Watch: The Weirdest Viral Video You’ll See All Month

Back in 2010, when he was 24 years old, David Lewandowksi was tapped to work animated graphics for the movie Tron: Legacy. At that point, the film school dropout had been living in LA for eight years, having taught himself graphics software like Adobe After Effects and found work on TV commercials to pay the bills. By 2010, though, he’d mastered more sophisticated tools, becoming, in his words, the city’s “Cinema 4D head vampire.” (Cinema 4D being a sophisticated piece of graphics software.) Styling the digital world of Tron, then, seemed like a dream job.

In some ways it was. But it exacted a very real toll on the young artist. “When you’re working six or seven days a week, 12 hours a day, and you’ve alienated every girl from your life for a year, and you’ve flaked on your friends so many times that they’ve written you off—that’s not worth it,” he says. After the movie wrapped, Lewandowksi decided to take some time for a personal project. He wanted to try his hand at being a director, not just a graphics guy.

The project was supposed to be everything Tron wasn’t–something more personal, and more fulfilling. He wanted to create something, in short, that felt more like a work of art. The result was “going to the store,” quite possibly the weirdest damn thing to be uploaded to the internet in the entire 2011 calendar year.

Lewandowksi meticulously plans each shot. Image: David Lewandowski

Set to a chipper synth soundtrack, the 50-second long clip shows a realistic computer-generated man bopping down the street, his nude body contorting in all sorts of grotesque ways as he goes. It’s a sort of “Ministry of Silly Walks” for the glitch age–equal parts hilarious and nightmarish.

It also proved to be very popular, racking up nearly 16 million view on YouTube. Last month, after taking some time to work on the sci-fi movie Oblivion, Lewandowksi released the second installment of the series, “late for meeting.” It sticks to the formula established in the first: creepy computer-generated guy, bubbly synth soundtrack, and some deeply weird walks. It will soon pass 10 million views.

The inspiration for these strange videos actually came from Lewandowksi’s time on Tron. While he was busy with motion graphics–things like holographic operating systems and flashy title credits–the visual effects team was working on digitally constructing a younger Jeff Bridges. “I started to see a lot of broken, photorealistic skin renders,” Lewandowksi recalls. It reminded him of works-in-progress he’d seen from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button years earlier. “The front of the head goes one mile in one direction, the back of the head goes a mile in the other, and the teeth and the eyeballs are still in place with this capture data moving around, all rendered completely realistically,” he says. Typically, when when that happens, the response of the effects composer is “delete delete delete,” Lewandowksi says. “But I always thought that stuff was hysterical.”

A screenshot of the new video in progress. Image: David Lewandowksi

In essence, “late for meeting” and “going to the store” are elaborate reconstructions of these strange digital hiccups. Both took months of work, with meticulous planning, shooting and reshooting. “Sometimes it’s embarrassing how well-planned something so stupid is,” Lewandowksi says. “With this there’s no exception.” He cites obscure Japanese sketch comedy and British surrealism as inspirations, but in terms of actually getting the unsettling silly walks in his own videos right, it mostly just involves patience.

Working with his digital body, Lewandowksi will flip bones and invert joints, speed things up and slow things down. “Certainly there are walks that are unfunny,” he says. He surmises that the most successful shots just hint at horror, activating the fear center in the viewer’s brain without being too creepy. Ultimately, though, it’s a strangely subjective thing. Sometimes, he says, you’ll see the digital body break “in a way that’s just unaesthetic.”

The one difference with the new video is that if you come across it on YouTube, you’ll have to sit through a pre-roll ad to watch it. Lewandowksi’s sensitive to the fact that the effect of stumbling upon his 50-second jolt of surrealism might be blunted by an Olive Garden spot preceding it, but the experiment’s been successful thus far–the ad has allowed Lewandowksi to recoup a good deal of the short’s production expenses. He plans to complete the trilogy next year, vaguely hinting at plans to shoot “out of the country.”

What’s been most rewarding, though, is the freedom Lewandowksi’s been afforded by these sorts of independent projects. When you’re doing a movie, he explains, you’re part of a big, slow moving team, and the vision is very much a shared one. Sometimes, that involves compromises. With “late for meeting” and “going to the store,” he’s been able to have full confidence in the final product he’s putting out. “There’s not a single thing I’d do differently,” he says of his bizarre videos. “They’re perfect in my mind. I’m tremendously proud of that.”