Taufiq reviews: my past humour
- Taufiq Rozaini
- Jan 23, 2019
- 10 min read
Double clap and a meme review, it's time I take a walk down my crooked memory lane and review my very first public Youtube video. My unlisted ones for my math assignments don't count.
A little context to the video, young impressionable 13-year-old me was browsing through Youtube when I came across a picture lyric video. A picture lyric video is very much like today's lyric videos except totally not. Somebody, instead of representing lyrics in words, thought it would be hilarious to represent the lyrics in picture form, with puns and what could barely be called memes. Needless to say (I keep her in check), I had the amazing idea to make my own picture lyric video of Queen's Don't Stop Me Now, a song who's lyrics I should have paid less attention to. I was at a humour level in which searching "funny" on Youtube and clicking the first video was a valid past time for me.
Anyways the video I will be reviewing is here, watch at your own risk. Let's dive, I will have no mercy.
Let's begin with the fact that this has yet to be stricken for copyright (Taufiq 2, Youtube 0). Already in the first second I'm pissed off.
To represent the lyrics of "tonight I'm gonna have myself", I decided to pick this photo of the night sky. What a sucky photo. First of all, it's clear I had no idea what to do with the rest of the lyrics except "tonight." Second of all, if I wanted to represent the night sky why in God's name didn't I choose a better, more credible and CROP it so that the black bars on the side don't show. People complain that Transformers The Last Knight had too many aspect ratio changes but I was the real first offender.
I would commend the effort put into interpreting "good time" if I was 7 and not more. It seems I placed to vector files onto Final Cut Pro's default white background which for some reason lost through time I did not decide to fill the entire screen with and instead leave the two abominable black bars on the side. These black bars are like the other members of Maroon 5 other than Adam Levine, visible but really need not be. Now I know what everyone is wanting me to get to so let's talk about the elephant in the room, the red circle. I believe it to be a compression artifact due to Youtube's codec. I could have easily solved it by bringing it into photoshop and cleaning it up but my lazy teenage fat self decided not to, disgraceful.
The worst part about this by far was my choice of clock. Firstly, it is not stylistically matching with the clipart thumb, it's a real clock. Even worse is that it's an alarm clock which has subtle negative connotations of the grogginess of being abruptly woken up. Furthermore it is also outdated, we use our phone's as alarms nowadays. EVEN worse than that, in what universe is 10:11 a good time? Recall the last time you had a precious memory at either 10:11 am or pm, you can't, it's impossible, a cosmic law. It's too early in the morning for any pleasant emotion and too early at night for the mysterious je n'ais se quoi of the night to take over. There's a reason nobody ever plans to meet, eat, dance or literally do anything at 10:11 what a horrendous time.
It's at this point I completely broke off and went a whole different artistic route. Instead of representing the lyrics visually I decided to respond to the lyrics in a way I deem humorous but at this age I was as qualified to determine if something is humorous or not as I was to diagnose cancer (on second thought that's what I'm doing right now).
This photo represents someone checking if they are alive and upon realising that they are, was reassured. It's highly debatable that that is the resulting emotion coming from confirming you are alive, many would argue for the opposite emotion. Secondly, why in all that is good and gracious are this man's fingernails so long? Why is he in front of what is best described as an enlarged photo of an amoeba? Why did I choose such a low resolution photo that even this cropped, I can still see the compression
Upon further research, the top image the appears when you google "checking pulse" is this photo. It seems that the pulse checking enthusiasts community is so preoccupied with their heartbeat fetish that they have not the time to cut their nails. Or perhaps all pulse checking demonstrations are done by one world-leading expert who refuses to be beholden to society's nail length standards and desires to be an inspiration to all long nailed dreamers out there. Or maybe I'm just sucky at picking the right photo.
...Need I say more...
I have to say, this is still pretty funny. It's the classic metaphor-that-makes-no-sense-when-taken-literally joke. Good job 13 year old me. But unfortunately I had to ruin in with that cringey "aww yeah" which serves no purpose, adds no value and shows no taste. I also wrote in the default Final Cut Pro X red which is the ugliest shade known to man, animal and amoeba. Looking closer you also find in no way does the photo represent ecstasy, it's various pills of brands in what I can only assume is an attempt to show how we are drugged and addicted to consumerism. Well, close enough Taufiq, close enough, I'll let this one pass.
Letting the aspect ratio slide, this technically means "no stopping" but, fair play.
I would say that there's a huge missed opportunity in using this image to represent "me" it's as shallow as Ricegum's self-made Genius verified video. Would have been a hundred times better if instead I had used an image of Maggi mee (sponsor mee) then at least a pun was added.
The diameter of our sun is 1,391,016 km in diameter while the average trampoline size 3.6m so the proportions are grossly under-exaggerated. To add on, a star would not say wee. A quick google search would have you learn that stars ring like a bell so it would be more accurate write "F'taang" or even more accurately since they vibrate at 2-4 MHz it's way beyond our hearing range so it would be more like"". Next, assuming that the size of the words are relative to it's volume, the "weeeeeeeeee" should at the very least be a few hundred or thousand times bigger. In all seriousness, would it have killed me to use some keyframes to make the star and gun actually move through the sky? Or was the joke that the star was literally shooting the gun through the sky in which case my humour was so advances that it defeats even the future me? The fact that it is unclear epitomises my ineffectiveness in communicating my artistic vision, I was an absolute wreck. Lastly, why didn't I just let the sun cover the whole frame which would have made it much clearer? Questions abound, perhaps never to be answered.
Hdwallpapers.com doesn't seem to dish out such HD wallpapers as we thought. This image has less resolution than people who sign up for gym memberships. I do think there is a whimsical tone to a tiger being coy though. However I find it highly unnecessary for this image to be made, a simple tiger would have sufficed and would have been equally unfunny.
I should not have overthunk this and just showed an upside-down tiger. I'm sure the simplicity is funny in and of itself. Instead I went for a highly contrived image of a tiger laughing at Isaac Newton represent defying gravity. After more than just a glance, the joke falls apart. Newton does not equal gravity and an audience will not turn a blind eye to this fallacy. I would like to add that it is highly unlikely that upon seeing a gravity defying tiger his first reaction would be annoyance that his life's work has been utterly shat on. I personally would be much more concerned with the gravity defying tiger. "Ahh a tiger!" or "oh no a tiger!" or "Ahh!" would really have been a better choice. Also, even if he did say "oh you bafoon" Newton also spoke Greek and Latin so it would have been equally likely for him to say "Okh Youkh Bafookh" or "ahhus you bafoonus."
I like the fact that I used a Koenigsegg, tickles the inner car nerd in me. I still find "vroom vroom whoosh whoosh" absolutely hilarious. Notice the shadow of the car, though it sits in infinitus incarnate, limbo, an endless plain, it still sits on a floor. I would like to think that my intent was in showing the inescapable limits of our imagination and how even with an infinite possibilities we cannot help but think within the confines of our physical universe. Yet again I could have spent an extra 5 seconds to keyframe that car so it actually moves. This would have been a brilliant depiction were it not for the ruinous office meme. Me finding that hilarious is like Mike Tyson imitating a snake noise, unpronounceably wrong. Never has a picture in that box with any caption in that form been remotely funny. What does hold the mayo even mean in this context, let alone the context of the meme? I picture a shaking Subway employee holding a bottle of mayo, inches away from the angry anti-mayo's sandwich.
For those who do not know, lady Godiva was rumoured to ride a horse naked. It seems ironic that I thought it was perfectly fine to do a terrible job parodying a song, but it was beneath me to show, even briefly, a naked lady or a drawing of one. Instead I added a text just as an afterthought, telling the audience "I have morals, i'm scared mom sees this and I get in trouble." Stranger still, I bothered to add fade in/outs for the text. I put in more care into not doing something than I did with literally anything else in the video. An artist must understand what priorities are in order to find focus in his work young grass-cutter (my future job had I continued these videos full time).
Here, I decided that showing the same image for all three "go"'s was not up to my high standards and decided an optimal solution was to reverse the image on the middle "go". Why did I not put in this much thought for the rest of the video? Why did I choose this barf? This image is the outcome of motivational slime ASMR video with the rest of the message yet to appear being "live your dreams".
Again the recurring small sky problem. Younger me couldn't seem to grasp the infinite nature of sky, not surprising considering it was the same me that chose to make this video rather than go and make meaningful social connections. I remember showing this video to my friends, them not laughing and me cancelling "Youtube content creator" off my mental career list. In the previous lyric I repeated the same Chinese lady pointing to her nose to represent "me". So there appears to be a huge continuity error in that I turned into a man. Either younger me did not understand persistence of character or had advanced knowledge in the combustable nature of gender reassignment surgeries, a hidden meaning I'm sure Freddie Mercury himself was thinking of when writing these lyrics.
Can't go wrong with a cute dog meme. I appreciate the thought that dogs could be named Fahrenheit. However it would have been thematically consistent to bring in Dr Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit himself seeing as how I brought in Newton. Consistency is key too, a lesson I had yet to learn back then.
So I've now reverted back to the version of me as the shooting star. Or perhaps in my eyes aging asian women are shooting stars and I was providing social commentary on racism. I'd like to think the latter is true. You can see I've learnt from my small sky mistake and have now expanded the sky to cover the whole screen minus the perpetual black bars that at this point seem to be more permanent than the pyramids. The lightbulb was placed there to demonstrate the "light" part of that sentence however it is completely irrelevant. I also do not appreciate the biblical reference to Genesis, I should have learnt to keep my religious affiliations out of my craft. The biggest problem by far however is the plane passenger's reaction to me. I am a giant ball of hot gas travelling at the speed of light, literally a feat never been done before. I would contain an infinite amount of energy leaving destruction in my wake. I would be moving so fast that there is no humanly possible way to observe me. Therefore a much better reaction to me would be the silence of death rather than cheering. I have also added 3 more Es to the "wee" compared to when I was leaping through the sky finally answering the age old question: how much more fun is it to travel at the speed of light than it is to leap through the sky? Three more Es, that's how much more.
I'm grouping these two together and calling myself out. I'm chickening out of putting actual effort into my visuals and instead responding to the song lyrics as if they are supporting cast to my production. You know better Taufiq.
I like how my best guess at what my reaction would be were I to suddenly be morphed into a satellite in outer space would be to say "holy mahogany" a phrase I'm sure has never been said un-ironically throughout all of history.
Why does the atom bomb take the comparison between a reloading sex machine and him as an insult? Does the atom bomb have an inferiority complex? I would too if my life purpose was to murder thousands. Or perhaps he's questioning Freddie's nonsensical writing in which case I applaud the atom bomb (don't take that out of context) for dissecting his words.
Yeah...I appreciate the effort put into it. The image flips every 4 beats. However why did the text flip too? Why is the image not censored? Why is Saruman paying a left-handed guitar? Sir Christopher Lee is right-handed, this all makes no sense, but what part of the video did?
I respect that I used multiple interpretation of the phrase"200 degrees" but I could have at least put in enough effort to copy and paste 200 of these. Accuracy matters. I would also like to point out that I got much lazier by the last chorus.
As Freddie belts the outro, the song takes a turn for the weird as what I will dub the "credits" is actually just a series of ken-burned photos of my friends at the time and my cat. It's almost as if I was at the Oscars, giving a thank you speech to all my loved ones. Why did I not even credit Queen? The title of the video is "dont stop me now picture lyrics" no capital letters, no apostrophe, I didn't seem to understand that grammatical accuracy is a key factor in deciding whether people will click your video.
In the end I give my effort a 3.5/10, terrible in almost every way with a few tricky jokes up it's sleeve and goofy enough to the point of being endearing. I hope I've learnt something since then.
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