Update: March 1st, 2024

Average Pixel was kind of enough last week, during a quite hectic month, to make an animation for my next video! When asking for a Deadline, I said "I'm aiming to be completed by Friday."

Fuck.

Starting with the good, it feels quite strange after what is easily, the most rewritten script I've ever touched, to be at a point where I'm completely happy with the structure, pacing, and thesis.

...I might've rewritten the entire conclusion last night while re-recording, but that wasn't so much rewriting as it was editing, making the same points just with different words, it was all done in less than an hour. I had a target, went for it, and hit it.

What's time consuming now then isn't the video's footage or narration, but the little things.

My videos have maybe at most... one or two effects that aren't transitions? But I had the idea early on to use the game's interface and menus for displaying multiple games.

Normally, this is something I'd hand off to friends Stoofer, LHudson, or Gruvii (the last of whom did assist me for one specific transition while I was away), but I wanted to see how I could handle these shots myself, especially considering their now frequent occurrence on this channel.

Even if in the future I continue to hire other people for these tasks, I'd like to at least get in the trenches once, if for no other reason than to be better equipped to direct them.

The sucky part is that a ten second segment is taking longer to edit than a ten minute segment, because you're basically learning from scratch, and almost re-living your days of QA at EA.

At several points, I thought about just slapping the Split Screen Filter and calling it a day... but I've already been using it more in this video than ever before sooooooo, nope, going to knuckle down and continue crawling through!

Having written an initial opening and conclusion for this video on the first plane to the States for my friend's wedding, I definitely didn't expect to be with this thing in March.

I've already got the building blocks of the next video setup, with the intent to be what this one was supposed to be, but whether or not that actually happens is dependent on actions, not words, so I'll refrain from giving more specifics.

It is on Perfect Dark Zero though...

I'll also talk about the external challenges that combined with this video in a postmortem, the last thing I wanna sound like is whinging, especially in-front of the people who've already been the most generous.

I was honestly shocked to receive notifications for new supporters just this last week.

Thank you; like, seriously.

Thank you!

I don't take New Years Resolution's seriously, but a lot of stuff I've changed about myself and my life just so happen to occur around the new year, and one of the things I'm keen to change is to really indulge and enjoy this work.

The last year or two, while changing a lot of things about myself for the better, I think I was needlessly pursuing an end-goal in videos at the expense of the day to day work. I'd see the task of placing down clips on an empty timeline as annoying, just wanting to skip to the part where everything's synced up perfect with music, effects, and cuts.

Whereas now, knowing how this video started, it's been really satisfying, especially in part, because it really could've been made a million different ways.

Rollerdrome's made me re-evaluate not just games, but how I talk about games, and hopefully that will only help me in this future, of talking about more games.

Hope y'all will enjoy this video next week! And no matter what...

Thank you!
Raycevick