TrelHouse.com

I'm the man now, dog.

2 September 2009, 00:07 | Art,

I created my first YTMND not that long ago. If you don’t know what that means, read this first.

It’s sometimes called “The place where brain cells go to die” but I truly see it as a great example of meme generation and how ideas can spawn copies of copies of copies of the original.

After watching a Ted Talk with Susan Black discussing memes , I became more interested in the connections between various ytmnd’s, and figured I would like to apply a technique that is popular in music right now : a mash up. Taking two ytmnd’s, there sound files, pictures, and text, then create a new ytmnd out of it.

[There is a group of members on ytmnd that believe that meme’s are inherently bad, because they pollute the site with the same thing over and over. I think this process serves to these concerns, as it is creating something new out of something old and tired.]

My search began on my xponent. I needed to find two songs from ytmnd’s that sounded good together, or that I can MAKE sound good together. Fortunately, there is the ytmnd soundtrack; torrents with collections of songs from popular ytmnd memes. I started trying to mash everything and anything. I found one combination that sounded especially good together: Axel F’s “Edwin van Santen” (popular from this series of memes featuring professor X ), and Tube & Berger “Straight Ahead” (from the Conan O’Brian Ytmnd’s.... )

Now, for something new. I remember the Axel F song from a flash file I found on the net several years ago, called rgb.swf . I figured this would make a good addition to the new YTMND.

The first thing I did was rotoscope Conan out of his background in After Effects. This was a longer process than I thought. Rotoscoping involves going through each frame and manually selecting around the subject. Tedious.

Second came Professor X. I thought that I should just use the face, and put it over Conans. I cut out the face and animated it along with Conans. Then I used a mesh warp to make the effect look a bit better by faking perspective when he throws his head back.

Last came the rgb.swf. I overlayed this on top and exported! “My YTMND was finished.”: http://conanisprofessorx.ytmnd.com/
I uploaded and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
After it’s run on the front page, it ended with around 100 views and a 3.38 score. Okay, not the reaction I was hoping for, but the score is nice, and hey, it’s my first one!