I’m currently rewatching The Big Bang Theory. I watched it once while it was airing on TV and I liked it a lot. It ran for more than ten years and I got so used to the characters and locations that when it ended, I felt a bit sad. It was like saying goodbye to real people and places, as if Leonard, Sheldon, Penny, Howard, Raj, Stuart, Bernadette, Amy… and all the locations (the apartments, the university…) had actually existed in real life.
Anyway, I started to rewatch the show a few weeks ago, and I was amused (as often) by a scene in the seventh episode of the second season, called “The Panty Pinata Polarization”. At one moment, Penny enters the boys’ apartment asking for help to access the wifi network, because she was locked out and facing a video Sheldon had recorded.
Here’s the movie clip of that scene:
When I was watching this scene, I paused and zoomed in on the browser to try to read the URL of the video, which was a strange one (as is often the case in movies or TV shows):
http://www.websearach/htb83.agp
I thought it would be fun if Sheldon’s video was actually watchable online. Obviously, a URL structured like this wouldn’t lead me anywhere, but I searched for it based on the file name htb83.agp, which returned a few results, including the show’s official website. But no video. For the record, the agp file extension seems legit, but it’s not a video file format, rather a text-based one.
So, as there was no trace of Sheldon’s video online, I thought it would be fun to upload it myself, for the TBBT fans who would also have the idea to look for the video. But I was facing a problem: the video Sheldon recorded was only watchable on Penny’s computer in the context of the scene, and I wanted the original video file, just as Sheldon had recorded it.
That’s when I told myself that it might work if I edited/cut/cropped the good parts of the clip, in order to mimic the video as if it was the original one Sheldon had recorded.
I opened the clip in Premiere and started working on it. I faced a few challenges such as the pre-recorded laughs, Sheldon’s face in the video not always being visible while he was speaking, Penny’s shaky laptop while she was watching the video with Leonard…
Well, it took more time than I thought and it’s not perfect, but it eventually turned out not too bad. See for yourself:
Here’s how I dealt with the challenges I wrote above:
- Pre-recorded laughs: I actually easily managed to remove them thanks to a tool named LALAL.AI.
- Sheldon’s face on his video not always visible: I had to take random snapshots of Sheldon’s face and include them on the timeline, where his voice can be heard but his face isn’t visible. In the final export, those parts make the video kinda laggy, but it’s ok.
- To remove everything except Sheldon’s face: I had to cut the scene in several parts, and zoom/spin the video to crop it so only Sheldon’s face is visible.
- Unstable laptop: I imported the whole video into a new sequence and applied a stabilizer effect.
Here’s what the timeline looks like:
Well, it was fun to make. The video is on Youtube, and I hope some people will stumble upon it while fulfilling their curiosity. I just wish I had had that idea around 2008/2009, while the show was actually airing, but hey, it’s never too late to make useless fun things!