My Videos

In high school I started taking an Audio/Video technology class. in which I spent the next three years learning what would become one of my most passionate and well-developed skills, one of few things I can consider myself to be genuinely good at: video editing.

Now, what amazing works of art did I create with such a refined ability? Stupid video essays about indie games no one's ever heard of and even stupider comedic remixes of British poetry readings, plus a whole bunch of other nonsense.

Anyways here's some of that.

treeview

Some of my proudest artistic accomplishments, the "treeviews" are a series of long-form analysis/review video essays where I pick a thing, usually a video game (though this is not the case all of the time) that I've found and really enjoy that is also tragically obscure and underrated, with the goal being to both share my opinions on the thing as well as convince others to check it out. They tend to be pretty long, ranging anywhere from just over 15 minutes to just under 40, and take a lot of work and time to make. Some common tropes you'll find in these videos include an overly long section dedicated to the game's soundtrack, a "post-video ramble" where, after the main part of the video, I talk without a script for several minutes about the production and other personal stuff, segments of the video dedicated to specific aspects of the game (such as gameplay, art direction, soundtrack, etc.), musically timed montages and a general focus on timing my editing to the audio, and much more.

I've currently made three treeviews, one covering the rhythm RPG Everhood, one covering the retro-throwback movement shooter ULTRAKILL, and a more relaxed, experimental treeview covering the chiptune album High Tide by Danish musician EX-LYD. I'm not sure if I'll ever make another one, the amount of effort they take plus a lack of motivation and the chaos of college life have made making them nearly impossible, but I'm not totally writing off the possibility.

Anyways, I've gone on long enough. Here are each of the three (current) entries in the treeview series.

YouTube Poops

I can't believe I'm actually putting these on display on a portfolio website, but you gotta show off your editing abilities somehow, right?

So, for those not in the know, a "YouTube Poop" or "YTP" is a style of video where you take a preexisting piece of media like a TV show, movie, video game cutscene, etc., and use editing to remix it into something with its own separate context and purpose, usually for comedic reasons. YTPs go back almost two decades, and they've had an immense impact on the humor and culture of the internet. They're typically very surreal, crude, and absurd in their comedy, and make use of a lot of shared editing tricks and tropes like sentence mixing (rearranging people's words to make them say new things) or earrape (loudly boosting the audio for comedic or obnoxious purposes), just to name a few. It's a very unique and fascinating style of remix art that's truly an organic product of the internet.

Garry's Mod Animations

Now for a category of videos that hopefully won't require a small essay to explain, the Garry's Mod animations!

In 2020 I had a brief stint where I tried creating a couple of animations using the sandbox game Garry's Mod as my animation program. Garry's Mod animations have a long history on YouTube, but I was specifically inspired by iconic Team Fortress 2 animator Eltorro64Rus, who makes some of my single favorite animated content on the internet. More specifically, I was inspired by the animation tutorial he released that year, which is what I followed when making the videos I'm about to show you.

Now, as that tutorial will show you, Garry's Mod isn't an animation program, nor was it intended to be one. These animations are created using a sort of "digital stop motion" where you have to physically manipulate ragdolls in the game and manually pose them as if they were actually dolls. Granted, there are tools to make the process easier and more like a traditional computer animation software by adding things like tweening and easier manipulation of ragdolls, but it still has that element of stop motion's tedium. Hence why I only made two animations, or really more like one and a half considering I didn't even finish the second one. I got burnt out pretty quickly. However, I still am sort of proud of what I did create for someone so new to the medium, and it taught me a lot about 3D animation.

Anyways, here are the last two videos I'm going to show you. The first is just a nonsensical romp trying to emulate classic Eltorro videos, whereas the second was trying to pay homage to the game Helltaker, though like I said I gave up on that one partway through.