Making "Spike as Spike"

The process of making “Spike as Spike” was a surprisingly short one, actually—compared to how long it takes me to complete some of my AMVs.

The idea to make the video came to me simply because I’m a big fan of MLP: FiM and BtVS, and had recently been re-watching the Buffy series when I started watching My Little Pony. I kept thinking it would be funny if James Marsters did the voice of Spike, or if the two characters met somehow, and then one night I came up with the idea of switching the audio of a MLP Spike scene with that of a Buffy Spike scene. Originally I was just going to choose a Spike & Buffy scene and use the audio from that on Spike the dragon, and then use that same BtVS scene with the “Spike the Knight” audio; however, when I looked at the finished product it just didn’t work. Buffy didn’t seem happy, and neither did Spike for that matter. So, I searched for a different scene—one where they were happy and seemingly in love. I found just what I needed in one of my favorite episodes! For those of you who know Buffy you probably recognized the scene right away—it’s the one where Willow’s powers are going nuts and everything she says is coming true…just like when she says “Why don’t they just get married?” in regard to Buffy & Spike, who have been spending a lot of time together due to Buffy trying to get information out of him about the mysterious soldiers. So, as a result, Spike proposes and Buffy accepts, and they get all lovey-dovey and weird, and…well, you know the rest.

But, anyways, the actual process went a bit like this:

I got the idea, and then I used my YouTube Downloader to convert a video I had called “Best Moments of Buffy & Spike (part 2)” into an MP3 file. I then went into Audacity (a FREE audio editing/recording program), found the section of audio I needed, copied it, deleted the rest of the audio, made a new track, and pasted my audio into the new track. I saved that and then went into Windows Live Movie Maker (a free movie maker program that comes standard on most computers with a Windows 7 series OS). I put “Spike the Knight” into the editor, put the Buffy audio in, and then went through the annoying process of cutting out useless parts of the video, saving the best parts, slowing down frames to help sync, and making sure expressions matched well with dialogue. Some frames I had to slow down to as low as 0.125x.

After finally getting the Spike & Rarity section done I got to work on the Buffy & Spike part. It was the same process over again, but with less editing in Audacity. I pretty much cued it up to the part where Spike saves her, and saved the file. But, as I mentioned earlier, the original Buffy & Spike scene just didn’t look right with the audio, so I had to find a different one. Once I had found what I needed I went through the process of trimming, deleting, and syncing all over again. It was a lot harder with real people, and I never was completely satisfied with how it looked, but I said “good enough” and got ready to upload it to YouTube. (If I only had some better editing programs I imagine I could sync those types of things at least a little better. But, oh well. J)

The ending to the video with Giles saying “Horribly wrong” was somewhat accidental. I simply hadn’t gotten around to trimming off the end of the video, and then when I was previewing it and the MLP audio faded out and Giles peeked around the corner with his line I just died laughing. Why? Because that’s exactly what was going through my head after making that video. William the Bloody with the voice of Spike the dragon and vice versa…it was just wrong. So, I decided to keep it, and uploaded the video to my newer YouTube account “Theatrical Ninja Videos”.

Currently “Spike as Spike” has over 200 views and is the 3^rd most popular video on my channel.