rong Wang

Chicken Wing Hot Dong and Bologna

Banana Song - ONISION

宇宙サムライ - 太鼓の達人