What is YouTube Haiku?
Loosely defined, it’s “any web video no longer than 14 seconds that possesses some poetic quality.” Sometimes I’m inspired to make them. Here are a few.
I’m intrigued by the idea of combining elements of wildly different media and smashing them together—it feels like a form of controlled chaos. doy stori.pdf is a good example of that - I captured video footage of the “win” and “loss” screens from the 1995 Toy Story video game on Sega Genesis and combined it with a ridiculous electronic remix of the movie’s theme song, “You’ve Got A Friend In Me.” I then used Logic Pro X to further distort the audio and add a thumping bass drum that played in time with the animations on screen. Finally, I used Adobe Premiere to add some rave-like video effects to complete the scene. The video title’s misspelling and incorrect file extension nod back to the days of P2P file sharing sites and other questionable corners of the internet, and it implies that the video originated from one of these dubious sources.
Hydro, Goodbye was the first Haiku I ever made. It demonstrates the same idea of combining disparate or unrelated pieces of media albeit on a smaller scale than the above Haiku. I simply captured footage from the 1999 video game Hydro Thunder and spliced it into The Beatles’ music video for “Hello, Goodbye” so that the game announcer’s voice delivers the lyric “go, go, go.” Is it a dumb joke? Yes. Does it still make me chuckle? Also yes. Unfortunately, the YouTube copyright gods didn’t share the same sense of humor, which is why this video is hosted here instead of YouTube.
Fly breakdances itself to death is more a “slice of life,” and it doesn’t involve any video/audio manipulation. One day I heard a mysterious buzzing coming from my kitchen and decided to investigate. What I found—an insect whirling in circles atop my refrigerator—was so absurd that I immediately grabbed my phone and started recording, knowing through sheer terminally-online instinct that the situation was ripe with Haiku opportunity. I recorded the video in portrait orientation and used a sensational title to mimic the many “found footage” and eyewitness videos floating around the internet. And I’m sure the fly is fine. Probably.