Monthly Update: Nov 2022 | Back with the Bakers Behind-the-Scenes (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

For this month's update we thought we'd give you a real in-depth look at the production of our latest series, Back with the Bakers.

Krupa's going to go through the idea why we presented it in this way and walk you through what he was thinking as he put together some of the early design work for the series, before Gav takes you through the process of reproducing that Grindhouse style and creating our best trailer to date.

Making Let's Plays Feel Like Something Special

Krupa: Back with the Bakers sees us playing a bunch of varied DLC that came out for Resident Evil 7 over five years ago. But we didn’t want it to feel like we were playing a bunch of five-year-old DLC.

It’s one of the inherent problems of Let’s Plays or streaming in general: we’re not the only people playing these games, so how do you stand out? Or even just make what you’re doing feel different?

I believe we make really good videos of us playing games, which I think you discover if you end up watching one of our videos. Fortunately, we have you, and you already know this and are going to give our videos a shot. We’ve built that relationship over time.

Another way I think we can set our material apart from the crowd is finding fun and interesting ways of presenting what we make. Not only is this creatively challenging and fun for us but makes the final series feel more special and premium.

Whether you support us directly on Patreon, paying for our Early Access tier to get entire series early, or you watch them when they debut on YouTube, we want you to receive something that feels valuable, that hasn’t been knocked together.

We thought we’d use this post to go into more detail about that process, using Back with the Bakers as the case study, since we did so much on this project. But the same thinking has been behind a lot of what we did on Retry: Demon’s Souls and Cuphead, and will be informing so much of what we do next.

Since the DLC is so varied, and obviously inspired by the Banned Footage idea Resi 7 itself tables, I originally thought it would be fun to present each episode as its own video nasty. I presented this really rough Photoshop sketch to Gav.

As we worked on each one, and he worked on the trailer, the idea grew, as they always do, and it evolved into this Grindhouse all-nighter.

Font Finding

But before we started on the trailer, I spent a weekend working up a unique title treatment for each episode. I wanted each one not only to reflect something of that episode – alluding to a particular sub-genre of film, if possible – and look completely different to the rest. I wanted each thumbnail to feel like a movie poster.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to commission any original art, so I was mainly working with in-game assets or promotional materials put out by Capcom. So I got busy downloading fonts. Lots of them. Around 40 in the end. I spent hours writing out the name of every episode in every font. This is exactly the kind of thing where Patreon directly helps us do something: we can buy great fonts from proper designs to make something like this really work. Little things like this make a huge difference.

I had a lovely time spending hours whittling down these fonts, either based on what I thought each title reminded me of or what I wanted it to imply.

Below is a little snapshot of what I was thinking for each one.

Nightmare

One of the main things I had in mind when I started on these logos were the wonderful tawdry covers of 70’s and 80’s horror paperbacks. I love them. In fact, there’s a great book which celebrates them called Paperbacks from Hell.

It collects together hundreds of covers and it’s lovely to stare at lurid images of evil babies imprisoning their parents in jars or snarling sexy cat people. Luckily enough I was sent a copy of it by a slug years ago – thanks, QueenKupo – and used it for inspiration while working on this project.

The word ‘Nightmare’ is just too perfect not to render in this style.

The font is Midwinter Fire, and my heart burns there too.

Bedroom

I recently read Christopher Pike’s novel The Midnight Club ahead of the Netflix adaptation coming out. I hadn’t heard of Pike before Mike Flannagan's series, and he’s not readily available in print over here in the UK. While browsing secondhand paperbacks on eBay, I discovered a series of covers published in the US by Archway, which was a Teen imprint of Simon & Schuster. (If you’re wondering, they’re now quite pricey on eBay.)

Just look at them. Aren’t they great? I love the cursive font and the garish late-80’s/early-90’s colours clashing with the grim yet polished YA imagery.

I wanted to use something like this for Bedroom, though I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe because Bedroom sounds quaint, homely, and so does a handwritten font? Maybe because it’s how I think Marguerite would write the word and there’s now something very old-fashioned about seeing cursive handwriting these days. The font, quite aptly, is called Banshee.

Weirdly, it also reminded me of Misery. Maybe it’s because Paul Sheldon is also bedridden, or maybe it’s because I can imagine it being used on the twee Misery Chastain novels. Although, if you look at the cover used in the movie it’s aping the style of King’s novels as we did with Nightmare. I guess we’re just stuck in a big old circle of influence now.

21

Pretty straightforward this one. I wanted to rip-off Saw, because Lucas is essentially doing just that. So I tried to find the nastiest, scratchiest font – the typeface equivalent of falling into a pit of used syringes. I actually found way more extreme options, but they were actually quite hard to read so I settled on this one. The font is called Okami, while the tagline is in the much more prickly font Violence.

Daughters

This one's a bit of a cheat really. This promotional asset has nothing to do specifically with the Daughters DLC, but it’s too great an image not to use. It does all of the heavy lifting and makes the poster for you.

Daughters. It’s such an allusive word: relationships, generations, legacy. To my ear it sounds like a classy, gothic horror film, so I wanted to lean into that.

I picked this font, which is called Virus Cursed, and added a quick peeling-paint texture to imply something sinister and corrosive lurking beneath the surface.

This one is really simple, and was probably the quickest to make, but I think it’s my favourite, but that’s largely down to it being carried by how good the original key art is.

Not a Hero

Not a great deal to say about this one, either. It’s a little brash action campaign, so I wanted a little cocky logo treatment. Something that plays up the heroism and downplays the modesty. Nothing says that more than 80s action. The font is called The Sonnyfive, which I’m assuming is a reference to martial arts legend Sonny Chiba. (If it’s not, don’t correct me, as that’s what I want to believe.)

End of Zoe

End of Zoe is about a man from Louisiana chinning everything that stands in the way of him saving his niece, whether that be military personnel or alligators. What a brilliantly ludicrous premise. It sounds like a B-movie already.

I thought of this one as a revenge film and given its swamp setting, I wanted a font that felt heavily weathered itself, not just from the compositing textures. This font, which is called Salvation, is really quite ugly. It feels to me like it’s been submerged in stagnant water, becoming decayed and bloated. Perfect for a scuzzy, grimey revenge thriller down in the Bayou.

Judging a YouTube Video by Its Thumbnails

So that’s briefly the thought process behind creating each title treatment and thumbnail. Before I pass over to Gav to explain how he created what I think is our best ever trailer and captured that thick grindhouse atmosphere, I wanted to say something about thumbnails.

I love that these can be our thumbnails. In one sense, these aren’t good YouTube thumbnails. We spent many years workshopping thumbnails at IGN, learning from trial-and-error what works and doesn’t, across a variety of projects, and there’s a lot missing from these. You wouldn’t necessarily know these are Let’s Plays or feature Resident Evil 7. (I would just like to point out that despite all that experience, I wouldn’t profess to know definitively what works, and anyone that does is probably trying to sell you something.)

We know this. This was a choice. We think they look nice, and distinctive, and deliver on the overarching idea we had for this series. We’re always going to be playing someone else’s game – that’s the Let’s Play format – but doing things in this way allows us to have more creative control and authorship over what we present to you and publish on the channel. Yes, we find it more creatively satisfying, but we also hope that it makes the experience better for you.

Having such an attentive audience (we’re not particularly fans of the term ‘captive’), one which supports us directly through Patreon, means we can make creative decisions like this. If we were more reliant on views, we’d have to make more functional thumbnails, and dispense with so much of this additional work to churn them faster. There would be more of it but it’d all feel so much more generic and ephemeral.

I could talk about thumbnails all day. I’ve got a pet theory about how modern gaming thumbnails have become the YouTube equivalent of the peacock’s tail, but I’ll save that for another post.

Now over to Gav, who’s going to get real mucky and walk you through how he took these title treatments and created our best trailer to date.

Making the Trailer

Gav: Creating our trailers is one of the most fun bits of making our shows because it gives us a chance to be really creative, whilst presenting a couple of nice little challenges. A trailer should make you excited about a coming project by giving you a taste of what to expect – in terms of tone, style, and format – but not spoil the best bits. Trailers are promotional materials but the best ones can stand alone. There’s quite a few trailers that I rewatch now and again just because I like how they’re made (Feel free to request my list of most watched for a Shield Up). 

With Back with the Bakers, we had such a strong idea for how we wanted to present the episodes – as this almost grindhouse movie presentation – that this naturally led us to creating a video inspired by some of the best grindhouse trailers which are basically a genre unto themselves. We kept saying that what we’ve ended up with is essentially a short film and there were a few ways that it came together like this.

Inspiration

Whilst I edited the trailer, everything we do is a collaboration so we started by talking about some of our favourite grindhouse-style trailers. These are trailers with a really uniquely schlocky style that often present the film as being way more exciting than it is (hopefully not the case with our show). I’ve put together a short playlist just to give you an idea of the types of things I had on repeat to inspire me while I was editing.

As well as having a laugh watching these, I also went back to the original teaser trailers for Resident Evil 7 to see how they were attempting to get the game’s new style across in 2016. I think they do a pretty good job but it’s all a bit polished and nice, and we were going for something a lot … muckier. A fun thing I found while I was researching this was an IGN article Krupa wrote after we spent a few days in Japan playing Resi 7 before it came out. We were among the first people in the world to play the game and there's even a video in that article of me playing the VR version. It doesn't end well. 

Resi 7 takes a lot of inspirations from one of our favourite horror films, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so that became one of the main trailers I was looking to for inspiration. We’d already used that film’s famous eerie flashbulb noise in our Resident Evil 8 trailer (I told you we liked that film) but I knew I wanted something that felt a bit more in the Resi world for the BWTB trailer.

Building the Trailer

That eerie noise acts like a brilliant functional sting between shots in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre film’s opening so I found a similar noise from an old Resi 7 trailer and that became the noise you hear in ours. For the jump-scare style shots in-between each game, I went back and captured the original Resi 7 opening, which if you’ve not watched in a while I would recommend having a look at because there’s some properly beautiful shots in it.

While Daniel and I edited these episodes, I do a final pass on every single video we put out to make sure they're consistent. This helps to make sure it feels like an RKG video and I add some flourishes we’ve been putting in since Day One. I also label-up potential clips that will be good for trailers and clips to put out on Twitter so that’s why the sequence is as multi-coloured as it is. Essentially anything in red means it’s funny as fuck.

The Muck

We then sourced a lot of actual footage of 8mm film stock burning up, old film scratches and various dirts and started layering these on top of our original title treatments to see which ones worked with what Daniel created for the titles.

You can see here the original Not a Hero title looks quite clean but then we add our chosen muck to it which combined with the title’s move into shot it starts to evoke the really silly low-budget action films of the grindhouse era – perfect when you think of the nonsense that goes on in that particular bit of DLC.

We also added a nice 8mm scratch effect to the whole trailer (V8 on the timeline) and I managed to source a really creepy filmstock scratch noise that runs across the whole trailer (A5 on the timeline). These are really small things that by themselves probably wouldn’t work but once you start to layer them onto the timeline with your shots, voiceover, music and other effects, if you’ve done a good job it should all work together nicely. The problem can be deciding whether it’s too much but I think because our core idea for the trailer was so strong, we pretty much always knew where the line was.

Sound and VO

We use a fantastic professional music library called Epidemic Sound which has now helped soundtrack every podcast and video we’ve made for years. The problem is most of the trailers we’re drawing inspiration from barely use music at all, it’s more of a droning noise aka a powerful sense of dread. I spent hours trying to find the perfect one that doesn’t draw too much attention from the voiceover and clips. I also went back and captured the original Resi 7 safe room music which you can hear at the start of the trailer. Originally I’d used a horrible sample of noise from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but we liked that the Safe Room music instantly recalls your own panicked experiences of playing the game so we went with that and I think it really works.

Voiceover is also such a huge part of grindhouse trailers and a lot of the time is doing some pretty heavy-lifting. We knew we wanted something in the style of famous trailer voiceover artists like Don LaFontagne or Redd Pepper. Sadly one of those lads is dead and the other is prohibitively expensive but Daniel found this legend on Fiverr and I worked with him on nailing the delivery. I asked for two very different reads from him – one that sounded like a horror film and one that was a lot straighter with less silly flourishes. What’s interesting is that a lot of the time the more normal take was what I used and I think this is a good example of when we knew something was too much.

Our VO fella was absolutely blown away when I sent him the finished trailer and some of your comments. It’s always nice to expose someone totally new to our community’s positivity. It’s the best trailer we’ve made to date and I’m so glad we get the time to work on these extra things to help present our shows in a way that isn’t just sticking them live on YouTube.

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We hope you enjoyed this extended behind-the-scenes look at how we put together Back with the Bakers and how we approach what we make.

If you've got any questions, put them in the comments below or send them into Shield Up, and we'll do our best to answer them.

Krupa & Gav x