Sons of the Forest - Update #3 (Patreon)

Good evening all. It's the 4th week of work on a Sons of the Forest video-essay and here's an update on progress:

• I've finished planning out the overall structure (completed last week) - resulting in about 40 points to talk about in sequence. Which currently occupy my wall as a guide.

• I'm penning the actual draft script and have finished half in roughly 5 days.

• No major problems and the work is on going.

After the pre-production scrubbing had identified lots of markers in Adobe Premiere - my first task was to get them all copied into Evernote for easy reference. Just like the last video, I need to be able to draw upon examples to support whatever point I'm trying to make.

This has resulted in little snippets of useful clips to thread through the script.

The goal isn't necessarily to link everything of course. More just sprinkle these down to make sure I have something interesting to show. Or perhaps something amusing between chapters.

From there, a structure of the script started to take shape. Mostly in the order of the playthrough itself and inline with Update #2. And post it notes started to appear on my wall that roughly corresponded with the story element to introduce or talking point to go over.

Please forgive my chicken-scratch hand writing.

Each column goes from top to bottom, left to right. With blue post it notes being cutaways to talk about something I've raised in the original Forest video.

Note that this wasn't actually my original plan just after finishing the game. And my deviance from that plan is worth discussing.

The original idea was to simply make a high level summary of Sons of the Forest - keeping the video as short as possibly without actually going into the weeds of the story.  Focusing on 3-4 specific topics over the course of 25-30 minutes and chaining together some worthy examples of why Sons of the Forest is different/same as before.

Doing that sort of structure however, I feel, had some major weaknesses.

• There are lots of small compelling points in Sons of the Forest. Little moments to praise. And they're difficult to include in a high level summary.

• It would be be relatively humourless, since opportunities to sprinkle amusing clips would be few.

So instead I pivoted to a structure that's similar to the first video-essay. I make a point (or contrast something from the first game), and then dip into a story walkthrough for 2-3 paragraphs, introducing things like cannibals, cultists, Puffcorp, unicycles, etc, then go back to a main point. Finishing on a wider observation/conclusion. Bookending the scenes with the individual moments of bullshittery-style comedy.

For example, if there's a segment just on Virginia, it can serve as a good moment to include bizarre things Virginia did. If there's a segment of the caves, I can insert moments where I shrieked due to bat jumpscares.

There is one big problem with that format however - the duration.

Replicating the previous style flies directly in the face of keeping it short. For I'm essentially giving Sons of the Forest the same treatment as the last game. A slow burn story walkthrough to the tune of hours. And whilst I think it'll be in a better shape for it, that still makes me nervous due to the production time.

Early eyeball estimates place this script at close to 30,000 words, of which 16,800 have been penned. And the original Forest video essay was somewhere between 36,000 and 40,000 words.

So yikes.

For the moment, let me keep plugging away on the script until it looks vaguely complete. Probably another week should do it. Then I'll be frank on what the expected development times look like, based on the original Patreon posts.

It'll then be your decision insofar as whether this is something to be parked and done in chunks. Or green lit to proceed as one.

TL;DR: Sons of the Forest script is roughly 16,800 words at the halfway mark. But looks to be 30,000+. Making it a 2+ hour beast on eventual completion.