path: root/lume/src/blog/basketball-10year.mdx

---
title: 10 years of Barkley Pie's Slam Jam Slam Song
date: 2022-10-15
tags:
  - youtube
  - flash
  - animation
---

Wow, time flies. Nearly 10 years ago I published one of my first Flash projects
to YouTube, [Barkley Pie's Slam Jam Slam Song](https://youtu.be/pAEa3CGX62Y).
The publication of this video has always felt like a turning point in my life,
so I want to spend some time to talk about that video and how the events that
lead up to its creation has left me irreperably changed for the better.

Here is _my_ copy of that video:

<XeblogVideo path="blog/basketball_10yr"></XeblogVideo>

<XeblogConv name="Mara" mood="hacker">
  If the embedded player isn't working for whatever reason, watch the one [on
  YouTube](https://youtu.be/pAEa3CGX62Y).
</XeblogConv>

## Context

10 years ago I was a vastly different person than who I am today. I had just
gotten out of a high school experience that I don't look back on fondly. I was a
ball of depression and I was sent out to college because that's what I was
supposed to do. Needless to say, I ended up getting a PhD in dropping out.

Depression is not something I usually like talking about on this blog. It's
usually a very personal thing that I have been societally trained into not
talking about out of the ideas of "austerity" or "being tough". I want to work
on breaking those stigmas, and one of the ways that I feel I can do that is to
talk about this openly. Depression sucks and if you are struggling with it
please don't give up hope that things can get better. They can get better.

I was very depressed in college and one of the few things that started to turn
things around was stumbling across the show [My Little Pony: Friendship is
Magic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Little_Pony%3A_Friendship_Is_Magic) and
the community of college aged and adult fans around it. Most of the online
communities I had been in before the brony fandom had been places filled with
hatred, toxicity, and ego. This was different. It was full of passionate, kind
people that wanted to get away from the hate.

<XeblogConv name="Numa" mood="delet">
  Fun fact: the brony fandom started on 4chan, the site notorious for hate,
  venom, and being the reason why companies have stopped doing "name this thing"
  style competitions.
</XeblogConv>

I wanted to give back, but the only skills I really had were using Flash 8 to do
basic motion tweens. So I sat on things for a while and then something else came
into my life: the [soundclown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_SoundCloud)
community.

### Soundclowns

I have always been fascinated by the work of the [YouTube
Poop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_poop) community. They have been a
constant source of inspiration for how I edit and create media. Attempting to
create some in high school is how I learned to get good enough at editing sound
that I have sometimes made significant cuts to audio mid-sentence in my talk
videos and nobody would have noticed it if I didn't point it out just now. Most
of the work of YouTube Poop was vocal chopping, pitch bending and picking out
samples from spoken dialogue and then transforming it into something new. It's a
sort of kitboshing form of art that violates the conventional rules and uses the
knowledge of that violation as a form of artistic dissonance.

Soundclowns are a more mature version of this, but done with music. A lot of it
has to do with taking the _aesthetics_ of songs and putting them all into a
blender. This leads to absolute works of art like ReDoin:

<center>
  <iframe
    width="560"
    height="315"
    src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/rjRV0G6qWgw"
    title="ReDoin"
    frameborder="0"
    allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"
    allowfullscreen
  ></iframe>
</center>

This song is a mashup of the Daft Punk song Doin' it Right from their final
album Random Access Memories, but combined with vocal chops and samples from the
infamous Christmas in July sale ads from the failing big box store [H. H.
Gregg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._H._Gregg). It has never gotten out of my
head.

At the time I made the Slam Jam Slam Song PMV (Pony Music Video, a portmonteau
of the term "Anime Music Video", or a video where you kitbosh anime clips into
music), another common mashup trend was centered around the realization
that the theme song from the movie [Space Jam](https://www.spacejam.com/1996/)
(yes, _that_ Space Jam) has a generic enough BPM and lyrical progression that
you can mash it up with just about anything and it will work. Way better than
you can imagine. For example here's a mashup of the theme song from Space Jam
and All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey:

<center>
  <iframe
    width="560"
    height="315"
    src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4xUar4TrmLY"
    title="All I Want For Christmas is a Space Jam"
    frameborder="0"
    allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture"
    allowfullscreen
  ></iframe>
</center>

<XeblogConv name="Cadey" mood="enby">
  This is never going to get out of your head. I'm not sorry.
</XeblogConv>

One of the main constants with these mashups is the photoshopping of the head of
basketball star [Charles Barkley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Barkley)
onto the album art or a key visual of the thing you are mashing it up with. A
friend made a mashup of a song from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
(particularly the one where the more lackadaisical character Pinkie Pie is
singing about her strategies for combatting depression) with the theme song from
the movie Space Jam.

<XeblogConv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">
  I'm not sure why they picked Charles Barkley in particular. He doesn't even
  have a significant role in the movie Space Jam. Meme culture defies every
  attempt at explanation.
</XeblogConv>

However, there was a space that I felt left room for innovation: none of the
videos animated Charles Barkley's head over the lead singer in the music video.
It was just a static frame. I had basic knowledge of Flash from nearly getting
banned from using the computers in middle school, so there was an opportunity.

So I set out to make my first contribution back to the brony fandom in the form
of...a surreal philosophical document that takes like 3 pages of context in
order to help people understand why such a thing would be created.

## The creation process

At the time I was mainly using Ubuntu on my gaming tower. So of course my first
instinct was to use [Flash
8](https://macromedia.fandom.com/wiki/Macromedia_Flash_Professional_8) to
animate this. It installed and ran under WINE perfectly. I then photoshopped
Charles Barkley out of some stock photos and got to work.

This was mostly done with basic motion tweens and additional photoshops as
things demanded. Someone's eyes were replaced with basketballs in one scene as I
fel that would be amusing. That still frame ended up being used to make sure
that the projector was evenly aligned for movie night on the CS dorm floor. I am
not making this up.

This wasn't particularly hard, but it was time-intensive. This took me about a
month of work because I had to fit this around my homework and studying for
tests. Animation is a very tedious craft.

I also forgot to mention that while I was creating this video, I was giggling
maniacally because this was even funnier than Pickle Rick to me at the time. I
was this depressed kid that suddenly is animating a basketball star over a
cartoon horse and laughing like I was on drugs. This got me a drug test. I
failed the drug test. My RA was _astounded_. I've always been kinda weird, but I
didn't think it was enough to make people think I was on drugs. I get where he
was coming from though.

### My history with Flash 8

At the time I started working with it, Macromedia Flash 8 was on its way out.
Flash animation as a whole was a bit of a dying art as the Flash player was
slowly being abandoned in favor of HTML5. I only really started working with
Flash because I got access to it in the computer lab during lunch break in
middle school. One of our pasttimes was to play flash games on the computers and
constantly hop between sites as the web filter blocked them.

This cat and mouse game obviously didn't sit well with the adults constantly
fighting us kids as we found more and more obscure game sites. At some point I
was starting to learn how to use ActionScript to try and make my own game (some
kind of terrible clone of Space Invaders) and apparently this was _the line_
that I had crossed.

I was summoned into the principal's office one day and then they took
screenshots of my development folder off of the school's NAS and said that I had
been "downloading games to my student profile". One of my parents (forget which)
had also been summoned there and argued that the mere act of _looking at
anything_ on the internet consituted downloading the games to the student
profile as a part of the technical nature of how the internet works. The
principal asked me where I got "invaders_test.swf" from and I replied back that
I had been working on it from scratch using the software that was installed on
the school computers for its intended purpose. My parent then looked at the
principal like they were an idiot. I got away from a meeting where they were
threatening to ban me from the school computer system for my entire school
career (this would certainly be a death sentence for my grades, even back then)
without even a detention.

Flash was removed from all the computers after that meeting. I still had
something written down into my student planner though: their license key for
Flash 8.

The UX for animating simple things with Flash is something that I go back to
sometimes to study. It is so direct and easy to do. I'm kind of sad that there's
not a real analogous tool for this with modern HTML5 animation. Maybe this is
just nostalgia talking though.

### The export pipeline

After the video was animated, I did some proof watchings of it in order to be
sure that the faces were animated correctly. I narrowly avoided having to pee
into another cup when the RA came around flabbergasted at what I had created.

Then came export time. When you export something like this on windows, you use
the native video encoder. This doesn't exist in WINE. Flash 8 did have a
built-in fallback encoder, but it was optimized for sharing things over dialup.
This was vastly insufficient for the kind of quality I wanted.

There was another fallback option though: I could have Flash 8 export the
animation as a series of png images. I would then have to combine that into a
video somehow and syncronize the music manually. It was kinda ludicrous, but it
could work.

So that's exactly what I did. I had Flash export every frame of the video to my
hard drive, used ffmpeg to stitch those frames into a video and then I used
mkvmerge along with various offset values that I created through a combination
of guesswork and lip syncing on the background ponies to create
`basketball.mkv`. This is somehow one of the few files that I still have from
that computer. I don't think I have the Flash project file for it anymore.

But then I had it and I uploaded it to youtube where it currently has 56,072
views over 10 years at an average of 5.6 thousand views per year. To this date
it is somehow one of my most viewed videos on YouTube. Even over my conference
talks.

## The personal significance of `basketball.mkv`

I think the creation and release of this video was a huge turning point in my
life. It really marked the transition of me mainly consuming media to creating
it as well. Making this really gave me the confidence to put myself out there
and it landed.

If I hadn't made this shitpost, I doubt that I would be writing this blog right
now. Working on this really changed my perception of YouTube videos as these
inscruitable magic bits of art to a science that I could understand, dissect and
create for myself.

Here are some randomly selected comments from that video:

> I really don't see the point in humanity's continued existence, now. We will
> clearly never do anything to surpass the magnificence of this single creation.

> Everyone needs to stop making Slam Jam videos and just watch this and sit
> down. We have a winner.

> I LOVE THIS! I DIDN'T LIKE A BRONY VIDEO LIKE THIS SINCE AT LEAST ONE YEAR.
> GOOD JOB, REALLY! YOU REALLY MADE ME SMILE.

> this video... personifies the internet better than any other video I have ever
> seen in my entire life.

> the inventors of the internet could never have foreseen that there would be a
> video like this

> Oh. My. God. I shared this video like 4 years ago... but in dead chat so it
> wasn't hard to find... Nostalgiaaaaaa :D

<XeblogConv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">
  It is really weird to comprehend the fact that people have _nostalgia_ for
  things you've created. I don't know of a good way to describe how _surreal_
  that is. If you are also an online content creator, you probably know what I'm
  getting at.
</XeblogConv>

I hope this look back into the xe iaso dot net cinematic universe vault was
interesting. Turning points like this are very interesting to look over from
more analytical standpoints. I could easily see my life turning out a lot
differently if I had never taken the time to make this. Hard to believe it's
been 10 years.

<XeblogConv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">
  Time flies, eh?
</XeblogConv>