Video of the Week: Rats SMP Animatic
Part of a certain kind of series.
Hello dear friends and subscribers; best wishes to all of you as the days get shorter and the nights get colder. I’ve been away much longer than I hoped I would, thanks to my usual “freezing-in-place” reaction to upcoming school deadlines. Some of you must know how it feels when an incomplete task ahead stops you from doing anything you want to do, the task included. It always helps to put your situation into words.
There’s a lot that I want to share with you concerning my thoughts from the past few weeks, including one major step forward in my quitting of Twitter, but that will have to come later. After all, it’s Friday, and I’ve got quite the video for you guys (I recall getting caught up in a conversation with a group project last year about whether “you guys” is a gender-neutral expression. I look forward to your thoughts on this).
The video I’ve chosen came to me just moments before I started writing. I’d picked out another last week that hasn’t made it to publication, a student film from 2012 about life and death or something. But this one is, in my opinion, equally interesting. The creator, EmblematicArt, has taken a clip from what I can only assume is the DreamSMP community of Minecraft Youtubers and animated rats over the dialogue. Interestingly, it was posted yesterday, it has 100 views, and it seems to have come from nowhere into my “recommended” front page. Take a quick look:
Are there knives in Minecraft? Is that even what they’re playing? Can the rats be explained? I like to choose a video that leaves me with more questions than answers, and that gets me thinking critically about myself. A few of you will certainly remember the Animated Rodent Showdown my sister and I ran on Instagram at the start of the pandemic. Check out the highlight in my bio if you’re not familiar — everyone involved got really into it. If I’d had more of a visual arts background, plus a handful of other changes, it could have been me making this animatic. Many of the types of people you see online can be taken as reflections of potential selves, and for that reason should not be dismissed or ridiculed. They should be feared and respected. You are who you are because of countless small decisions made, more often by others than by yourself, every waking moment.
I’m thankful that this video appeared to me today, and I hope you feel similarly about my scattered thoughts on it. It’s always nice to write nonsense like this. Go ahead and check out EmblematicArt’s channel if you’re interested in seeing more RatSMP animatics. Surely this won’t be their last. Anyway, it’ll be nice out all weekend, so make sure you get outside while the trees are still putting on their show. More posts coming soon; take care for now.