Fury Balls Together

Outcome

This mashup video is a remix of the several amazing animation movies I watched in 2016. They made me laugh and helped me maintain a positive attitude towards my life, so I think it will be a great idea if I can remix the most amusing clips from these movies and share them with others. I intend to show how these cute characters from different animation movies can interact with each other in their movements, facial expressions and even appearances. Also, I intend to see how people, especially adults will react to this mashup video, since I am really curious about what makes animation movies so popular among adults as well as among kids.

Context

My outcome is greatly inspired by the Kichiku Culture. It is commonly used to refer to a type of fast paced video that combines repeated clips or pictures and songs with good beats. I adopted the style of repetition, chose Unity, one of my favorite songs as the background music, and matched the video clips to the beats of the song.

I think the theme of Kichuku Culture is similar to that of meme culture, and actually these two do overlap. Both cultures are sometimes pointless, and they both adopt an extremely entertaining way to spread its contents. When producing my mashup video, I learned from both cultures and tried to make my outcome as amusing as possible.

Process

When I saw the theme “go viral”, I immediately came up with the idea that I would make something amusing. At first, I planned to remix video clips and let some characters from well-known movies to “speak out” some famous meme-like sentences in my proposal. However, I then realized that firstly, audio processing is too much for me, and secondly, making funny mashups from serious movies makes me feel uncomfortable and somehow guilty, though it might be a perfect way to arouse controversy and attract audience.

Therefore, I changed my idea and created my video from comedy animation movies that mainly served to entertain audience. I believed that amusing sources are great boosts to my work, and I finally decided to make “amusing clips” more amusing in my video.

Product

I created a remix of four famous animation movies as listed in the sources, and the song, Unity. I used the website (videograbby) to download the original sources and used Premiere to compose my work. I first selected very amusing clips from source videos, each clip spanning 0.5 – 2 seconds. Then I adjusted the sequence and length of these clips and adopted great amounts of repeated and reverse clips to fit them into the beats.

For example, at the beginning of the song, the rhythm sounds like an introduction to the chorus, so I use the clips of bird and dog walking smoothly. When beats gradually get stronger, I use denser, shorter clips, and sometimes reverse these clips to create a ridiculous atmosphere.

Critique

I think my outcome matched my intent quite effectively, since the video itself is amusing and I believe the fast paced style together with strong beats makes it spreadable.

However, I think I could make it still better by utilizing more special effects in the video. I feel that I have not gained mastery of Premiere techniques, and I should do better next time adding more variations to my video.

Furthermore, perhaps more video clips are needed. Since I want the mashup to be fast paced, each clip only lasts less than 1 second, and it takes plenty of time to browse through various sources and find so many amusing clips. Thus, I repeated some of the clips too many times, and maybe adding some different clips can make the video more watchable.

Reflection

This project allows me to practice my skills in video processing, and compels me to predict what “points” will go viral and try capturing them in my work. Previously, when I saw those viral videos and images, I just thought they were funny. Now, when I was asked to create a viral piece of art myself, I had to think over the issue: What are the expectations of the audience? Why are they willing to spread a video? Since I did not come up with an explicit answer to these questions, I tried to experiment on the audience with my animation movie mashup. Many of my friends told me they loved this mashup, and it brought them happiness.

I suppose that maybe videos emphasizing cute characters (funny fury balls) are more spreadable than videos with normal characters, especially when these characters are also humorous. Given the opportunity, I would make another video using real person characters from famous movies, and see which one is more spreadable.

Sources

(1) All Angry Bird Scenes from:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9WyT2ICHEU

(2) All Zootopia Scenes from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKS_2ulNBYU

(3) All The Secret Life of Pets Scenes from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWI_Jsw9qUs

(4) All Madagascar 2 Scenes from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yTK1lGdLhA

(5) Background music: Unity by The Fat Rat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8X9_MgEdCg

References

(1) Inspired by MEOW, Cyriak Harris

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNwCojCJ3-Q

(2) Definition of Kichiku Culture Paraphrased from China Pop Words

http://www.chinapopwords.com/hot-words/gui-chu.html

Proposal

My project will be a recompose of clips from famous movies, music videos, and speeches, and the theme will be college memes. I intend to extract words, or even syllables from the lines of these well-known characters, and use these fragmentary words to construct whole new sentences. For example, I would let Elsa, the major character from the famous Disney film Frozen, say “functions are values” even if she herself would never say it. I want to create contrasts between the social image of the original character and these memelike sentences, and therefore make the video amusing and impressive.

I intend to first spread this video among my friends and schoolmates via facebook, twitter and other social platforms, and see if it goes viral within the neighboring community. For the video to be practically spreadable, I will first limit the major target audience to college students, and more specifically, CMU students. Thus, I will choose to incorporate frequently heard memelike sentences among colleges in this video. For example, the sentence in the image below: