My Apologies, David Fincher
A few words about never being done
Back in 2023, I had a very stupid idea. I loved that joke meme, where people stuck “What I’ve Done” by Linkin Park on the endings of various movies. It was a play on the ending of Michael Bay’s Transformers, and it made me laugh every time. I wondered, “Had anyone put the song on the end of The Irishman?” Thematically, it seemed like a no-brainer, but I couldn’t find anyone who’d done it, so I did it myself.
My next thought was, “I’ve gotta do this for Oppenheimer.” It was only October that year, and Oppenheimer was still exclusively playing in cinemas, so I had to wait a bit longer for the film to have its home media release. The moment it did, I pirated a copy (sorry, sorry… not actually) and got to work.
It was a slightly harder job than expected. There was score over the whole final scene of Oppenheimer, which I could simply remove, except there was also crucial dialogue I wanted to keep.
Oppenheimer: Albert?
Einstein: Hmm?
Oppenheimer: When I came to you with those calculations. We thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world?
Einstein: I remember it well. What of it?
Oppenheimer: I believe we did.
I needed the music to build under that bit of dialogue before taking over and leading into the late Chester Bennington wailing, “Whaaaaaat I’ve dooooooone, I’ll face myself…” I found an AI audio engineering tool online, similar to the one Peter Jackson used on his Beatles documentary Get Back, in order to split the soundtrack from that Oppenheimer scene into separate channels for voice, music, and sound effects. It worked remarkably well, pulling the dialogue into a separate track for me to layer in with that Linkin Park song. Still the timing of things was off, and rather than edit the clip itself, I opted to haphazardly lengthen a section of the song’s intrumentals, repeating one section of the track and futzing with the volume to make it work. I was never happy with it, but I posted it.
That was November 9, 2023. It went up on Twitter, and within hours it had gone viral, getting tens of thousands of likes and thousands of retweets. Then it got taken down. A copyright strike from Universal. I tried posting it again, but it still got flagged.
At the same time I had gotten some feedback about the clip, advising me it was too long to make the joke work. I disagreed, but I figured it might be worth editing the clip down to fit the shorter length of the necessary song clip. That might protect it from being flagged by Universal’s anti-piracy bots. So I did just that.
It still got taken down, but it was the beginning of my tinkering. Not only had I cut out most of the montage following Cillian Murphy’s final, devastating line, I had actually slowed down the final shot of him closing his eye in order to get the timing right. Few noticed, but when I saw my joke video start spreading, uncredited, on Instagram, it was often this version. I knew it was my cut, because of that slowed down shot, just like I knew when it was my longer cut because of how I’d lengthened the song track. The only attempt I saw to merely copy my video rather than steal it was not as good, first off, but was given away by the dialogue track not having the movie’s original score fully removed. So yeah, mine was the original, and it was better. I don’t actually care about getting credit for a joke video made using pirated material, though I’ll admit I was perturbed by others taking it and putting their own watermarks on it. A disturbing kind of dishonesty, I think, where there aren’t any actual stakes involved, so why do that?
Ah well. Still, it was not the end of my journey with this very stupid joke. The videos had consistently gotten taken down, which led me to make other attempts to get it to stick. About a week after my original post, I decided to try again. Oppenheimer was officially released digitally at that point, and I figured perhaps now Universal would lighten up. But I also took the opportunity to tweak the video even more.
I had originally taken the Linkin Park track directly from one of the original meme videos. Not the first one, but the first one I saw, by Jack Aling, who hilariously put it on the ending of The Godfather. That 30-second cut of the song is what I’d lengthened for my first cut of the Oppenheimer version. Since then, I’d found another cut of the track, which had more of the song’s instrumental in it. Perfect, I thought, for fixing my issues with my shoddy song editing. The problem was the timing no longer of the music no longer fit the video. Well, I had already taken to editing the video for the shortened version, so I went ahead and did and edited a longer version. Trimming some shots, slowing some others down to extend them, all to get the visuals to match the beat of the music.
In terms of pure editing, this was the most satisfied I’d been with the video so far. But I was not satisfied at all. That’s because the music didn’t sound right. The audio, by the time it got to me, had been compression beyond beyond salvagable. At least, I didn’t have the knowhow. You can hear it yourself. The music sounds tinny, and big drop when the vocals come in that the end doesn’t have the oomph of the earlier, more bass-y version. I couldn’t fix it, but that’s fine, because it got taken down again anyway.
Here and there, I’d try posting it again, and each time it would get taken down. I believe eventually I got a post of the shorter version to stick, but by that point the ship had sailed.
Then, this week, Bluesky finally upped their video upload limit from 60 seconds to 3 minutes, and I simply knew I had to take advantage and post the Oppy meme. I considered posting the original version I’d made, but I was stuck on the idea that it could be better.
So I went back to that third version I had made, with the tinny sounding music, and I started playing around. I realized that using some EQ tools, I could get most of that audio track sounding better, but the ending of the track still didn’t pack any punch. My solution was to take the last section from the original version’s audio, and stitch it onto the ending of the newer one. Eventually I got it there, but in the process I found myself noticing little issues with the editing of the video itself. It just wasn’t on beat in the right way, and the dialogue track was actually out of sync. I no longer had that original stipped dialogue track, and didn’t feel like going through that AI process again, so I simply shifted the position of the current audio track to get it in sync and then started on editing the video to match the music.
Some time later, I posted this version on Bluesky, calling it my “masterpiece.”
Pretty good! Except then I watched it again, and I noticed the dialogue still wasn’t exactly in sync, and anyway I’d mistimed some of the edits toward the end. Rather than coming in on the beat, the edits felt like they were rushing the music. I wasn’t going to deleted the Bluesky post. People had already started sharing this version, and it was good enough.
But not really. I went back to work immediately, fiddling and fiddling. Finally I got it to where the edits felt more natural.
Yet watching it again now, I notice little things. An edit early on that could use some tweaking. A bit later on where one shot feels like it’s held slightly too long, which another little edit could fix. And knowing me, at some point I will fix it. But that won’t be the end of it, becuase I’ll notice more little details that could be better.
Recently, David Fincher has been releasing 4K versions of all his movies. Rather than simply doing new scans, putting together new masters, and releasing them, Fincher has been doing his Fincher thing. He’s made hundreds of little adjustments. Shots stabilized and their movement altered to feel more rhythmically satisfying. Objects added and removed from frames. Digital reflections, sharpening, straightened window drapes, objects moved to correct continuity errors, and tons more. It’s the kind of fiddling that I’ve called out in the past. I’ve joked that Fincher is crazy. But as you can see, I totally sympathize. I’m crazy, too. The work never really feels done.
My apologies, David Fincher.