From the Mailbag

Mugato writes:

How long did it take you to do one of these videos? From planning to upload.

Good question, Mugato. I never really paid attention or tracked the time I spent, but each video, depending upon the length, took somewhere between a couple hours to four or five, and that's just the time I spent sitting in front of my computer. Getting the footage (from various sources, none of which will I mention here), importing it into iMovie, and then uploading to Youtube all took a long time, but I was able to do most of that stuff while I did something else. Uploading the videos to Youtube probably took the most time, so I would usually do that at night before I going to bed.

From start to finish, the process was long but fun... usually. After watching the movie, of course, I would sit down and write the scripts, which usually took about ten to twenty minutes. This was the easy part. Then I recorded all the audio and imported it into iTunes (which automatically imports into iMovie). At first I used GarageBand, but I didn't really care for it and found it to be not very user friendly, so I switched over to Audacity.

After that I went ahead and edited the movie, choosing clips that seemed to match when with whatever i was saying on the audio tracking, trying to punctuate certain points by featuring short scenes from the movie. This is the fun part, and the annoying part. It's fun because editing is challenging and sort of like putting together a puzzle, and when you put together the elements in the right way, it can be very rewarding to rewatch. However, it's also tedious, and you have no idea how long a few seconds of film really is until you start cutting together movies piece by piece.

For example, a sentence as simple and short as "Day of the Dead was directed by George A. Romero," might take up only about four seconds, but that's four seconds I have to fill with footage. That's longer than it seems, especially since I have to scan through a feature length film in order to find the perfect four seconds. Sometimes I pull it off, sometimes I don't. That's why some of these videos are better than others, even from moment to moment.

So the Dead Snow video probably took me about two hours or so to put together from start to finish, and that was one of the shortest one. The Resident Evil review, which was around ten minutes and spanned all four films, took me close to an entire day, but I kept getting annoyed so I took a lot of breaks.

And sometimes I got lazy. For example, a lot of the footage from the Serpent and the Rainbow review was taken from a trailer I downloaded from Youtube. I mixed in some footage, but it's mostly just the trailer cut up because I was too lazy or busy (or, in the case of that movie, just unengaged) to do it all myself. I think I did that with a few others, but I can't remember which ones.

I use iMovie to edit these films. I use Audacity to record the dialogue. I used the website Cooltext to create the logo. Oh, and I meant to mention this in my recap, but the "theme song" is taken from the opening of the film White Zombie. I just thought it would fit.

I hope that answered your question, Mugato. Thanks for watching and for reading!

And if anybody wants to learn more about Mugato and his crazy antics, check out his great blog.