July 15, 2009: One crazy day! The day actually began at 9:00 the night before, as the clock reached midnight on the east coast, and the winner was announced. That's when the world became a very surreal place.. then a very dark place for the next 24 hours.As most of you know, the kids and I decided to enter a Harry Potter contest on Youtube. It all started out so simple: one day I was surfing around my typical list of Harry Potter websites as I was sucked into the hype surrounding the release of the 6th film. On one of the sites I saw an ad for a video contest, the kind of thing that typically gets my attention as I enjoy the creative challenge. This one was simple: create a 90 second video explaining a Harry Potter style magical potion, how to make it and then demonstrate what effects it had. The only problem, the contest deadline for entries was that night at midnight. We had very little time to put this together.
I quickly grabbed Amanda and Little Calvin (Tyler was in Colorado visiting the grandparents for the week) and we began to brainstorm possible ideas. As I had been working on editing my mom's documentary, and had been neck deep in listening to stories of my Uncle's cruel pranks on my mom as a kid, suddenly a story popped to mind. At one point in time, while my mom was getting ready for a date, my uncle and a buddy snuck into the bathroom, and slipped out all her clothes, towels, bath mats, etc. leaving her stranded in the bathroom. Then, with her stuck, they delivered her diary to her waiting date, so that he could read everything she had written about him. This story has always been a favorite growing up, and suddenly we had a direction for our video... just done in a magical way.
We decided to create a video that would have much the same effect: it combines a bunch of random ingredients that when drunk, would magically give the drinker the power to "zap" things in and out. Little Calvin would make the potion, then in an attempt to humiliate his sister prior to her first date, would zap the towels, bath mats and shower curtains out of the bathroom. Then, taking his prank to the next level (as is normal for me), he would zap his sisters date into the house, then into the bathroom. This seemed really funny to us in our little naive world. I never really considered how the rest of the world may interpret this little stunt. In my mind.. if the video could have continued, the very next scene would have shown the poor, embarrassed young kid bailing out of the bathroom door.
When it came time to film this particular scene that night, we had a problem. In my original vision of this I pictured finding some obviously young kid starring in the "date" role. He'd get zapped in all dressed up in a shirt and tie, holding a corsage and looking all nervous, and then get zapped in the bathroom. Seeing the fear and awkwardness of the young, scared and obviously inexperienced kid, would create the awkward comedy that I was going for. But this particular night.. there were no teenagers to be found.. anywhere. All the kids from church were at scout camp that week, and the neighbors were all gone. Little Calvin and I even rode around the neighborhood on our bikes trying to find a teenager... ANY teenager. But none could be found. In desperation to get something in place so I could at least get the timing down, we decided to film me in the role, until we could find someone, then I'd just swap out the shot. But before we knew it, the midnight deadline was upon us, and not thinking about the public perception we uploaded our contest entry and called it good. The video made us laugh, and that's all that counted. Besides.. I figured with all the competition, this would never go anywhere.
Over the course of the next few weeks, the video got some attention, receiving maybe a few hundred hits from people watching and voting on their favorites. We just had to wait until July 15th to find out who won. And the prize was very simple: the winning video was to be featured on the home page of YouTube. Nothing big. We did the video for fun, not because the prize seemed all that great.
Now we are back to July 14th, 9 PM pacific, as I logged into Youtube only to see Little Calvin featured on the front. How cool! We had won and I was excited.
Now.. quick side note... a few years ago I saw a commercial which made me smile.. I don't even remember the company that it was for. But it showed a group of web developers launching their new website. Soon after hitting the launch button they received 10 orders and they all cheered. Suddenly it was 50 orders, then 100 orders and they all went ballistic in happiness for finding success. But then the numbers kept climbing.. 1,000 orders, 10,000 orders, 50,000 orders, 125,000 orders.. and suddenly all that excitement was swept away and was replaced by horror as everyone realized that they now had to fulfill all these orders. They wanted success.. but when it came on suddenly, somewhere a line was crossed from "cool" to "fear". That about sums up the next 24 hours for me.
By midnight.. just 3 hours in, Little Calvin's video had over 8,000 views, doubling any other video I had ever posted. And suddenly I started feeling a little.. uncomfortable... It was like 8,000 people were staring at my kid, and peering into my living room. Then I realized there was a whole other level to this. I checked my e-mail only to find my in-box absolutely flooded with e-mails, coming in at almost 3 every minute. About 90% of the comments were very positive and encouraging.
"Cute video."
"This kids a winner!"
"Ohhh. how cute!"
"You totally made me laugh!"
On and on.. but mixed in with these comments, I found something I never expected.. HATE. THREATS. PROFANITY. People were saying ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE, SICKENING things about my child. I couldn't believe it. This was simply a kid who had entered a contest to show his love for the Harry Potter characters, movies and books that he loves, and people were saying far worse things than I ever thought I would be reading. I suddenly found myself sick to my stomach.. what had I just done?
By the time I woke up the next morning, after a very light sleep, over 90,000 people had watched the video and my in-box was overflowing. Again.. mostly positive comments, but many were filled with hate, vulgarity and even threats against us for putting our child on Youtube, for subjecting him to witchcraft, and even to forcing him to drink glass shards. PEOPLE ACTUALLY THOUGHT IT WAS REAL! Hasn't anyone heard of movie making?! Yes, and the Harry Potter characters actually fly on brooms and cast spells. Good Grief.
That's when I realized that my little naive idea, was being perceived in a way that I never intended in my rush to get it finished and uploaded.
"What a sick kid! He zaps some old fat creep into his sisters bathroom to rape her!"
WHAT!? NO NO NO NO NO! That is so not what I was thinking!! But the hate mail continued to pour in. I never dreamed people would read sexual innuendos into our video, they would look at it as promoting homosexuality (I'm totally not kidding), violence, sexual molestation, racism (not kidding there either) and child abuse.
By the end of the 24 hours on Youtube's home page, I was counting down the minutes until it was removed and things could finally calm down a bit. The video was getting close to clearing 200,000 views, numbers so far beyond what I was expecting, it was nuts. I spent several hours that night attempting to carefully go through over 1200 comments, deleting all the offensive ones, so that if Little Calvin ever looked through the comments he wouldn't freak out. People have a right to not like the video, that is totally fine and in our free country they can disagree or not understand the video. I left those comments there. But for those that got out of hand, or used foul language, I exercised my rights as the video owner to delete their comments and block them from making future ones. If they can exercise their freedoms, so can I.
Now, a week and a half later, views have slowed dramatically. We will soon cross the 200,000 threshold, which is still so weird to me. It was just so bizarre to read all these comments. The good news... as a struggling filmmaker, trying to find ways of getting eyeballs on my work.. suddenly having my Youtube channel pounded for a day, was great. Not only did our Harry Potter video get slammed, but all my videos as well. I went from 2 subscribers to almost 150 overnight, thus giving me more chances at exposure for my films. It just felt very odd, like having 200,000 people peering in my living room, and being critical of what they saw all at once.
Was the prize a help, or a hindrance? A blessing or a curse? Did I just do something to help my career, or expose my kids to the scum of the world? I haven't fully sorted my feelings out yet. But what a wild and crazy day, one that I will not soon forget!
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Side note: Last week I was doing some late night channel surfing to wind down for the day and came across the intro for "The Soup" on the E! network. Suddenly Joel McHale, the host, starts taking about clips of Harry Potter fans making videos of potions and I literally yelled "NOOOOOOO!" at my TV. It was weird enough to wrap my head around 200,000 Youtube views, but having my child on "The Soup" was just too much. Luckily, He was referring to something else. For a second I feared this could get even more out of control, but it didn't go there.
