Underlined dress-ups
Bold clinchers
It’s January 27th, 2023. I’m sitting at my computer, about to start working on a song. Cool rays of sunshine creep through the window blinds like a lizard squeezing under a tiny gap in the wall. Life is simple. Life is good. Life, as I know it, is about to be completely flipped on its head for the next nine months. It’s January 27th, 2023, and The Jade Mountain Archive, a Wings of Fire Youtuber with over twenty thousand subscribers, has just DM’d me a job offer to edit videos for him. Why? Well, the short answer is that I made a couple videos about him that he liked, and thought my editing style would go well with a series of Wings of Fire meme reviews he was working on. However, those videos I made in 2022 aren’t what this essay is about. This essay is about what happened after January 27th, the videos I edited then, and my experience working with a semi-famous youtuber.
After a bit longer than I would’ve liked, The Jade Mountain Archive, who I will now refer to as simply JMA, got the files for the first video for me to edit on February 5th, and I started editing the next day. Keep in mind, most of the videos I’d made up to this point were completely fundamentally different from what I was about to make, so I had to learn some stuff along the way. For example, JMA has this PNGtuber model, which is basically his dragon character drawn with different expressions for different situations - for example, a laughing expression when he’s laughing at something, or a thinking expression when he’s deep in thought. This was something I didn’t initially know how to edit very well - the movements were janky, unrealistic, and sometimes seemingly random - but was something I got better at with time. Since I didn’t know what I was doing, the process of editing this video had its ups and downs, with it taking longer than later videos would. In fact, I livestreamed the first two or so hours of me editing this first video, and in those two hours I had barely made it forty seconds into the video. Later I would be able to edit a whole four and a half minute long video in about six hours, but for now I wasn't there yet. For now, I was busy editing that DANG PNGtuber model. Would you believe that the most time-consuming part of editing these videos was transitioning between the various poses of JMA's character? You might think this'd be the easiest part, and you're not wrong, it is pretty easy, but that's a part of the problem. Basically, each time I want to transition from one pose to the next, I add a little pop to make it look smoother. On average, this takes roughly twenty to thirty seconds to do, which may not sound like much until you realize I had to do this over sixty times, meaning that these near-insignificant, barely noticeable little pops could take up to thirty minutes! Now, it was usually closer to twenty, thanks to some tricks I found later to speed up the process a bit, but still, the fact that it's so easy makes it rather boring. Anyways, I finished the first video by February 10th, and after some changes, it went up on the 24th without a hitch and positive reception all around!
Now, after all that, you might think I hated this job, but no, I promise you, this was one of the best experiences of my life, it's really just this one thing that I didn't like. What did I like about editing these videos, you ask? I’m glad you asked. For one, it was fun to find ways to be creative and make weird jokes with relatively limited resources. For example, in the second video I edited, JMA says “I’m flattered!” but I cut him off so that it sounded like he said “I’m flat!” and squashed his PNGtuber model as he said it, and thus, Flat JMA was born. Similarly, overdramatizing things that, on their own, wouldn’t and shouldn’t be all that dramatic was pretty fun. For example, also in the second video I edited, JMA looked at memes about a semi- controversial ship, and while he was, I added dramatic music and visuals to add comedic effect, which was also pretty fun to edit. Possibly my favorite part of editing these videos were the lore segments. Now, there weren’t all that many, but the ones I did get to edit were a really nice change of pace from what I was used to. For example, in the eighth video I edited… actually, no, I’m not gonna spoil it, it’s best if you watch it yourself. Speaking of lore segments, why don’t we talk about perhaps not just the best video I made, but the funnest video I made for this guy?
We knew from the start that the last meme video was gonna be a finale to remember. We actually had a LOT of scrapped ideas for this video. For example, in mid-July I had the idea of having JMA get mind controlled by an evil strawberry that almost takes over the world. Later that same month, I started writing this multiple page long story featuring multi-dimensional travel, pocket dimensions, an evil strawberry with cybernetic enhancements… bro it’s a friggin’ meme video- To summarize, it was originally gonna be a lot bigger, but I guess neither of us felt like putting in all that effort, so we settled on something a bit smaller. JMA actually got most of the files to me a few days before we figured out what we were doing for the lore segment; to be precise, he got most of the stuff to me on October 2nd, and the stuff for the lore segment on the 6th, with a soft deadline of October 12th. Alright, let’s do this… later. I thought, opening up Youtube Shorts. Yeah, despite having most of the files since the 2nd, I didn’t start until like the 8th, meaning I had about 4 days to make my best video ever. But then, as if that wasn’t enough, some of my old videos started randomly getting views, and what, did you really think I was gonna pass up this opportunity? Now I had to upload a new video to my channel soon if I wanted to capitalize on this success. Throw school on top of that, and it seemed impossible, but luckily, JMA had some mercy and extended the soft deadline to the 14th, which seemed maybe technically barely possible. I was gonna have to give it my all if I wanted to finish in time though, so I quickly finished my main channel video, and by the 12th I had finished a bit over half of the video. It was gonna be really close, but- oh. Well there goes all my suspense. Yeah, so basically, I was also working with someone else for this video, and it turns out, she also sucks at meeting deadlines. That meant that JMA had to extend the deadline to the 18th. Now, just because I got an extension doesn’t mean I could just slack off. It was still gonna take a lot of effort- oh, who am I kidding, I’m not getting that suspense back, you all know I finished the video. With that, the finale to the series was uploaded the 20th to critical acclaim, and… it was done.
With that, it was over. 9 months of my life had come to this. 9 months of working with genuinely one of my favorite people on such a fun project. From all the great memes that fans submitted, to things like Flat JMA, or that d a r n p n g t u b e r . . . this was an unforgettable experience. Not to mention how cool it is to be able to say I’ve edited videos for someone with over forty thousand subscribers?? (Oh yeah, when I said he had over twenty thousand earlier, that was at the time of January 27th. He has well over forty thousand now.) There have been ups and downs, and while no job is ever going to be perfect, I’d like to think I got one of the better ones.