Vacations are fun, Disney World is fun, and short videos are entertaining.
Combine them all, then add school, and the result will be our viral video project. This project was very fun, as we actually went to Disney World to film TikTok videos of whatever we wanted. We each made five videos based off of a viral trend, like dancing, or edits, etc. My five videos were based off of these five trends.
Scenery compilations
Explained/Translation videos
The song Xenogenisis synced with a video
Transitions
And a video called “the pig video” which is a series of photos of John Pork (an instagram influencer) with the iPhone 8 default ringtone in the background.
Most of these videos may seem just like ordinary stereotypical TikTok videos, and if they do, then I think I did what I was trying to do pretty well, but the majority of these videos actually have a much larger history than you would initially think.
Now before you continue reading, I would suggest getting comfortable, and maybe grab a drink, as this blog post is one of the longest posts I’ve ever made, and I have a lot of stuff to share and talk about.
Scenery of Disney
I’ll start with the video that took the longest to make, Scenery of Disney. This video took much longer it should have, as I didn’t realize how long it takes to sync photos up to music. Another thing that took much longer was finding the right music. I’m not much of a musician, so when I’m editing a video that relies on having the right music; which is most of them, I end up spending way too much time browsing Spotify, googling music genres, and getting sidetracked when I find good music that I want to save to my playlist. I think it was the day right before the videos were due, (I’m an expert at procrastination) I was revising the transitions video for the 3rd time, and it dawned on me: why don’t I just use the music from Disney World? The video was about Disney World anyway. So I searched Magic Kingdom ambient music, I grabbed that audio, and then I started on the scenery video. The video is called: The Scenery of Disney, but not all the scenery is from Disney, and that’s just because I thought it would be more fitting for the photos to be in chronological order from when we left for Florida until the end of the trip. It’s also because there were some photos from the plane ride that I just had to include due to them looking cool.
The reason I chose to do this is because, A) I saw a few reasonably popular videos of scenic photos clipped together while I was scrolling through instagram, or “searching for inspiration” B) I saw a few very popular videos of photos perfectly synced up to the beat of a song, and C) I just started getting very interested in photography, taking pictures of every nice view I saw. If you don’t believe that I took a picture of every nice view I saw:
It’s because of those 3 reasons that I feel that I have a connection to this video, and it’s not just another one that I made just because it was a school assignment. I made this because I wanted to. (And partially because it was a school assignment)
Aurebesh to English
This video doesn’t have as much of a personal connection as the previous video does, but it is still partially inspired by personal events. This video is also the one that I feel is the least related to a current “trend” although there are some similarities. Another thing that makes this video unique from the others is that this video was the only collaboration video I have, which I made with Cooper. When we were deciding what to make for our video, we got sidetracked and started talking about how cool Galaxy’s Edge is going to be when we go to Florida, and then I think I mentioned that the language they have written everywhere there can be translated to English using a key you can find on the internet, and then we decided that would make a cool video, and that’s what we did. For the music, this video was edited after the Scenery of Disney video, so I re-used that strategy and grabbed some Galaxy’s Edge ambient music and put that in the video
Fireworks
In this video I sync up the Fantasmic fireworks to the song Xenogenesis by TheFatRat. This video is based off of two separate trends; The video is partially based off the second trend I listed earlier when talking about the Scenery of Disney video, and there was a trend a few months ago where people would play this song while exiting a room, or going through something like the McDonald’s drive through.
I chose to make this video because I thought it would be fun to try to sync music up with something as dramatic as fireworks. I made this video before the Scenery of Disney, and it partially inspired that video. The fireworks don’t sync up perfectly with every beat in the video, and I slowed the video down or speed it up at parts to make it seem like it synced up better, but you can only do that to a certain point until it becomes very noticeable. This is the second video I made because of my recently developed passion for edits. (or first, because I did make this video before Scenery of Disney) I think this video could have been executed a little better, as I partially underestimated the length of the song I was syncing the fireworks to, and I had to edit together two separate clips, instead of having one long clip.
Transitions
The third video I chose to make was the Transitions video. This is the most relevant video I made, technically. The trend I based this video off of is a trend that is very alive and well, and extremely recent. I decided that I wanted to make a video about the four Disney Icons, and I thought I would base it off of a trend that was a few years old, which was where people would walk into a building or room, the camera would pan into a wall, the ceiling, or the floor, and then they would walk out of a different building or room. My plans changed about 3/4 into the Florida trip, when I was watching instagram, and I saw a video where someone would try and create the smoothest transition possible, and the song Immortal Freestyle would play in the background. I kept scrolling, and I kept seeing more videos capitalizing off of the trend, with some videos purposely making bad transitions pretending they were good to poke fun at the trend. I ended up watching at least 20 videos related to the trend, and that’s when I decided that I should do that kind of transition instead.
The video I ended up making has two transitions in it, the first one isn’t amazing, but it follows the original trend I was going to base my video off of. The second, and more important transition is much more seamless than the first transition, and it uses the trend that’s currently relevant, although I do think that the music is a little over the top. I do really like this video, it’s my favourite of all the ones I made, and it is still currently relevant as of when I’m writing this post.
The Car Video
The shortest video, the strangest video, and the video with the most behind it: The Car Video. If you watched the all videos at the top of this post, you’ve seen this one. This is by far the strangest video I made for this project, and it’s also the shortest by one second. In the background of this video is the iPhone X default ringtone. It’s the default ringtone on all Apple phones that have a number greater than 8 (Apple skipped the iPhone 9). The strange thing is that it’s not available on the iPhone SE 3rd generation, which came out after the iPhone X, but it is available for purchase on the iTunes store as a ringtone for $0.49. I own the iPhone SE 3rd gen, and I spent those 49 cents to be able to use it as a ringtone, and if you go up to anyone in PLP 10 playing that ringtone, you’ll get a response like “not again”, or “no not this”. If you’re wondering why I’m telling you this, why I spent $0.49 on a ringtone, or what this has to with the Viral Video project, you better get comfortable, because it’s a long story.
Pt.1: Loon Lake
For context, Florida was not the first PLP 10 field trip, and we went to Loon Lake for a week in late 2022.
About a month before the Loon Lake trip, Ben Y went on a trip with his team, and on the long bus ride back to Vancouver, some members of the team were playing an short instagram video by Crust Chad that consisted of a slideshow that was all photos posted to instagram by another account, John Pork. I’ll elaborate on who John Pork is later. In the background of the video is the iPhone X default ringtone, which plays twice. Once at normal 1x speed, then a second time at a slowed 0.9x speed. The was posted to instagram, so it has no title for the video, but there is a caption that reads: “He’s kinda chill” When Ben returned from the trip, he played the video all the time, around Carter and I typically.
After about a week, Ben shared the link to the video with Carter and I, and we also started playing the video at random times around people we knew. This went on for a while, and eventually Ben started calling the video the “Pig Video”, and when it was played we would say that “someone’s getting a call”. After a couple, the video slowly started to be played less and less, and others couldn’t play the video because only the three of us had access to the link to the video. Quite a few people kept asking for the link to the video, without receiving it. Then came the Loon Lake trip, and all of PLP 10 were living right next to each other. This was the perfect situation for the Pig Video, because it was easy make sure that someone was hearing the video all the time, making it impossible to forget the ringtone and the photos of John Pork. During this trip, the three of us played the video at any opportunity we had, etching the ringtone into the memory of all the PLP 10 students, and by the end of the trip even the teachers would sometimes recognize the ringtone and associate it with John Pork. About halfway through the trip, Ben decided that access to the video would not longer be privatized, and the link was shared with about half of the members of PLP 10. Mickey was one of the people sent the link, and he showed it to all the people who hadn’t seen the video yet, making sure that all the students knew what the Pig Video was. When we returned to Vancouver, sometimes you would randomly hear the ringtone in the background at least once a day for a couple weeks. The video was played a ton, by many different people, and it even became known by a few people outside of PLP, although none of them seemed to have gained access to the link. Eventually winter break came around, and it was barely played anymore, but everyone will not forget the video, and how “viral” it went within PLP 10.
Pt. 2: John Pork
I said at the start of Pt.1 that I would elaborate on who John Pork is, and that’s what Pt.2 is all about. John Pork is an Instagram account that posts photoshopped or CGI photos and videos of a very realistic looking man with a pig head. It is unknown who runs the account, but the account is frequently active and posts instagram stories frequently, although not a lot of posts are made, most likely due to the effort that goes into making the photos look as realistic as possible. The account only had about 30k followers when the Pig Video became popular within Seycove, with the account blowing up a week ago, going from around 40k followers to 100k followers in 3 days. This is because of a worldwide trend of a video that depicts John Pork calling you. Many TikTok and Instagram users have made videos depicting Pork as a force to be reckoned with. Some videos show Pork arriving at the house of people who hang up on him, often using a photo of Pork running at the camera as a jump scare.
John Pork has been capitalizing off of this popularity, welcoming it and posting about it in a positive way. This has caused any mention of John Pork to become part of the trend, from people pretending he was found alive after being presumably dead, to the popularity of the Pig Video skyrocketing to 6 million views.
Pt. 3: Summary
So, to summarize, the Car Video was made as a Lightning McQueen spinoff of the Pig Video, which was a trend within PLP 10, but just recently it became part of a current extremely popular trend, due to the video’s ties to John Pork.
Reflection
I handed in a few of these videos overdue, and that’s due to how I spent almost no time on school work over spring break, even though I had some time that I could have used more productively. I do think that I was pretty flexible, changing my videos slightly to make them fit current trends, especially with the transitions video. The one that I could have improved the most is the Translation video, which is the video that was the least relevant to current trends, and also the one that I handed in the most overdue. For that video I could have put more thought into it during the creation process, but in this video I did use a lot of editing techniques that I didn’t use in previous videos, and I also had to spend some research figuring out how to translate the Star Wars language into English.
Overall I could have planned my videos better, and used a larger variety of trends, with less similarities between the videos, although I do have reasons and backstories to why my videos turned out the way they are, and I had a lot of fun in this project making the videos.
That’s all for now, thank you for taking the time to read my blog, and have a great day.