Ruby & Sapphire Behind the Scenes Part 2 - Scripting (Patreon)

Normally when I make a video essay on this scale, I give myself a lot of time to revise. Vidit typically does some research separately and comes up with the first part, with the background of what was going on at GameFreak at the time of development, and will send me a write up of how he thinks the information could be used. For this video Vidit was obviously way out ahead of me on getting the script started, so he sent me several early arrangements for part one. I usually cut these up and rewrite them to fit the tone for the video that the intro sets out, but for this one I actually made really minimal changes save for clarifying some things since Vidit has a habit of using very little punctuation. 

When I get to writing my section, I will usually start with taking notes as I play through the game, and then make an outline of those notes by organizing the information into categories. I'll be posting photos of the notes I took next. It is really difficult to stay organized when a video has to cover a lot of really different ideas like this one did, so usually I will get my ideas down in a first draft, realize that I could do a better job of explaining these ideas to someone who wouldn't share my perspective, and then go in and re-organize or make points stronger. 

Given that I gave myself about 3 days to write 16 pages, I had very little time to do that final step of making sure all the information flowed and was explaining why each detail mattered rather than just having the information sitting there. So basically up until the very last moment I was recording and re-recording audio from several different drafts. I had trouble convincing myself that it was finished because obviously there was a lot I couldn't touch on in this video and I had to resolve to come back to the topic some time in the future in order to move forward.

There was also the additional problem of not being able to send this to people outside my perspective for proofreading without the potential for leaking our discovery so I am extremely grateful to Cara and Jonna for being trustworthy and providing good feedback. Jonna actually was the one who pointed out the Zigzagoon/pickup being part of the allegory!

Attached are the various text documents used to piece the whole thing together including a color coded final draft. Hopefully these are in a format everyone can read. RSEstart are Vidit's early part 1 drafts. There are a few files here with either cut or modified paragraphs that I was using to sort of keep track of pieces that I either thought I might re-arrange in the script or wanted to re-write independently of the main document. These files would be the "cut bits" "new section 2 and 3" and "rearranging part 2." Then the first actual draft I was working from is called just "Ruby an Sapphire Review" and "Draft 2" is the final draft I recorded from, with parts I had to re-record color coded. The red text were very last minute additions, blue was second to last and green was third to last. Anything black obviously survived from the very first full draft.