Here, at long last, is my much-belated mashup!

For my mashup, I chose to put together a couple of clips from the Coronet instructional film collection on the Prelinger archives on Archive.org. I initially just had a vague idea of doing something funny – putting together some of their hilariously unintentional, but inappropriate, comments into some sort of video together. I started by just watching a couple, and taking notes of when the potentially funny lines came up.

But by the time I got around to actually making the video, that just wasn’t working for me. I didn’t want it to become just a laugh track of entertaining lines. (Although that idea has great potential!) I wasn’t skilled enough with the programs avilable to me to do that easily, and I wanted something a bit more cohesive.

Eventually, I just decided on a video to use as a framework, and then to edit it and work around it. (This video was “How much Affection?“) I eventually decided to use the time-honored tool of video editors everywhere – the flashback – as the centerpiece of my video. But a funny thing happened while I edited it and added in other work – it became less and less of a joke. I still totally manipulated the meaning of several scenes by quick edits, and there’s one good scene where the meaning is entirely different and pervier than intended, but overall it became a lot more cohesive and less joking.

What I ended up with could either serve as a challenge to the advice and mores of the day, if you want to read it that way. But more and more, how I began to think of this as more of a contextualization. I was no longer simply or even primarily making fun of these goofy old videos, but making them, to some degree, more understandable.

At least, to me – I ended up somewhat more melancholy than jovial, by the end of the process. And while I’m sure part of that is due to a sense of “Oh man, I have a ton of work that I’ve been blowing off to make this video when I totally could have done something in 15 minutes instead that would have gotten me the exact same grade,” I think a great deal of it is from the video itself.

I’m really curious as to what people think about this. I hope a lot of people watch it, given how much work I put into it the week before finals. On that vaguely desperate-sounding note, here’s the video: