The video that took the longest time to make

From all of the videos I ever created so far, the one about the fastest clappers took the longest time to make. Well, the whole idea was to have something with my brother together, which seems like an easy thing to do, except that we live like 9000 km apart from each other. :) I am located in Japan and he is in Hungary. In September 2019 I visited Hungary and I was alone, my wife and kids stayed in Japan. So the circumstances were just perfect. In theory, I had all the time in the world to come up with something great and record it with my brother. He is a pro beat-boxer and has really nice gear to record with as well. Knowing that the time is short pressing us both, I thought we will make something really good. Everything was just perfectly set.

Well, things turned out quite differently. Of course I wanted to spend some time with my parents, other brothers and sisters, friends and so on. My brother an I just kept saying that we would record something cool on the very next day. Actually, we met only once with the purpose of recording. Although we had quite much time on our hands, we started to have fun playing with his kids, watching funny videos and so on. Then the idea came that we should do a video, in which we clap our hands really fast, since we are both good at speed clapping. We had a bunch of ideas and his wife recorded one video on a smartphone with no lighting, external mic whatsoever. We tried to use some effects on the audio, but time ran out and I had to come back to Japan.

Later, my brother sent me the video and I really didn’t know what to do with the footage. It was funny, but not really good enough to upload. Then I had the idea that we could create a very nice looking trailer in contrast to the video. I immediately wrote down the title: “When the trailer is WAY better than the actual video.” I imagined some cool action movie trailer like music, some nice shots about my brother and I working out to prepare ourselves for the fastest clapping in the history of mankind. On a sunny day, I recorded some of my usual calisthenics training wearing the same T-shirt I had on in the clapping video. I dug in real deep and found some nice music tracks that (in theory) were royalty free. I made my part of the video, used the music and wrote some lines for the narration. Me not being a native speaker of English would have made the narration rather ridiculous, so I decided to go on fiverr and hire someone. I found Rick, whose voice was just perfect, and he in fact did an awesome job. I was really happy and sent over my video with the music and narration already made to my brother who is much better in video editing and stuff. We only needed his training part for the trailer and a split screen showing both of us. But he was quite busy with his job and stuff so it also took some time for him to work with the video. I was really happy as I got a message from him on December 24th saying “Merry Christmas”! It had the video in it. I received it in the morning around 8.50 and was very happy about it. My students in my class beginning at 9.00 were not able to tell what exactly I was so stoked about. :)

I really like this video, the only downside with it is that the music was in fact not free to use and I got a copyright claim, which forbids me to monetize the video on YouTube. Even so, I consider this one the best and maybe the most creative one of my stuff out there. Thanks bro!