TempusWare

Last year, I showed my friend one of my favourite videos: NTBTS’s Update Day – a late 00s online short about giving lyrics to the Wii Shopping Channel music. This year in July, we had the idea to make a remake/parody of the original video but based on the Nintendo Switch eShop. So we scrolled through a list of Switch games on the eShop, wrote some lyrics, and then sat on it for months until we finally shot it one night in November.

As neither of us are actors, remembering lines is incredibly difficult, so we played around with the dialogue while sticking to the story (which is easy since we’ve seen the original video a million times). And as we fluff up so many times, we kept redoing takes; When you’ve said and done the same line and action a dozen times, you gotta do something subversive to keep everyone laughing. I think you tell what bits were unscripted.

I have two regrets with this video. Number one is not double-checking the lav mics; While we both wore them, the audio for the entire video came from my mic since the other one was on the wrong setting and captured unusable audio. Number two is not using ‘Art of Rally’ instead of ‘Mario Party’ in the song; We wanted to use titles that are recognisable and neither of us had heard of Art of Rally before, but it is closer sounding to ‘Stardew Valley’.

The epilogue was written by my friend, and while editing, I realised I could add a reference to Episode 4 of NTBTS, where our scene would parallel the ending of that episode with the Star Wars music and the camera moving back. The on-screen credits was the last addition to the video, which I added just so more stuff would be happening visually instead of us just talking.

I almost didn’t do the intro card at the start. When I edit my videos, I usually spend the whole day on it and by the end (usually midnight) I just want to hit render and upload and be done with it, and the intro card had slipped my mind until just after I had rendered the video. My friend convinced me to give it another day, so I spent a few hours the next day skimming through fonts to find the ones used in the original, and I recreated the intro card to frame-by-frame accuracy. Ultimately I’m glad I did, cause I feel like the recreated intro card perfectly sets up the expectations for how stupidly high-effort the rest of the video is, and it’s a nod to the recreated opening credits in NTBTS itself.