My Big Messi 2015 Project: Hours of Work for… Well, a Story
Alright, so cast your mind back to Messi in 2015. The guy was just unreal, wasn’t he? Pure magic. Everyone remembers the trophies, the goals, that whole MSN thing lighting up the world. But I got this itch, this crazy idea to really, properly document his genius from that season. Not just the headline stuff, but everything.
My grand plan? I was going to create the ultimate video compilation. I’m talking every ridiculous dribble, every no-look pass that split defenses wide open, every piece of insane control. The kind of stuff that makes you rewind ten times. I wanted to show the whole picture, the stuff that highlight reels often miss. Seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, naturally.
Diving In: The Hunt for Footage
First job: get the raw material. And let me tell you, that was a proper mission. I spent weeks, no joke, weeks, trawling the internet. Obscure forums, dodgy streaming sites, old recordings from who-knows-where. I was desperate for every single match, every possible angle. The quality varied wildly – some clips were crisp, others looked like they’d been filmed on a calculator. But I was determined.
Then, the watching phase. I must have sat through every single Barcelona game from that 2014-2015 season. Multiple times. My eyes were square. I had notebooks filled with timestamps, little comments like “that insane turn near the halfway line” or “the way he just ghosted past three guys.” My desk was a mess of notes and half-empty coffee cups.
The Editing Grind: My Poor Old PC
So, I had amassed this mountain of clips. Terabytes of footage, seriously. My computer was not happy; it sounded like it was about to take off most of the time. I was using some pretty basic editing software, nothing professional. Just trying to piece it all together. The process was a slog:
- Cutting out the exact moments I wanted – frame by frame sometimes.
- Trying to make the transitions look half-decent (mostly failed at that).
- Finding music that wasn’t awful and wouldn’t get the video instantly flagged.
- And the rendering… oh god, the rendering. Hours and hours of just waiting, hoping the program wouldn’t crash.
There were so many times I nearly binned the whole project. Especially that one night the software crashed and I lost about six hours of meticulous work. Just gone. I nearly threw my monitor out the window. My family definitely thought I’d finally lost it, hunched over the computer screen day and night, muttering about Messi’s left foot.
The Masterpiece (Sort Of)
After what felt like an eternity, I actually finished it. It wasn’t exactly a polished, professional job. The edits were a bit clunky, some of the footage was still a bit fuzzy. But it was mine. A good solid, like, 25-minute video packed with moments that truly showed Messi’s 2015 brilliance, the stuff beyond the usual goal compilations.
I showed it to a few of my mates, the ones who really get football. And they were buzzing, said it was amazing to see all those little details they’d forgotten or missed. That felt pretty good, I won’t lie.
And Then… The Internet Happened
So, feeling pretty proud of myself, I uploaded it to one of those big video platforms. Thought I was doing a service to football fans, you know? It stayed up for about, oh, maybe a week. Then, WHAM. Copyright infringement notice. La Liga themselves. Video taken down. Just like that. All those hours, all that effort, vaporized.
I tried to appeal, sent a message explaining it was a labor of love, a fan tribute, you know, “fair use” and all that jazz. Got back some automated reply that basically said “tough luck, mate.” Classic. What really got under my skin, though, was a few months later, some big official sports channel released a “Messi 2015: The Hidden Magic!” type video. And wouldn’t you know it, some of the very specific, obscure plays I’d painstakingly dug up were featured pretty prominently. The exact same angles. Could be a coincidence, I suppose. Or maybe someone with a bigger budget and better lawyers saw my little video before it got nuked and thought, “That’s a good idea.”
So yeah, that was my grand Messi 2015 project. It taught me a heck of a lot about video editing, the joys of copyright law, and maybe a little bit about how the world really works. I don’t really bother with massive video projects like that anymore. Too much heartache. Now I just stick to watching the games, yelling at the TV, and having a good old moan about things with my friends. It’s simpler, and honestly, a lot less work.
