I think it is about time I tried to explain a little bit about making the video.

First of all, you need to take a bunch of shots of yourself that somewhat all resemble this one:

(you can probably do without the weird beard and the humping monkey though!)

I always shoot at arm’s length and set my lens to its widest angle, so most shots look kinda similar:

Once we have a bunch of pictures, we can sort them on our hard drive and import the first shot into our favorite photo editing software. I recommend renaming it into something like “standard.jpg”:

(In order to process the pictures in the video, I think 1200 to 2000 horizontal pixels are okay – I used a 1600 pixel resolution.)

As always, I am not telling you to get a certain brand of software, as you can figure that out for yourself. There’s no need to spend ridiculous amounts of money though; the most basic versions of any popular photo/video editing suite will probably do just fine.

Back to our “standard.jpg” – we need to eliminate all the things that belong to the background. Then we can increase the clarity of the facial features:

When this is done, it is time to go ahead and process the following pictures individually, one at a time:

I found that the main focus of attention in the video would probably be the eyes, so I wanted them perfectly aligned – if the background was going to be bouncy and unsteady, at least the eyes should remain in the same spot.

Aligning the eyes in hundreds of photographs isn’t that easy though. After failed attempts using a video stabilizing software and stickers attached to the screen, I resorted to a method that yielded more reliable results. Too bad it was also the most tiring method. By far.

Here we go: First, we want to copy the new pictures into the shot that we named “standard.jpg”:

Then there are a few steps for each picture:

1) set the transparency of the top layer (in this case that would be the monkey picture) to roundabout 50%.

2) manually adjust the size of the top layer and drag it around until the areas around the eyes and the mouth of both the top layer and the bottom layer are perfectly matching.

3) set the transparency back to 100%.

4) cut the bottom layer (“standard.jpg”) and merge down the picture.

5) export a jpg and name it with a consecutive number.

Hint: make sure that the “snap to grid” checkbox in your photo editor is unchecked, otherwise moving the layers will be a hassle.

Then we unfortunately have to do this:

Wonder why the whole video took me more than three months to create, eh?

Okay, now that all pictures are lined up and in perfect shape, we can open our favorite video editing software:

This is the sweet part; although my computer was aching under the burden of almost 1400 pictures, I still had a lot of fun creating the actual movie.

Again, there are a few steps:

1) Make sure to decide from the start whether you want to ultimately export a 16:9 HD movie or a traditional 4:3 movie. I learned this the hard way by having to edit my video all over again after I found out that HD looked so much better!

2) Import the pictures into your movie. I used a feature called “slide show” and assigned 3 frames to each shot. This really depends on how fast you want your movie to go.

3) Find a musical score and make sure you obtain usage rights for it. In my case, the Kingpins were very kind and let me use their song for free, while I had to pay a bit of money in royalty fees to the legal owners of Zhu Fengbo’s song.

4) If you want to include other footage, now’s the time to go through your archives. I used a bunch of video shots that I had taken with a small digital camera while I was on the way.

5) You can also add captions if you like. I spend hours and hours coming up with place names and numbers for the kilometer counter.

6) Export the project into a mpg file  – make sure the video is of the best quality you can get! ;)

Hint: you need the best possible quality because the video sites are going to compress your material for you, and you want to give them the best possible original video to work with. (I exported an mpg-file that was 1280 by 720 pixels and had 996 mb. It was MPEG2 and had a framerate of 50.)

Almost done!

Now we can finally go ahead and upload the damn thing to a bunch of video sites on the Internet:

When this is over with, we can lean back in our chair, have a cool Dr. Pepper or some fruit juice, look at our work, and wait.

Wait for fame, wait for fortune.

Wait for something to happen.

Soundtrack: KC & The Sunshine Band – “That’s The Way I Like It”