March 30th, 2012. That was the day I exported the audio track. A song where I fought back against the notion that you have to follow along with everything in popular culture. The idea then grew to make a music video for youtube, something I had done several times before back then. Then I thought I would use cartoon drawings to illustrate the references to Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger games and so on. Initially, I thought I would use still images of myself moving, until I stepped into the time consuming dark place that is rotoscoping, taking frame by frame from video to create cartoon animations.

In my inclusive thinking, I wanted to paid homage to some of my Internet friends at the time, and during that first summer, I drew many of them, such as Michelle Akin (formerly Vargas, but not the porn star), Tipsy Bartender, Grace Helbig, HejaInternet and more.

The project was then an on and off relationship, with a few drawn in early 2013 followed by an hiatus of almost a year. The addition of the quite complicated Katniss animation with the bow sparked a recurring theme with me reading books. Mockingjay, 50 shades of Grey, the Fault in our stars. Harry Potter had an early three part animation with the stone, the basilisk and the kiss with Cho, which was then followed by the Twilight part, which had no animated movements. This was a time saver but also fit well into the video.

I realized that the perspective on the audience stand was incorrect, as I in the foreground was too small. This resulted in me moving the stand back, and thereby adding many more empty seats that needed to be filled. As that process continued, so did the addition of two balconies, which on the one part contained anime characters from my childhood, and then popular culture references to Mr Holland’s opus, A beautiful mind, Spaceballs, A nightmare before Christmas, Office Space and Handmaid’s tale. In fact, the video contains more visual references because the lyrics of the song were contained to 2012.

In the last two weeks before upload I added around 20 more people to the audience, and while doing that, moving some characters back for various reasons. Aside from the stands and the balconies, there is also a backstage shot with four people, and some people in front of the stage, Herman the photographer, Dane Walker the conductor and Tomas and Malin. IJustWantToBeCool-Victor doing his Poka mig-dance from an older video was included, as well as the child tv character Björne.

The decision of who to be included in the video was the most problematic one. I obviously know many more people that are in the audience, but the process was that I drew a person around the time that I in some way interacted with that person. This sadly meant that some people that might have been obvious in the longer perspective, were not included. There are even people included that I might not have much contact with anymore, but that I kept as a testament to the process of making the video over 6 years.

I am really happy to have uploaded it, and I have gotten so many positive comments from people who are part of the video. Shoutout to Anton for helping me with segments of the music, and for those that provided me with pictures of their loved ones, unknown to the person that I drew them.

I talked about the process of finishing long-term projects in a Good Talk video, and the feeling now when the video is out, is a form of exhausted happiness. But now it’s time to move on to new projects. The road goes ever on. See the behind the scenes video below: