A couple of weeks before I proposed to Shorty on the 30th of November, I decided that I wanted to have a video made of the moment that I ask her to marry me. I wanted to have it as a memory that we would keep forever and maybe something we can show our kids in future. I was away on business a lot so I didn’t really have a chance to look around so I asked one of my colleagues, Mimi to help me out.
At first I thought of getting a friend of mine Nigel Sia to do it. But I heard that he was already booked out with many other jobs plus it was last minute. So Mimi then managed to find this production crew called Crazy Monkey Studios. They agreed to do the job and we met at Nerotecca itself a day before the proposal date to plan where the cameras were going to be. They didn’t know I was going to show any memes. All I told them was that I would be showing some signs through the glass door and that’s it.
Then on the day itself we did the proposal and the video was made. About a couple of weeks later, Shorty and I had just blogged about our meme proposal. It went on 9GAG and we saw it go around the internet a bit. That scared us a little. Why? Because after years of blogging we’ve learned that if you put yourself out there, you will some people saying nice things about you, and you will get some people saying bad things about you.
We’re used to taking the bad with the good but when it came to our proposal, we just wanted to remember it for the good and not the bad. So after the pictures from our blog entries went on 9GAG, we almost decided not to post the video up at all. We were pleasantly surprised though that there were lots of good comments on 9GAG about our meme proposal… much more than the bad. So that alleviated our fears a bit. But we still weren’t sure if we wanted to put the video up.
Crazy Monkey Studios though kept persuading us. They said it was an awesome video and if anything it was just to share it with a few of our friends and our blog readers. So on Tuesday night they told me that they were going to make the video public. I said okay but neither Shorty or I blogged or tweeted about it. When I woke up on Wednesday morning, I saw tweets from people having already seen the video. It was even posted on ChurpChurp by one of my other colleagues Tim2.
So by noon I decided to blog about it and then tweet about it. From then it exploded. We went to bed on Wednesday night with 60K views on the Vimeo video. When we woke up Thursday morning it had passed 100K and someone had put a copy of it on YouTube. It ended up on 9GAG for the second time.
I was a bit afraid then that it might annoy 9GAGers because from what I understand, 9GAGers don’t like reposts.
When we searched “meme proposal” on Twitter, there were new tweets every minute and the touching thing was how they were all about how they loved the video. “Meme proposal” even trended on Twitter Philippines.
The blogs and news sites all around the world caught up with it. It was on Gizmodo.
On Mashable.
On TheNextWeb.
And many other news sites. Some celebrities started sharing it too. Like Guy Kawasaki.
Or Chris Brogan
Then people started tweeting me, saying that the official music video of the song used in the video “A Thousand Years”, had loads of comments from people saying they were brought there by the meme proposal which I thought was really cool.
Then before we knew it, we saw Ryan Seacrest share it on his Facebook,
Twitter and Blog.
That’s when we were like…. OMG OMG OMG!!!
I was at my grandmother’s house on Thursday noon when I learned Christina Perri herself had tweeted about the video.
When Shorty and I both tweeted her back to thank her for the wonderful song she replied.
That was a totally surreal moment for us. Never have we ever been tweeted by a famous artist/actor/celebrity whatever.
Before we could calm down our excitement, we found out that our “meme proposal” video was one of the Most Viewed and Top Favorited videos of the day.
There were loads of comments on the video and we were afraid to read them at first. We did eventually muster the courage to read them and were touched to see that so many of them were all good comments. Every now and then you’d see a bad comment but then other YouTubers would stand up for us.
We were so moved at how everyone loved our video.
We loved how people from all over the world watched it and loved it.
And we especially loved how our fellow Malaysians were so proud that the “meme proposal” is… and will always be… MALAYSIAN (FUCK YEAH!!!)
We had the best responses. Even some 9GAGers creating little memes for us too.
The honest truth is that we never expected the video to go viral the way it did. We always thought it was just a really simple proposal. It wasn’t lavish or big or anything. It was just me proposing to Shorty at a restaurant with some meme signs… and with some of our best friends.
The proposal gave us some media attention too. Radio stations and newspapers called us up for interviews.
But all that ‘fame’ never mattered to Shorty and I. Because we always knew that it will go away as fast as it came. What mattered to us the most was that for a few days in December 2011, people from all over the world shared the joy of our wonderful moment. Thank you everyone.
We love you all!
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PS: Yes everyone. If you look closely at the video you’ll get a glimpse of this card in the stack. In case Shorty said no.
The truth is that I was pretty sure she’d say yes since we’ve been going out for 3 years (or she wouldn’t have wasted so much time on me haha)… but it was just there as a joke.
Fortunately she said YES though. So everyone will just remember this one.
If you haven’t already watched the video, here it is.
As of today (5 days since video went public), our YouTube video has had close to 1.5 million views and our Vimeo 1.3 million. There’ve been many other reposts of our video on YouTube, even one video with Portugese subtitles. Haha! Cool huh!
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space