In an ideal world, I'd own the only copies. Mercifully, none of this stuff ever made it online, but I did sell a couple of DVDs to people at school who rightly/probably/hopefully never watched them. He didn’t go to the hospital even though he probably should have. He landed on his back and ended up coughing up blood. One time a mate of mine fell out of a tree when he tried to swing from a branch. There was a James Bond 'spoof' that involved misquoting portions of dialogue from that scene in GoldenEye where Q gives Bond an exploding pen. The author at the Bristol Climate Change Protests in September 2019. It’s probably quite offensive in hindsight. He obviously never saw it and there's no question that we looked like idiots filming it at the local park. There was an ill-advised 'Ballers' skit in which we ventured out in sports gear to make a mock training video taking the piss out of a guy at school who fancied himself as a bit of a gangster this painfully middle-class white kid who listened to rap metal and liked basketball. We considered this to be the absolute pinnacle of comedy. There was an ambitiously misguided 'silent horror' short, soundtracked by Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, in which someone chopped off ‘my cock’ (a banana) with a garden shear. Nothing was ever scripted per se, but we’d usually start out with a rough idea of something and see how it played out. We’d eventually gravitate away from ‘stunts’ towards more structured skits and sketches. Plugging a video camera into a computer and capturing footage directly to editing software is pretty much a given for today’s generation of content creators, but back in the early 2000s, this was revolutionary. At the very least it also means I have a bizarre, tangible record of my youth that I’ll be able to laugh at one day when I’m old and wizened.īy summer 2004, we had started filming on Mini-DV, which opened up a whole new world of editing possibilities. Looking back, the whole endeavour was entirely aimless, but aside from coming away with mild head injuries from time to time it was an innocuous way to spend my childhood. You either try to fight it and get destroyed, or embrace it and try to cash in. Having not watched any of it in well over a decade, I can safely say that the content contained within those tapes is unequivocally shit.Īll of a sudden you're everywhere and it's out of your control. I still have a box full of VHS-C tapes kicking around somewhere, which can only be viewed on one of those absolutely insane VHS adapters. Inspired by the likes of Jackass and Bam Margera’s CKY movies, our impressionable young selves set about ignoring all relevant safety warnings, hurling ourselves out of trees, riding scooters into curbs, and racing tyres down hills on skateboards.Īt the age of 14 or so, I had envisaged cutting the footage into a chaotic feature-length video of “stunts.” I’d probably have soundtracked it with music from the Tony Hawk games, alongside countless other homemade skate videos people made circa 2003 that probably featured a mix of Ace of Spades or Guerilla Radio. It began in mid-2003, when myself and a group of friends would have been in our early teens. Having spent the best part of my school years filming stupid skits with mates instead of studying, there was something semi-appealing about the prospect of being able to put videos online to share with friends. To understand why, it’s useful to remember that the internet in 2007 was, for better or worse, a very different place. In recent years I’ve come to appreciate and even enjoy its bizarre status as an enduring piece of internet history, but my relationship with the clip in the decade that followed its inexorable rise hasn’t always been easy. Who was the guy who got punched? Why did he get punched? Who punched him? What was he thinking? Why did he react that way? Why did he leave YouTube? It’s been nearly 14 years since I uploaded the original video and to this day it still prompts questions.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |