Too much time on my hands...

I now know why so many employers block YouTube on their employee’s computers.

Forget the porn; that place is a complete time suck. You click over to watch the video of your cousin’s kid singing in the church choir and an hour later, you’re watching videos of cats on record players spinning around.

You don’t mean to, but you do.

I’d managed to avoid YouTube for the most part. I never wandered over without a reason – a direct link to what I needed to watch. To be honest, I never thought to look there for the any of the hundred thousand “must watch” videos everyone was talking about.

Then, one day it happened. I clicked off a blog link to YouTube to see something I’d never heard of before: people mixing scenes from TV shows with music to make their own music videos.

Like this one:

Or this (Probably not safe for work):

Since then, I’ve killed hours on YouTube – hours I’ll never get back – watching these stupid music videos. They’re oddly addictive. I’m a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I loved Buffy and Spike’s relationship, but why did I spend so much time watching it be rehashed over and over again to everything from “Addicted” to “Glory of Love”?

And, dear dog, the hours spent with Star Trek: Voyager videos..

Then there are the videos where the makers take scenes and manage to put them together to tell a completely different story line. Ever wanted to see Buffy and Xander fall in love, fight, break up and make up? There’s a video about that – even though it never happened on the show – thanks to the magic of clever editing. Really clever editing can put characters from two different TV shows together in torrid relationships.

I also watched a lot of recut movie trailers – “Sleepless In Seattle” as a creepy stalker horror movie, “The Shining” as a feel-good love story.

And these:

Or this:

I thought PhotoShop was bad at distorting reality – movie editing software is really scary stuff.

So I’ve wasted hours of my life watching these videos – and I’ve only seen a fraction of what’s out there. But what amazes me is the amount of time someone had to put into these videos. Three minutes of video – properly edited, synced to the music, lots of cool effects – must take hours and hours to produce. Just searching the DVDs for the perfect one second clip to put right there at the big cymbal crash could take hours. And some of these folks make dozens or hundreds of these videos.

Where do they find the time? Trust me, I don’t ask that question lightly. I’ve had too many people ask me that question about writing. I know the correct answer is “You make the time.” Call me a cynic or whatever, but there’s no way I’d spend that amount of time doing something (that dances on the edge of copyright infringement to begin with) and then post it on YouTube for free.

Am I missing something? Am I too selfish? Too greedy? Too stingy with my time? If any of our blog readers does something like this – recut trailers, make music videos, heck, run an unofficial fan site (one of those big ones that are obviously labor-intensive) please let me know. I feel like I’m missing a piece of a puzzle.

Alternately, you could all confess your guilty pleasure internet time-sucks and make me feel a little bit better.

PC

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