The making of Super Mario Odyssey Bloopers (Patreon)

Heyo! If you haven't seen my April Fools special for this year, you can check it out at the link below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u0ElTm7cCs

For this year's video, I wanted to a small throwback to the Mario 64 bloopers of old, including those posted on my channel from 2009:

Back then, I made videos on a Windows XP netbook with Project64, Windows Movie Maker and HyperCam 2. I still have it to this day! Everyone loves to meme about these tools, but that really is the best tool for a stupid child trying to get into video-making like 2009 me. (I did graduate to Fraps and VideoStudio later on though.)

The idea for Mario Odyssey Bloopers came from this tweet I made in July 2018. That single tweet took me like half an hour to prepare correctly, but with that attempted once I felt it would be neat to make a full fledged blooper video for Mario Odyssey with 2009 tools.

https://twitter.com/akfamilyhomeak/status/1021794574040162304

My primary computer right now is a MacBook, so obviously I had to get Windows XP running on a virtual machine, as well as HyperCam 2. However, I wanted to use the unregistered variant which added the watermark we all know and love, and turns out the current official download for HyperCam 2 was made free for worldwide usage! I'm pretty sure I ended up digging up a copy of Unregistered HyperCam 2 from an old USB drive.

To obtain the game footage, I obviously first recorded it with my capture card (in crisp 480p no less), but getting it to work in Windows Movie Maker proved to be a bit of a problem. It wouldn't accept MP4s, and even using converters to convert it into AVI and WMV files didn't work either. I could play them in an XP version of VLC media player, but Windows Movie Maker would refuse them.

My final solution ended up being uploading the captured footage to Streamable, accessing Streamable from my XP virtual machine THEN recording the video stream with Unregistered HyperCam 2. As an unintentional downside (or benefit?) it couldn't directly access my system audio, so it captured crappy speaker audio instead which is what you heard in the final product.

Revisiting Windows Movie Maker was certainly fun. You have a video track (audio + video), a second audio track for background music or sound effects, and a overlay layer for floating text. That's it. To overlay something on top of a video that wasn't text, you'd have to capture that frame and edit it in Paint or something. That's what I tried to do with Toadette holding the Super Crown, but it proved to be a bit too time-consuming with XP Paint. (You also can't insert blank spaces between clips, but you can sidestep that by using a black picture.)

Windows Movie Maker also ended up cutting all my captured video footage into multiple 5-20 second chunks for some reason. I have no idea if that's what it's normally supposed to do or it's because my captured footage was too long for it to handle, but that was weird.

Also my virtual machine didn't like the concept of me running Windows Movie Maker at all so my screen preview looked like this the entire time.

There were multiple staple elements of Super Mario 64 bloopers from the early days that I wanted to incorporate into my video (obvious exception for some offensive jokes/terms that were more prevalent in the early days of the Internet and are better left in the past):

• Unregistered HyperCam 2 (duh)
• Mario soundbites (Yes that includes 'mama-******', I had to)
• Scatman (Scatman's World was chosen over Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop because I feel it's a bit underrated)
• Wacky Movie Maker transitions
• A cut to Mario Kart footage on Royal Raceway (why did you block off the castle Nintendo)

I suppose the only other major element from Mario 64 bloopers I couldn't include are the use of Gameshark codes, because, you know, I don't have a hacked Switch.

Anyway, that's about it! I really tried to capture the feeling that this whole video was written in 2009. (stuff like the editor's note joke came by on a whim, I was actually thinking of how to obscure the text bubbles while keeping a good camera angle when I just said screw it) I hope you enjoyed watching all that nonsense though!

And fun fact for the uninitiated, the intro to the video is my very first YouTube intro from 2009. Help it's been 10 years.

(Less sad fun fact: 10% of the stuff you see in this video was added in outside of Windows Movie Maker. It was possible to make the entire thing in Windows Movie Maker but I made a few small tweaks, such as fixing mistakes where I accidentally used Registered HyperCam 2 as well as adding in a higher quality version of the intro.)

Anyway, going off on a side tangent to talk a little bit 'bout the future! Near the end of April, I'll be clearing off my final college projects for the semester. Until then, I've been dabbling a bit in video scripts when I have the time. In addition, I've been invited by a certain group to do voice-over narration for a game history video, so if all goes well, hopefully you'll be seeing that soon as well!

If you have other questions about working with Windows Movie Maker in 2019 or the production of Super Mario Odyssey Bloopers in general, feel free to ask in the comments! With that said, catch you guys later, and thank you all once again for your support! :)