Blog Post

AGDQ was last month. It's the biggest event in speedrunning and raises millions of US dollars for charity every year. All of the runs I watched were impressive in one way or another, but one of them stood out to me a lot more than the rest; A speedrun of Crazy Taxi's Crazy Box mode, but with a real, live punk band playing the music from the game by The Offspring and Bad Religion. They even stopped and started mid song when the runner finished or failed a mission.

I like both bands, but I'd only listened to a few songs from either of them at the time. The AGDQ run/concert made me want to listen to more, so I checked out the album that both of the Bad Religion songs in the game are from; The Gray Race. I liked it a lot!

Silly Americans, that's not how you spell Grey. :P

My immediate favourite new (to me) song on the album was A Walk. It's extremely catchy, and I've had it stuck in my head for the past nearly-two weeks. The chorus' melody is very repetitive, and I hadn't memorised any of the lyrics yet, so when the song was playing in my head, I just kept imagining the lyrics going "I'm going for a walk" over and over again. I've always loved meme edits that take parts of ta song and cut them up and rearrange them. Niel Cicirega is famous for this sort of thing with tracks like Wndrwll and Bustin, but I also love , tracks that repeat the same word or line over and over, like this edit of The Human League's Don't You Want Me, or this edit of Eurobeat Brony's Discord. Hearing the word "walk" in my head over and over also reminded me of another edit I'd seen that repeats the word "wall" in I Am, the theme of the Shadow the Hedgehog game. I knew what had to be done. I had to make the silly edit in my head real.

"It's just a quick audio edit," I thought. "It won't take long, I'll just do the chorus first and see if I feel like doing the rest later."

I did a whole lot more than just the chorus. Or just the song, for that matter.

As someone who was recently diagnosed with ADHD, I've become much more self aware of aspects of my behaviour and thought patterns that I've always been doing. One of them is falling down silly rabbit holes like this one. I should be working on that Halo video essay I've been on and off of for years. I should be practicing drawing. I should be doing housework, or organising my emails, or selling/donating some of the random shit that's piled up in my house, or catching up on the Xenoblade and Like a Dragon games before the new ones come out, or going for a real walk and getting some real exercise and sunlight, or a million other things. But once a new idea gets in my head and catches my interest strongly enough, it's like nothing else matters. The rest of the world fades into the background. I'm going for a walk. I'm going for a walk. I'm going for a walk. I'm going for a walk. I'm going for a walk.

It started as an audio loop of the chorus in Audacity. I used a third-party plug-in to remove the vocals from the rest of the track, copied the first line of the chorus, and pasted it in over and over, Then I sprinkled in a few extra bits to better match the original song, like "So I'm" and "And I'm". I made the chorus loop, had a little chuckle to myself about it, planned to upload it to YouTube, Bluesky and Tumblr, and that should've been the end of it.

Inspired by edits like the ones linked above, I did the rest of the song. The first chorus and the verses were like the I Am edit, with just one word at a time being walk, then the other choruses were more like the loop I already did. I added the stretched out bit in the instrumental, which made me laugh, and the ending didn't need to be edited at all. It took a few hours, I had a bit of fun, I planned to upload it to YouTube, Bluesky and Tumblr, and that should've been the end of it.

To share the looping chorus online, I'd need a looping video clip. I think that the "blank but for 10 hours" thing on YouTube is funny, so I found a SpongeBob walking gif and rendered a 10 hour loop of it with the looped chorus, and a single loop and double loop for social media sites that usually loop videos automatically. Simple enough. This was the first time I'd rendered a video anywhere near this long, and the first time I'd rendered a video with my new(ish) GPU (an 7800 XT, my first AMD card). I'd heard that YouTube and my GPU support AV1, a new(ish) video codec that makes files much smaller, but requires more powerful hardware to take advantage of it. I tried rendering the 10 hour version, it took about half an hour, and the file size was way smaller than I was expecting. I planned to upload it to YouTube, post it to Bluesky and Tumblr, and that should've been the end of it.

Then things got stupid.

I needed a visual to go with the audio edit of the full song. At first, I was just going to use the album art, but then I realised it would be better to use the original song's music video than a static image, so I watched the music video again. Then it hit me. Do you know who get's really excited about going for a walk?

Dogs. I'm one of those. Or at least I am on the internet.

...what if the guy from the video was a dog?

I've been doing video editing on-and-off as a hobby for close to 20 years (I'm 30 as of writing), and I've used plenty of video editing software. I started with messing around in Windows Movie Maker as a kid, before trying CyberLink PowerDirector, Corel VideoStudio, and Sony Vegas. I got into using Adobe Premiere Pro when I was 17, and I've stuck with it ever since. I've also dabbled in Adobe After Effects, but only very briefly. After all of those, trying the Fusion page of DaVinci Resolve for the first time last year made me feel like I've never edited a video in my life. It's UI, with it's nodes connected by lines, looks more like Unreal Engine than a video editor. It's a completely new way of thinking about video effects to me that, combined with the other pages in Resolve, results in software that combines the best of Premiere Pro and After Effects into one program without Adobe's bullshit overpriced subscription (or it's alternative 🏴‍☠️😉). It even sort-of-works on Linux.

This was a perfect opportunity to learn some more about how to use DaVinci Resolve.

So I found a png of the dog snapchat filter, applied it to the A Walk music video, figured out how to use the tracking node to track the singer's face, applied the dog png to the tracker, adjusted the tracker by hand for the clips it didn't work properly on, used keyframes with the TransformFX node to distort, rotate and resize the png when the singer turned his head or moved back and forth, all while learning how to do this stuff for the first time from YouTube tutorials. That was just one clip. I set it up so that the same nodes would already be there for each clip, but I had to dial all of that stuff in for every single camera cut, and this is an upbeat '90s punk rock music video, so there was no shortage of cuts. It took hours. I worked on it for 2-6 hours a day for 4 or 5 days.

I kept questioning myself. "Why am I doing this? I've learned the skill, the rest is busywork for a dumb joke that no one else is going to get or care about. I suppose I should finish it since I've come this far, it would be a shame to waste this effort. Isn't that the sunk cost fallacy? I've almost finished anyway. The ADHD hyperfixation is starting to wear off. I'm bored. I'm frustrated. I'm almost finished. I'm less than halfway done, but I'm almost finished. Why am I still doing this?"

At some point in the middle of this, I realised that I'd like to redo the looping versions to have a dog in them as well. I found a looping dog walking gif, redid the looping versions, including the 10 hour one, uploaded them to YouTube, Bluesky and Tumblr, and that should've been the end of it.

Then I finished the full video. Finally. It's over. I rendered the final video, uploaded it to YouTube... and that should've been the end of it.

Then I remembered that I have an Obsidian journal and a website with a blog on it, where I write about the things I've made, how I made them, and what I've learned, and I've learned so much about DaVinci Resolve. I should write some of it down and make the video public at the same time as the blog post. So I wrote half of this entry in Obsidian, stalled for a few days, finished writing, put everything online, updated my website...

...and finally, that was the end of it.

I think I'll go for a walk.

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