It started, on Tuesday, May 4, as a side comment on Friendfeed during the last stretch of a reference desk shift.

“Code Monkey get up get coffee….Code Monkey go to job”

I had Jonathan Coulton‘s song as a quiet earworm.  And then Dorothea chimed in with the next line and over two days, one line at a time, fifteen people joined the sing-a-long (type-a-line-of-lyric-a-long?)

The earworm got worse and worse. By Thursday my answer to everything was “Code Monkey Like Fritos.”

About halfway through Wednesday, I had an idea. Dangerous those.  What if we did a video in the same fashion, with each of us sing one line at a time? So, Thursday morning in a fit of brilliance (or raging insanity–either is possible) I put it out to the LSW libs….

The response was immediate. David Rothman agreed to be on standby if I got stuck with video conversion or editing.  Jason Griffey pointed out we needed to decide on format and helped figure out the whats of that (though I would still end up converting a lot of .mov files). And I set up a spreadsheet with lyrics so people could claim their favorite lines.  Names poured in. That was just in the first hour.

Because I can rarely count entirely on my memory, I opened up a blog post so I could start documenting the process cause a) whoa and b) I’m a librarian and apparently feel the need to take notes.

I checked cnet Download for different video editing software. I had Windows Movie Maker but wasn’t sure that would have all the functions I wanted. I ultimately ended up going with Nero Vision.

I also bought a copy of the karaoke version of Code Monkey from JC. I’ve heard it many a time now and have a feeling I’ll find other uses for it in the future. (Next LSW meet up?)

By the end of May, I had all of the clips. Real life, finals, and vacations had slowed us down from compiling. Now it was all in my hands.

Nero Vision was actually the third video editor I tried.  I also tried Windows Movie Maker and Video Pad.  WMM wouldn’t give me the editing granularity I was looking for and VideoPad was having issues with about a third of the videos. I edited the first thirty seconds or so six or seven times, moving from editor to editor.

When I did finally decide on Nero Vision, it wouldn’t read about 8 of the videos because they were mpeg4 and it doesn’t like that. Prism Video Converter to the rescue (I also got conversion assistance from Media-Convert.com and David Rothman).

It took about nine hours of actual editing, with other hours scattered across the month for converting, nagging people for videos, running around my apartment singing Code Monkey.

I finished the video about 4 a.m., much to Gypsy’s confusion and frustration. About every twenty minutes she would come to whine at me, attempting to get me to go to bed. I told her she was welcome to go on to bed without me, but she chose to sit on the balcony, chase her mini-mouse toys, and gripe at me. One bonus: If I keep her awake until 4 a.m., she’s a little less likely to be hopping up and down on me at 6 a.m. demanding breakfast.

But it went live this morning! For your viewing pleasure

and for those who are curious–here’s a cute cartoon version with Jonathan Coulton singing it.