About

"It Was At This Moment He Knew He Fucked Up" is a catchphrase often featured in FAIL video for humourous effect. In the videos, the footage pauses in a black and white freeze frame just before something goes painfully awry, with the voiceover narrator delivering the line with a slow and deep voice. Since emerging on Vine in 2013, it has gained notoriety as a popular audio exploitable used in various parody videos.

Origin

On September 14th, 2013, Viner McCully Quinn^[1] posted a short clip titled "Jonathan fucked up" featuring footage of a young man trying to slide on a ramp with a scooter. When he is about to fall down, the clip cuts to a black-and-white freeze frame while Quinn utters the line "It was at this moment that Jonathan knew he fucked up," shortly before resuming to show the final impact. As of January 2017, it accumulated to over 1,600 loops and 1,900 likes on the site.

While not being an instant viral success by any means, Quinn continued to create parodies with the same formula, using various random names such as "William" (shown below, left) and "Daniel" (shown below, right). They soon became a lasting series on Vine and Quinn's signature joke.

Spread

On YouTube, Quinn reuploaded most of his parodies starting on October 23th, 2013^[2]. As of January 2017, the channel gathered over 80 parodies, with the compilations of its best Vine videos gaining over 1.8 million loops (shown below, left), 1.3 million loops (shown below, middle) and 100,000 loops (shown below, right) views, respectively.

On January 11th, 2014, YouTuber Random--〉What´s next? uploaded a compilation of segments taken from various movies in which a protagonist gets pwned (shown below, left), using the same audio and freeze frame format. It has gathered over 300,000 views over the next three years. Over two years later, on July 31st, 2016, YouTuber The Real Neal posted another compilation, this time with anime characters (shown below, right), accumulating over 17,000 views in the next six months.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References