100 (or more) things that we thought sounded like a good idea in our heads but were much harder when we started.

#2: Creating my Documentary project for one of my classes. It was originally meant to be 5 minutes long but I kinda went overboard with the information, so it'll probably be around 15 minutes instead! I've been spending hours creating it, and I've still got work to do…
 
#3: Creating an overly ambitious movie in high school all by myself.

So when I was in high school I took this class called Communications Media - it was learning all of the aspects of film and stuff like that. This particular semester basically centered around this massive project where you make a movie about whatever you want, and then we'd watch all of them in a movie night. We had the choice to do it in groups or by ourselves. I foolishly chose to go by myself.

My idea was to make this movie focused on characters that were my stuffed animals. It was going to be a comedy disguised as a fantasy/adventure movie if you know what I mean. I thought this was a great idea; the stuffies would be very easy to dub, and it would provide a big contrast compared to almost everyone else who was doing live-action stuff. My teacher was totally on-board with my idea, he even bought green screen gloves for me so I could do it. (That was my favorite teacher - basically everyone's favorite actually.)

So I try setting up the stuffies to film just the first scene, and it went awfully. It was really hard to set up a camera and move the stuffies around while still keeping them in frame. It's almost like it's a multiple person job. But then when I was editing that footage, the wrinkles on the green screen were VERY noticeable. It was unusable. I kept trying again but nothing looked good. Not only that, but I didn't find anything to replace the green screen with in advance. I thought I could just easily find images that were good enough later, but nope. You know how people take pictures at their eye level? That perspective is much higher than a stuffed animal. The perspective in every image did not mesh with the characters at all.

It also didn't help that my main character was a frickin male mallard duck, genius work by past Viable 🤡

So I'm back to square one and the semester is half done at this point. My teacher notices that I'm struggling, and he suggests that I switch to something quicker like a video essay sort of thing. I tell him the first thing that comes to my mind - I could make a video ranking all of the Mario games from worst to best. (All of the mainline platformers specifically. Yes, I've played them all at this point.) He approved the idea. So I got right to writing the script. Instant problem: I made the script too long. I naturally wanted to give in-depth reasonings for each game, but I never really considered the math: if you talk about each for even only two minutes, that will add up to over 36 minutes of video. They weren't exactly expecting these videos to be over 30, 10-20 was the general ballpark.

I kept trimming as much as I could but it ended up being over 30 minutes anyway. I had a lot of fun with it at the time since editing was my favorite part of the process and the video was 90% editing. It was stressful with the time crunch though; I chose to spend every lunch and break I got in the computer lab and still only exported the video the day before it was due. I don't remember what grade I got on it, though I do know only the teacher and some of my friends saw it because I didn't want it to appear on the movie night (thought it would be kinda weird compared to the shorter actual movies). I might be able to find this video if any of you readers care to see it.

MORALS:
1. Try to not do massive projects by yourself if you have the choice to be with others.
2. If you use a green screen, know what you're replacing it with in advance.
3. Know how long your script is when you say it out loud. Even one paragraph takes longer than you'd think.
4. If you ever need Mario footage, Typhlosion4President is your best option. They don't use watermarks in their videos.
 
#4 Trying to replicate Paper Mario 64 in Minecraft. I never got further than Mario's house lol.

#5 Trying to make custom Super Mario Galaxy 2 levels.

#6 Trying to replicate my Grandpa's house in Minecraft in memory of him. I don't plan on giving up but it's harder than I thought.

#7 Building a PC (though I did eventually succeed)

#8 Trying to replicate my first school in Minecraft in memory of my time there. I gave up partially because it was much harder than I thought, and partially because it's been 7-8 years now and I've moved on.
 
11. Trying to make Mario Party / Monopoly in Minecraft for Nintendo Switch, only for things not to work as planned, or not being able to use commands Java has in doing so.
 
12. Delivering mail. You might think it's just walking house to house delivering papers and some packages to the right numbers but it's actually much more than that and it's a very physically demanding job because you will lift up heavy trays and buckets filled with paper on top of whatever giant bullshit some customer occasionally orders from Amazon.
 
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