A Peek Behind the Curtain (Jan 2023 newsletter) (Patreon)

So, to start things off, unfortunately the Star Trek video will be a little late. I was really hoping to have it up by tomorrow, but I tried something new and it didn't quite work. However, I figured that I could explain it and also offer a glimpse at my production process in the meantime, for those who are interested to know. 

So it obviously starts off with playing the game. This is definitely the most fun part of the job, but I do have to focus on learning the rules as best I can. I try to play it at least twice. For a big game like this I want to play it more (and I did), but that's a bit of a tightrope walk because it also takes more time to set up multiple games, so some of those games I just played against myself. Anyway, once I've got a good sense of it I start writing the script. This is mostly what you'd expect, except that I also take detailed notes for every single shot of b-roll (the footage of the game itself).

It might be easier to do it in wider shots that cover more things at once (like what most other tutorial makers do) and record my audio while performing the actions so it lines up easily. However I prefer to have a mixture of wider shots and detailed close ups, so for me the best solution is to plan them all out and film them separately. For a game like Star Trek Ascendancy, that means I'm writing out about a hundred different shots. It looks like this.

And because I did the expansions as well, I write a script and shotlist for that too, which happened to equal almost exactly the same length. So I write a rough draft of both scripts and then I do a second pass for clarity, rules accuracy, and jokes. Once I'm happy with it I start filming. Usually I can do this in a day or two. This one took three days. I was very tired when it was done.

Now here's the part where I tried something new. One of the most time consuming parts of this process is editing, specifically adding in the b-roll. I upload footage and build what's called a timeline. Basically just all of the video of me talking. This actually goes pretty quickly and sometimes I get some lovely freeze frames of myself looking especially handsome.

The next part, where I add in all of the inserts, is the tedious part. Luckily, or so I thought, I had been contacted by a group of editors who work with Youtubers and were offering a free trial of their services. I wasn't going to trust an entire video to this group I'd never heard of, but I figured I could give them the main video to just roughly add the b-roll to and I could work on the expansion video in the meantime. Then they could send back the editing file and I could clean up what they did and finish it up.

...well, that didn't really happen. I am about 95% done with the expansion video, but after over a week with the base game footage (it usually takes me 2 days tops for this stage) they sent over a rough cut and it's just completely unusable. I knew it wouldn't be perfect, but they clearly didn't understand what I needed. Unfortunately that means I need to scrap everything they did and just edit it all myself, which I don't mind doing, but it does push the schedule back a bit. I'm hoping to have it done by this Friday, but it might be more like next Friday.

Anyway, how's your month been? What have y'all been playing? I played Terra Cotta Army recently. It's good!