A couple of years ago I made my longest, arguably most epic YouTube video to date: Best Chadwarden Parody Moments Remix.
It went out on the 14th March (the edge of the 13th March in the USA), which was a day later than I really wanted. (The 13th March was the day the original Chadwarden video had been uploaded.)

The background of the video was also epic: so epic that I have to mention the drama involved in its release. The whole video took around three weeks to produce, which included:

  • watching and downloading as many Chadwarden videos as I could;
  • grabbing all the funny [enough] parts in Premiere;
  • deciding on the order of the clips (which is a lot harder than it sounds);
  • making all of the titles in Flash, complete with sounds;
  • customising and rendering the model of the “PS Triple”, from six different angles, in trueSpace. (Many thanks to someone from Google Sketch for the model.)

Everything was ready to go on the 11th, which admittedly left me with an empty feeling inside. Have you ever felt empty inside, when you reached the end of a project you’ve been really passionate about?
I really felt that the already 25-minute long masterpiece was missing something, perhaps a more personal touch. I just couldn’t figure out what the missing something was.

But at the beginning of the final render, my brother cracked a line from another YouTube video that we’d recently seen:

"There’s more!"

With those words, the saga continued.

I’d spent the entire day on the 12th trying to think of funny clips I could add to the end of the movie. Because of sudden commitments, I was unable to make a start that same night; compiling the footage from scratch would have to wait, right until release night.

Have you ever desperately wanted to get something done, but there’s a billion things literally standing in your way? Things like spending/wasting nine hours of your day at work, with two hours of travelling in one direction? Well, of all days, that’s exactly what happened.

And here begins the drama…

First off, I was late to work. (I think it was an hour late.) The place I was working at the time was one of those companies that was anal about spending nine hours in an office, regardless of whether or not there was any work. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was close to home, but the journey to work was 90 minutes at best, by public transport.

Leaving work at around 1830, it was a race to get home. And funnily enough, the second train I’d intended to catch had been cancelled. That had never happened before, and has never happened since.

After catching the next train that came about 20 minutes later, I was reliant on an unreliable bus service to get home. Get home I did, but the fun wasn’t nearly over.

I’d spent around two hours solid putting together the clips, disappointed that YouTube was being anal and not allowing access to a video I’d really wanted to use. (I think they’d taken said video down, due to copyright issues or something.)

I began the final render, which for some unexplained reason stopped at around 80%. I then realised that the hard disk partition was low on space, so I rendered again to another. After about 30 minutes, the video was rendered. It stood at a massive 5.44 gibibytes.

5.44 gibibytes would take an age to upload, so the next step was to shrink it to a lower-quality, more manageable movie. I used MediaCoder for the job, which did a faithful conversion in around 20 minutes, but again not without some hiccups.

It was now just before midnight, and I thought I’d finally made it. But no! YouTube restricted my uploaded movie to 10 minutes, because I had registered as a “director” too late. On further discovery, I found out that they’d disabled the privilege for newer YouTube members, regardless of their account type. (You can now only upload long movies if you’re an old YouTube member, or a partner. Though they claim it’s to deter copyright infringers, it’s nothing more than an inconvenience.)

But there’s more.

The only option I had was to split the movie into smaller chunks. Frantically searching the net for a program that split movie files, the computer caught a very annoying worm.
Some of you might have experienced this particular infection: on execution it immediately disables your firewall and any antivirus programs you may have, as well as Spybot S&D. It also prevents you from installing such programs to get rid of it, though an online scanner would probably work.

I eventually was able to find a program that split the video, and it did so successfully into three parts. It was now around 1am, and I was pissed off at YouTube for its hand in destroying my Windows installation.

The rest of the night was spent uploading two of the parts to YouTube; the third was uploaded later in the morning.

Fortunately, all that work and drama was worth it. Despite the baseless comments from people who couldn’t be arsed to make their own videos, Best Chadwarden Parody Moments Remix received general praise. It was planned to be my last Chadwarden video, having made a few, but I went on to make some more.

Unfortunately it’s been a couple of years since Chadwarden mania died with his disappearance. But those were great times.