The Reality of Our Lives

Good morning everyone!

So it is finally done! I’ve finished my project and I just want to say it was a huge pain in the ass, but I’m happy it came out pretty well.

First off I should probably thank my models because this wouldn’t have been possible without them. One of the hardest things to do was not telling them what was going on at all. I had told them that basically I was making a series of flipbooks and a very basic storyline if you could even say that. The fact that they trusted me enough (minus one person) to go along with the whole thing was pretty astounding so I’d like to thank them all. They didn’t even know what they were really doing until they showed up and I can’t remember how many times I heard, “So what are we doing?”

So anyway, now on to some fun facts.

1) It took 975 pictures to make this
2) I didn’t think we had enough to make a video that would last the half the song, but it pretty much went through the whole thing.
3) We did all the pictures in one day.
4) It’s hard to get people to do something you can’t really explain to them.
5) I really wanted this to be a surprise to everyone because I feel like whenever I do a Mattbert Show it’s fairly well announced on all levels.
6) One reason I wanted to do this project was because I always wanted to do a stop animation type project, but after seeing all the really really amazing ones on YouTube I was pretty discouraged. (I’ll leave a list of my favorites at the end of this post)
7) The main reason I wanted to do this is because I really wanted to make something that could possibly cheer people up. As the video says it’s pretty depressing out there. Plus the media is saturated with depression be the news, music, movies, tv shows, and I could go on forever. I thought we could use something a little more uplifting.
Also, I just want to say I’m pretty tired of hearing people complain constantly about how they have the most horrible lives ever. Well, shut the fuck up! No matter how bad your life is there is always someone facing with worse. It’s hard to be happy all the time, but what is the point of living a life of complete misery most of the time. “The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very rough mean place. And no matter how tough you think you are it will always bring you to your knees and keep you there, permanently, if you let it. You or nobody ain’t never going to hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. If you know what you’re worth, go out a get what you are worth. But you’ve got to be willing to take the hit.”
8) I kind of want to redo this whole thing all over again someday a lot cleaner. Although, I like the way it came out for the most part it’s best to think of this as a prototype.
9) There’s a few mistake you can see peppered throughout the video. After spending weeks, timing, editing, and testing the picture I’m very well aware of this, please don’t feel the need to tell me.
10) In the lego piece you can see I wrote something on my wrist. It says, “Write list.” A reminder to make the list that was at the beginning of the video.
11) When we did the photo shoot we were in the middle of about a month of constant rainy/gray weather. This was probably the only day it was actually a beautiful day out, which I thought was pretty amazing. It made the whole thing a little more special for me.
12) We took some of the pictures at a different frame rate so some of the video is pretty jumpy. Specifically the post it notes and the bomb.
13) I didn’t have a title for this for the longest time, which added to the length of me making this video. Without a title I couldn’t really name the files, but eventually I just picked Codependency and shortly after I named all the files LiB (Life is Beautiful). It wasn’t until pretty much the very end of the project that I came up with the real title. I was reading my old notebooks from high school when I came across a short story I never finished called “The Reality of my Life (Version 1.8675309)” which was named after The Reality of My School, one of the more important writing projects in my life.

Anyway thanks for watching and I hope you don’t completely hate it. Wootz!

Here's the list of my favorites:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBjLW5_dGAM or anything else by PES for that matter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywu1DeqXTg4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJzU3NjDikY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpWM0FNPZSs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY


The world just spins along…