Monthly Update: January 2023 (Patreon)

New Year. Traditionally a time for new beginnings, and we’ve been doing just that.

If you’re a patron, you know this is really something we began towards the end of last year. Back in October, we published a patron-exclusive vlog detailing our rough plan for the RKG Studio and what we were going to do in the months ahead.

Fitting the studio properly has always been hugely important for the future of RKG and what we want to do long-term. It’ll make making things easier and quicker, allowing us to focus on other things – like making the RKG patron experience even better, creating more one-off videos, and developing new formats to run alongside the things like Retry and SPOOKIES. (We’ll be talking about this much more in the months ahead.)

But despite the studio being so important, it’s never been really urgent. There’s always been more pressing priority – the main one being making sure we have enough quality videos going up on the main channel. We could give ourselves more time by chucking up ‘filler’ content, made quickly, but we’d never do this. As we’ve said over the last couple of years, we want to do things differently and make Let’s Plays to a different standard, one we’ve set ourselves. But doing that takes up a lot of time and focus. So the studio stuff intermittently gets put on hold.

But this has been part of a bigger plan. For the last 5 months of 2022, we filmed consistently every week, which allowed us to film several shows. That included The Quarry, Back with the Bakers, Shadows of Rose, and what will become The SPOOKIES: Double Bill, which will be launching in just a few weeks. (More details on that coming soon.)

Working like this has been transformative for us. For the first time in our history, we’ve been able to put out two shows a week without compromising on quality. It has also given us time over the next few months to really get the studio to where it needs to be. Without the pressure of weekly uploads, we can make it the priority it should be.

We’ve talked about this previously, but we’re not a big team. It’s just us. We occasionally use some freelance help with some edits, but we don’t have a big backroom team. It’s just us. We’ve been in the new space for almost a year, and it’s really time we get this all done.

2023 will be a big year for RKG – the biggest since we launched. Not only are we going to embark upon our most ambitious adventure in Retry: Elden Ring, we want to explore how we can use Patreon in interesting and creative ways to offer you the best-ever experience.  We can’t go into loads of details just yet, but along with the studio and plans for some special new pieces of RKG merch, this is what we’re working on right now.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve really committed to the idea of making Let’s Plays to a higher standard, and we want to explore and express those principles across everything we do and in new projects, too. That’s what we find most satisfying, and believe is the most valuable thing we can make for you, our audience and patrons.

Right now that means focussing on building a studio tailored to our specific needs. It’ll make everything we want to do so much easier and we need it in place before we break ground on Retry: Elden Ring.

Until now there’s been a lot of talking, spreadsheeting, and eyeing up new equipment, and not a lot of doing. So last week we went into the studio and began clearing out the rooms we want to be our recording spaces. We had a big cathartic beginning of year clear out, which involved a lot of moving things to new places, looking at it, and then moving it again. We debated whether we needed to keep reams of green felt once used to make Rory a Solaire costume, or whether, after 4 years of not using it, it was safe to finally throw it out. (We threw it out.)

One of the studios, the room we’d ideally like to become our main Let’s Play space, was used as an edit bay by the previous tenant and had a huge wooden desk, which was screwed and glued into place and took up half of the room. We needed to rip it out, but unfortunately it was glued in and our toolbox consisted of a partially broken screwdriver and some pliers. So we got a man in. A man named Alan. Unsurprisingly, Alan made light work of removing the desk by just doing it and not standing around staring at it while drinking tea for three hours, as we would’ve done. He got in there, and soon the desk was no more.

The next step was painting it. So, while Krupa and Gav put the finishing touches to SPOOKIES: Double Bill, Alan coated Retry’s new home in a special black paint that doesn’t reflect light at all. Here he is surveying his work fuelled by a cup of Gav’s tea.

It was nice to finally get into the new space and crudely recreate the Retry shot, and see what space we’re actually working with. Our big worry was it was going to be too small. We got in there with a camera, and tried to figure out which was the best way to shoot inside the room. Shooting one way would’ve packed us in more tightly than the days in Gav’s spare bedroom, so we opted to shoot in the other direction. There’s still an awful lot to do, but we’ve made a start.

We’ve got a list of all the equipment we need to take our tech set-up from the functional but limited system we currently use to something much more sophisticated and professional. This is what’s going to make shooting Retry: Elden Ring, and anything else, much easier. Without going into too much detail, shooting the show in 4K and editing properly involves a lot of time sinks in our current workflow (file backups, file transfers, building edit drives). The new workflow, helped greatly by a new set-up and tech, will eliminate all of this. It’ll mean we’ll be able to transition from shooting to editing almost instantly. We’re pretty close to deciding on this new set-up, and once we get it installed we’ll share more details with you. After all, you’re making this happen.

Thank you for supporting us on this journey, and we’re excited to show you what this means for RKG in 2023.

RKG x