Totally Legit Recap: "School Raze" (Part 1) Season 8 Episode 25 (Patreon)

I actually wrote out both parts of the finale video back in November, but by the time they were done, the holiday special had come out and I set them aside and started working on that so I could get it up by Christmas. That video and the last two parts of RR changed my view on how to do these. Most of the videos I put out in 2018 were shit, and I finally realized it's because I had gotten bored of my own shtick - ranting about how drunk and depressed I am with memes constantly flying at the screen. I think a lot of people watching were getting bored with it too. When I did RR, I began pushing these more in the direction of an abridged series, and it started being fun again.

When I came back to the S8 finale, I had to rewrite the whole thing to reflect that change in attitude, and I think what I ended up with is vastly better than the first version. I'm never gonna try to be FiW or MAS, we already have those, and I like having a pliable, "do whatever the fuck I want" style format, but it's much more fun to make videos with some kind of narrative running through them. This video did have a lot of meta-commentary from me, but I tried to tell a story with it instead of just ranting. I know the whole Chrysalis joke was probably visible like an oncoming train within the first 30 seconds of the video, but goddamn did I want to do that Kill la Kill scene.

Holy shit, ponies are harder to lip-sync than EqG. Lip-syncing requires a ton of stitching frames together in photoshop. Most of the time there aren't enough frames of a particular character in a particular scene or shot to sync with my lines, so I have to create my own by stealing mouths and facial expressions from certain frames and shopping them onto others. It's tedious work, but it's also a challenge I enjoy in a way. Doing this is usually pretty easy with EqG because other than profile shots, the mouth and eyes are in the center of the face, so you can take an expression from one frame and stick it onto another with relatively little touch-up. With ponies - because of the way their heads are shaped - most shots have the mouth on the edge of the face, so when they talk the mouth movements change the shape of the head. That makes it way harder to swap mouths between frames without a lot of brushwork.

Anyway, I'm gonna end up writing an essay here. I have the script and most of the frames for part 2 ready to go, so unless something catastrophic happens, that'll be the next video. As always, thank you guys for paying my bills, and I'll see you soon. If you have any questions, feel free, I try to keep pretty good track of my patreon notifications because, you know, you guys give me money.