I had some plans for my entry into the JoCo Cruise 2021 Fancy Pants Parade, but they involved being on an actual cruise ship. When it went virtual, I assumed there would be no parade. When the call for video submissions came on 16 March, with the deadline on 31 March, I was unprepared. I’m not shopping in-person, and I didn’t think I’d be able to order materials and make anything in time.

But as much as the virtual cruise makes it impossible to do some things we would do on the real cruise, it also makes it possible to do things we couldn’t do on the real cruise. In one in-person Fancy Pants Parade, there was a person in a motion capture suit holding a sign saying ‘we’ll fix it in post’, and also a person in a green screen suit (who was controlling the tentacles of their partner’s pants.) In a virtual Fancy Pants Parade, we really can fix it in post. So I decided to try using my pants as a green screen — for what, I wasn’t sure.

At first I thought I’d try with some black jeans and hope I could tune the green screen effect for them, but then I realised I actually had blue-green jeans (purchased purely because I was excited to find jeans that were the right length for me.) I paraded ridiculously across the room in them, and Final Cut Pro immediately recognised them as the colour to apply the green screen effect to.

I settled on showing footage from previous Fancy Pants Parades on my pants. At first I thought I’d use my own pants, to not steal anyone else’s glory, but I didn’t have footage of all my own pants. I went with the winning pants from each parade, making this sort of a restrospective — a celebration of the whole tradition of Fancy Pants Parades. As the live version of Mr. Fancy Pants often says, chances are you’re best in everybody’s pants.

After submitting my entry, I duplicated the footage, enabling different settings in each copy, to make this short step-by-step. I’ve never used a green screen effect before, so this was me learning as I went along.

I submitted my video on 21 March. On 30 March, the JoCo Cruise Home Office sent out an email saying they’d only received one submission so far, and Jonathan was “nigh-inconsolable” about it. So I encouraged some friends to submit some — as I mentioned in my last post, winning by default is not as much fun as winning by crushing the hopes and dreams of your friends. So here’s how the Fancy Pants Parade went. Watch it before reading the rest of the post if you don’t want the result spoiled:

There was a lively exploration of the problem space of pants. What is fancy? Does it modify ‘pants’, or ‘parade’? What are the most important components of being ‘best in terms of pants’: physical pants-crafting, presentation, or spirit? And is that fancy pants spirit, or we’ve-been-home-for-a-year spirit? Still, it seemed that at least the chat comments were mostly in my favour, until, in a shocking twist, they found Gina’s video, which had been accidentally left out of the parade. And hers, too, used some movie magic! More debate: Culture and history? Conception, or construction? All pants, no dance? If you are silent, the pants will speak. I put my pants on one leg at a time, but in four dimensions, somehow.

It came down to a vote, and… I won! But all the particiPANTS were winners.

This is my second win… as you might guess from this year’s video, I also won in 2014. I am not the first person to win twice — the 2016 winner had also won previously, I think in 2013.