Time Waster - WSJ.com

-- Summary article type=Sports Page=Free Article-->

-- Summary article type=Politics and Policy Page=Free Article-->

Lasse Gjertsen's has no spoken language, zero sudden injuries and nothing in the way of narrative or pop-culture reference.

No copyrighted material was harmed in the making of this film.
Yet, in just a month, " " has been viewed more than 1.5 million times, according to YouTube's tally, and the video earned the highest user ratings over that span -- making it a certified viral-video hit.

The title of Mr. Gjertsen's successful submission refers to his skill at playing musical instruments. By calling himself an amateur, Mr.

Gjertsen also inflates his stature as musician -- the star performer can't play a lick. But in the three-minute video, the Norwegian weaves together a drums-and-piano duet, creating a knee-bouncing tune that substitutes crafty editing for the instrumental skills Mr. Gjertsen lacks.

His trick: stop-motion video.
with a borrowed drum kit sitting in a wood-paneled suburban basement in Mr. Gjertsen's hometown of Larvik, Norway.

He enters stage right dressed in formal attire -- prepared to conduct a symphony, perhaps -- and proceeds to fumble with the drums for a few moments. How much of this is acting or actual ineptness isn't known, but the would-be percussionist certainly looks uncomfortable at the controls.
Suddenly, the image leaps into herky-jerky motion as Mr.

Gjertsen repeatedly slams his drumstick into the kit. Each disjointed drumbeat, including some distinct sounds created by Mr. Gjertsen hitting himself in the head with a drumstick, was captured individually.

Mr. Gjertsen stitched together and rearranged dozens of individual clips to create a smooth backbeat. Through blisteringly fast editing, Mr.

Gjertsen is heard performing dazzling feats of syncopation -- all while his body is strangely out of synch.
After a minute-long drum solo, Mr. Gjertsen strikes a chime and the screen splits in two.

A second Mr. Gjertsen -- dressed in dorky sportswear replete with wristbands -- takes a seat at a piano. Mr.

Gjertsen and his clone proceed to perform a duet of stop-motion pop music, with the piano melody fitted perfectly with the drumbeat. At one point, the drummer stops for a smoke while the pianist lets loose a disorderly shuffle up and down the keyboard.
"I have some music sensibility," the 22-year-old Mr.

Gjertsen admits. He self-produced , but it was made entirely of computerized samples and without any interference from physical instruments. "I cannot play the piano or the drums.

"
To make "Amateur," Mr. Gjertsen recorded each analog beat and note one by one on video. He transferred the sounds from each video clip into audio files, which he could rearrange with the -- the same software he's used to create his all-digital music in the past.

After organizing the sound files into the right order, Mr. Gjertsen reconstructed the pattern with the original video files. In the final product, he insists, nothing about his performance was digitally enhanced.

"You have the original sounds from the video," he says.
The finished video, with its rapid-fire barrage of clips, seemed impossibly tedious to construct. Not true, Mr.

Gjertsen admits. The drum portion consists of only 40 distinct beats, which didn't take too long to arrange. The piano melody was a different story: "That was about 130 different clips," he explains.

A single note or cord, once captured on video, might be used several times in the video. But to create the effects of his body sliding up and down the piano bench took substantial efforts at choreography.
Plus, Mr.

Gjertsen adds, it's not as if he has the ability to play the melody straight through, from the opening note until the last. "I didn't play the song in slow motion and just cut it together," he says. Even now, after all his tinkering with the melody, Mr.

Gjertsen says he can't duplicate the one-note-at-a-time opening of the piano segment in real time.
The whole project -- from planning to filming to editing -- took two days to complete. He released "Amateur" via YouTube on Nov.

7.
Mr. Gjertsen created his first stop-motion music video three years ago while studying animation at a British art school.

In that video, called " ," Mr. Gjertsen created individual beats using only his mouth.

The result -- much more annoying than "Amateur" -- has also become popular on YouTube since its release last May.

(The human-beatbox-via-stop-motion-video act was popular enough to be for Cartoon Network's show "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.")
As a homework assignment, however, it wasn't well received.
The teacher "didn't like it all," Mr.

Gjertsen recalls bitterly. Academic rejection, both at the British school and back at an animation program in Norway, left Mr. Gjertsen out of sorts.

He filled his hours watching "South Park" and "The Simpsons."
"That's what I did last year," he says. "But then this 'Amateur' video happened and I'm getting so much positive feedback -- job offers and everything.

" Mr. Gjertsen says he just returned from Italy, where he began work on music-video project. He credits the high visibility of "Amateur" for landing him the job.

Mr. Gjertsen's story of YouTube redemption isn't quite a rags-to-riches saga -- for the time being, the former student is back at home living with his folks. But it's another example of the video-sharing site's impact.

Without YouTube's easy-access mass audience, Mr. Gjertsen probably wouldn't have bothered creating "Amateur." And even if he had, it's likely only a few people would have seen it buried somewhere on an obscure Web site.

How did "Amateur" find such a large and largely approving audience in just a month? Mr. Gjertsen isn't all that interested in analyzing his sudden popularity.

But it's possible that the language-free aspect of his music video played a strong role, given the globalization of Web entertainment. The most-watched video in YouTube's history is " " by "inspirational comedian" Judson Laipply. The video has taken more than 36 million viewers on an interminably long dance medley spanning Presley to Timberlake (sans lyrics).