Undercrack

Outcome

Intention

When I learned I'd have to make something that could go viral, Undertale immediately came to mind because I have a tumblr blog about Undertale with 2000 followers, and everything I post there that I put a fair amount of work in gets a lot of attention. When I heard I'd have to make a video, I immediately knew I wanted to make a crack video, which is a video that shows clips of a movie, tv show, video game, etc. while playing clips of songs that relate to what is going on in a humorous way. I wanted to do this once in the past, though I abandoned the idea because it would require recording myself replaying the entire game, possibly multiple times since Undertale is so different depending on the choices you make, which was more work than I wanted to do, but now I have the perfect excuse!

Context

I made a list of relevant songs while replaying the game, focusing on songs that the average person would recognize. This, however, was a bit difficult since my music taste is very european, and I am targeting an american audience, so I don't know a lot of the popular songs here. All I can hope is that the message will come through regardless of whether or not the songs are recognizable. 

Crack videos themselves are collections of clips from a tv show, movie, video game, etc. that have been altered in some way to make them more humorous, often using overlays of ironic music. Crack videos are popular on the internet, and I couldn't find a single one for Undertale, so I knew that filling a void would help with going viral even more.

Process

What I first did was I replayed Undertale while recording my progress using Camtasia, which took about five hours. Unfortunately, there were a couple issues: First, due to some issues with free memory on my computer, about an hour of footage didn't record at all. Second, I made a mistake in the game that stopped me from getting the preferred ending (Undertale is very choice based, and since I didn't make friends with one character soon enough, the king was killed by a flower. Shame on me). So I had to replay the entire game again, which worked better the second time around, thank goodness.

While I played the game, I made a list of songs to potentially use for the crack video. I settled on 41 songs that I thought could be effective. I had already downloaded some of these songs, and the rest were obtained using videograbby.com. I trimmed all the songs to obtain the section I wanted to use using mp3cut.net. Eventually I had a few videos containing my gameplay, but they were all an hour to four hours long. This prompted me to use QuickTime to create smaller snippets that Windows Movie Maker could handle, each being around thirty seconds to a minute long, though some that were compilations (Facebook Uh Oh Oh and Heathens) were around a half hour long. I used this software to trim the video down further and add in the music clip accordingly with correct timing. For some videos, I thought it best for comedic effect if the characters spoke for a bit before or after music played (Soldiers of Love, Why Can't We Be Friends, I'm a Joker, and Kiss the Girl), and for those I added audio files of the characters' speech sounds. 

Once I had all the clips, I made the static transition classic to crack videos using a static sound effect in the Undertale game files. The opening sound was used directly from the game as its opening title sequence. I arranged the clips in the same order that the scenes would appear in game, simulating the viewer experiencing the story of the game in a new way. The only time this couldn't happen was for the segment during which Facebook Uh Oh Oh plays, which was a mashup of characters using social media. For that, I placed it according to the first clip in that segment while keeping everything within it in order. I then ended the video with a character demanding an end to 'plaguing my life with incidental music,' which is taken directly from the game, and I thought made an extremely fitting ending. 

Product

I have produced an eight minute long crack video about Undertale using Camtasia, videograbby.com, mp3cut.net, QuickTime, and Windows Movie Maker. It displays 41 clips from the game to the tune of a fitting or ironic piece of music. The reason why it is so long is that from my experience, most crack videos are either around two or eight minutes long for some reason, and people seem to like the longer ones more. 

Critique

It was very rewarding to see the video come together, and I'm really happy with how it came out. A few of the clips are really only understandable to people who know Undertale, but I doubt the video would get much attention outside of that audience anyway, so I don't think it's a big deal. The timing on some of the speech clips also seemed a bit off at times, but it was the best I could do with the time and resources given to me. I also wish I could have more songs in here that the average american would instantly recognize, though most of those that do not would have been heard by the average European citizen. Only a couple songs are obscure worldwide, but I think they still make good clips since those are all some of the particularly ironic ones. Overall, I'm proud of myself. Do I think it will get tens of thousands of views? Honestly, no. Virality is such a random concept that one can't really trust it. Though I do think this is a better candidate for virality than anything else I could have made and put effort into, so I'm happy with that.

Admittedly, this was more difficult than making a crack video of a TV show or movie, since there are no spoken words from which audio can be drawn, which limits my possibilities for humor somewhat.

Reflection

I learned that videos like this take FOREVER to make. I spent a few dozen hours on this, which I never expected or wished upon myself. So it can be said that I have a new respect for mashup artists, or just people who make videos in general. It takes a LOT of time. Thank god this was enjoyable, or else I'd be screaming all night long. 

Sources

Game:
Undertale, by Toby Fox and Temmie Chang

Songs (in order of appearance):
Problem - Ariana Grande feat. Iggy Azalea
Rude - MAGIC
Soldiers of Love - Lighthouse X
Call Me Maybe - Carly Rae Jepsen
Best Song Ever - One Direction
Sexy Back - Justin Timberlake
Mother Knows Best - Tangled
I'm A Joker - Anri Jokhadze
Popular - Eric Saade
All I Want for Christmas is You - Mariah Carey
Why Can't We Be Friends? - War
A Thousand Miles - Vanessa Carlton
Fancy - Iggy Azalea
Too Sexy - Right Said Fred
Ridin' Dirty - Chamillionaire feat. Krayzie Bone
I Am the Bread of Life - Suzanne Toolan
Something in the Water - Carrie Underwood
Who Let the Dogs Out? - Baha Men
Umbrella - Rihanna
Paparazzi - Lady Gaga
Bad Boy - Mallory Everton, Whitney Call, Natalie Madsen
1944 - Jamala
Lighthouse - Nina Kraljić
I Wish I Could Go Back to College - Avenue Q
Glowing in the Dark - The Girl and the Dreamcatcher
Halo - Beyoncé
Dangerous Woman - Ariana Grande
Walk on Water - Ira Losco
Facebook Uh Oh Oh - Valentina Monetta
Cool Me Down - Margaret
Beautiful Pacific Islands - Vanessa Quai
Cake to Bake - Aarzemnieki
Heroes - Måns Zelmerlöw
I'm the Bomb - Pigeon John
Me and my Broken Heart - Rixton
Don'cha - The Pussycat Dolls
My Heart is Yours - Didrik Solli-Tangen
Heathens - Twenty One Pilots
Miracle - Samra
Kiss the Girl - The Little Mermaid
Hold Me - Farid Mammadov

References

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLDdHsGqvwI

The first crack video that comes to mind when people say crack videos, so naturally it influenced what I did a lot. Sorry to those who don't know Orphan Black. Also warning, there's a butt.