This video seems to have sparked a fair few comments which need responding to, but I’ll address the most important one first: Alex’s Mustache. Is it real? Well, it’s kind of real, but not really real. When I told him about a week ago that I wanted to shoot another episode of The Alex and Charlie Format, but set in the past, I pretty quickly came up with the idea for a mustache, which I then asked him to start growing. There wasn’t any resistance on his end when I asked him to do this by the way, he’s a pretty good friend, eh? On the day of the shoot however, it wasn’t quite as hairy as I would have hoped, so the solution we came up with was to extenuate it with some mascara, lent to us kindly by Beckydoll. Thus, Alex’s slightly pedophilic tashe was born. Don’t worry, you won’t be seeing it again any time soon.
Next up, the old style VHS effect. Simply put, what you’re looking at isn’t actually an effect at all, but real footage from a VHS-C camera that I inherited from my Gran a year or so ago. As soon the camera came into my possession I knew that I just had to make a YouTube video with it, how could I not? But it was a long time before I came up with the idea of shooting an Alex and Charlie Prequel, and even longer before I actually got everything I needed in place to be able to make the video. I bought some software so that I could digitise the composite signal from the camera, then some new VHS-C tapes to record onto, and managed to borrow a 1995 CRT computer from a lovely guy called Martyn who I met on twitter. It wasn’t a 1991 computer, sure, but seeing as I didn’t have to spend a penny on it, and that it was in perfect working condition, it worked brilliantly for what I needed.
There also seems to be a scary number of people commenting on the video who are confused by the fact that it’s set in 1991, but that Alex and I seem to be exactly the same age as we are now. My hope is that, at the very least, most of the people leaving these comments are posting them self-aware of how silly they are. But for those who really aren’t sure, there are two solutions to your problem. Either Alex and myself have somehow acquired the fountain of youth, (or some similar method to reverse the aging process) or, we were just joking and we filmed the video yesterday. In fact, a pretty important rule that you should follow about watching me in general, is that you shouldn’t always take everything I say seriously. Teasing you is fun for me :)
