Going Viral
It was March 9th, 2015, and I was in my attic, giggling maniacally at my laptop. Unbeknown to me at the time, in just 24 hours the internet would regard the video I was working on as a postmodern masterpiece.
It began innocently enough. I had been listening to All Day and thought it would be fun to mash up video in the same way that Girl Talk mashed up music. After a few failed tests, I found myself laughing mischievously at Earl Sinclair rapping Biggie Smalls’ Hypnotize.
Editing something funny is a little like telling the same joke to yourself over and over again. The first time it’s hilarious, the second time it’s funny….and in the case of a high quality ‘sync up’, the 150th time makes you want to tear your eyeballs out.
I worked on the Dinosaurs vs. Hypnotize video for five long nights, and when I finally submitted the video to Reddit /r/videos at noon EST on March 10th, I had zero sense of what I had created...so it was much to my surprise that in only 3 hours, the video was in the number 1 spot of /r/all and was getting thousands of new upvotes per hour.
After just two days, my Dinosaurs vs. Biggie mashup trended to #1 worldwide on Facebook, was covered by just about every notable online ‘news’ outlet, and even put Hypnotize back on the Billboard charts!
This turned out to be the beginning of a very interesting year of making ‘sponsored’ content for Hip hop artists and Labels, and let me focus any remaining time on my other passion: cryptocurrency...
Introduction
I’m AnimalRobot. A sometimes filmmaker, sometimes programmer. For the past year I’ve been working exclusively on YouTube and cryptocurrency projects and I’m super excited to see the worlds of content and blockchain collide on Steem.
Whether or not Steem is ‘the one’, I think that it has fundamentally transformed our understanding of how to monetise user generated content, and I’m hopeful that it’s the beginning of fair and sustainable incomes for artists, and creative anarchists of all sorts. I think that blockchains are going to change the world for the better, and hope to be a small part of making this happen.
When I'm not working on YouTube content, I'm building https://www.poloniexlendingbot.com/, a service that automates cryptocurrency lending.
Okay, that's all for now. I'll leave you with more of my video work, and let's do this again soon!
Rick and Morty vs. Rap God. I wanted to try something really difficult, and it was, requiring over 100 hours of painstaking syncing.
GTA vs. Straight Outta Compton. This one took forever too...but I got to play a lot of GTAV and was pretty happy with the result.
Blackalicious vs. Fantastic Mr. Fox. Totally underrated movie, and a really great track from Blackalicious. This is probably my favourite piece because the music and the video fit together so well.
-Ben