Saturday, 24 October 2015
Thursday, 22 October 2015
Tuesday, 20 October 2015
Working on some videos lately and I've learned a lot in the past few days. I started posting on a sub reddit for Lets Play videos and it's kept me motivated to keep working on my channel. For starters, I decided to throw together a banner and a profile picture, and started to think about how to make my videos more appealing to a viewer with a limited amount of time on their hands.
Before I get to that, I'm happy to say that I was inspired to go in and make a video for Fight Night Champion last night. I recorded around 1 in the morning and got it edited and uploaded around 3am. It isn't the most amazing video I've ever made, but it's a departure from my standard fare because I'm not doing any voice-over for it.
Instead, it's in black and white and I even gave up monetizing it so I could put in some music near the end of the fight. If anything, it's good motivation and I'm happy to have done it.
Today I had the impulse to play Stranglehold again and it started out as a typical Let's Play video, but ended up being a really fun editing exercise that I learned a lot from.
I recorded about a half hour with the intention of making each level an episode, and found that there was a bit of background whine on some of the PS3 footage during cutscenes. It's kind of like the frequency sound you get when you turn on an old CRT television or monitor and it makes a kind of low, whine. Well, I decided to edit that out, and one thing led to another and I found myself looking at the video and wondering if someone with limited time or a short attention span would even make it into the gameplay portion of the video.
The first two minutes are me giving an intro, setting up subtitles, running the intro cinematics, and then starting the game. According to metrics, average user attention span is about 3 minutes, so I decided to just cut out the part of the video where I was setting up subtitles and giving an intro to the game. I found that I just happened to naturally start the video around a minute or two into it when the title screen came up, and I just cut it to start there instead.
I cut out the cinematic intro and the opening cutscene for the game, and cut out all the loading screens. I truncated the gameplay to just show the action highlights and none of the in-between moments where I'm running around, looking for ammo or finding the next area.
I took a several minute long cutscene and trimmed it to the main points only: you enter a bar, a bad guy gets spooked and a drug deal goes bad, the hero takes out the bad guys. It ended up going from a serious tone to a comedic one when you re-edit everything to be more fast paced.
Overall I took a 30 minute video that would have been a long play of a level with every last bit of footage used and trimmed it to a tight and entertaining 13 minute video.
I also spent some time and put together an intro bumper for my next video with pieces salvaged from this project. I'm really happy to have learned so much and I know now that I can never really go back to the long, uncut footage approach from before. I have to focus in on setting a fast pace early and just show the best moments of each playthrough.
It's exciting to me because now I can freely play any game I want and do voice-over for it, and then I can edit it down in post production and take out any part of the voice over or video I don't like.
I'm very happy!
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)