Not devastated. Not heartbroken, but just like, oddly reluctant to let it go. Like you’re deleting a tiny piece of your stream’s history. I’m sure I’m not the only streamer who has looked back at their old clips and reminisced about moments that brought so much joy. Especially if, like me, you’ve not streamed for a while and miss streaming generally. So to actively choose to remove something that was a part of your stream feels like you’re hurting yourself on purpose.
Is it just me? Let me know if you’ve ever felt this way about something you’ve made for stream and then got rid of.
One of the reasons I started streaming was the appeal of figuring out how to build interactive nonsense. If I could make people laugh while also making them ask, “Wait, how did you do that!?” was half the fun.
A lot of streamers grab gimmicks made by other people and use those to make interactive streams, but what stops you from going a bit deeper into the tools you have at your disposal and asking:
“What stupid thing could only exist on my stream?”
For me, the fun was taking:
- OBS
- Streamer.bot or MixItUp
- Pre-edited video clips
- Virtual greenscreen filters
- Source clones
- Alternative camera angles
- Audio layering
and turning them into things like:
- My Earthquake gimmick that caused a crack in the wall behind me and dust to fall from the ceiling. The tiktok video for this got over 100k views, and a news reporter thinking it was genuine…
- My decapitation effect where my head would be chopped off by an axe-wielding skeleton in real time.
- My hot tub scene, with shimmering water and bubbles that would appear if someone did the !fart command while the hot tub was active.
Thoses ones still exist, but one I’ve decided it’s time to let go is my “Find Peter Parker” gimmick. Perhaps it’s because of the work that went into pulling this one off that I kept it around for longer than it should have, but I think memes and cultural references have a limited shelf life, and the movie this gimmick is based on came out in 2021. It’s time for it to go. I disabled it a while back, but I stopped short of actually removing it from OBS and Streamer.bot until now. It’s stupid, I know, but this blog post is giving me closure and letting me delete the scenes, sources and Streamer.bot actions that made it.
Here’s how it looked on stream. You wouldn’t know from that clip just how much work went into it, but for those interested I’ll break down how I made it on the other side of this clip.
F in chat. o7 to one of my favourite gimmicks.
How I made it
If you search youtube you’ll find a greenscreen video of Ned saying “Find Peter Parker”:
I think most people would have stopped at that, just thrown it into an OBS scene and be done with it. But what I wanted was something a bit more random, that I could react to in real time, to have a conversation with, so that every time the gimmick was redeemed you’d get a different experience.
So I also grabbed the full scene of Ned using the sling ring to find Peter Parker:
And then I got into DaVinci Resolve and created lots of short clips:
- Nan screaming (28s into the original full scene video)
- Nan throwing something (32s in)
- MJ looking puzzled while camera pushes in (3 mins in)
- Ned saying “Great it’s just some random guy” (3 mins 8 seconds in)
- MJ saying “You’re Peter?” (3 mins 18 seconds in)
- MJ Nodding (3 mins 23 seconds in)
- Nan waving (3 mins 27 seconds in)
- The greenscreen video was also chopped up into 3 distinct short clips, starting with ned saying “Find Peter Parker”
The problem with chopping up all these individual clips is the original video had background music, which meant switching between clips would cause choppy background music. So the first step was running the original video audio through a tool to separate the the background music from the voices.
I then overlaid just the voice track into Da Vinci to replace the original audio track.
The clips with Nan screaming and throwing things also originally had Spider-Man talking in them, so for those I stripped out the full audio, and overdubbed them with my own sound effects, e.g. a scream sound effect, a swoosh and crash for the throwing clip.
I then found an epic musical score to replace the original scene music, “Olympus” by Ross Bugden:
I only needed the first 30 seconds or so, but this meant I could now play clips in any order inside OBS, without the music chopping between edits.
OBS setup
Two scenes:
Spider-Man – Cuts → MJ, Ned and Nan Clips.
Spider-Man – Portals → Greenscreen portal clips with my side camera source.
This meant I could toggle source visibility without flickering, as the gimmick moved back and forth between characters and me inside the portal. I also added the replacement background music + my mic on both scenes so that the music flowed seamlessly between scene switching.
Streamer.Bot Setup
Older Streamer.bot versions didn’t let you do inline if/else conditional branches, so the only way to do it was to split my gimmick into 6 separate actions.
“Spiderman – Main” – the thing that got triggered by the channel point or command, then a bunch of additional ones that the main action could trigger:
- Spiderman – Nan Scream
- Spiderman – Nan Throw
- Spiderman – Nan Wave
- Spiderman – Random Guy
- Spiderman – You Are Peter
The Main action would do things like reset all the source visibility, track which scene you were on when the gimmick was triggered (so it would return to it after the gimmick ended), execute timed scene switching and source visibility, perform randomness and trigger the right sub actions.
So you end up with this sequence:
- Ned says “Find Peter Parker” – a portal opens showing me side-on.
- Cut to MJ looking puzzled
- Cut to me inside another portal
- Randomness check – Cut to Ned saying “Great it’s just some random guy”, or MJ saying “You’re Peter?”
- Cut to me inside another greenscreen portal
- Another Randomness check – Cut to Nan screaming, or Nan waving.
- Cut to me again inside the portal
- If Nan screamed – cut to Nan throwing something
- Finally – if ned didn’t say it earlier, cut to Ned saying “Great, it’s just some random guy”
What’s your favourite unique stream gimmick you’ve made?
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