Script Writing
I took a variety of lessons I learned from making my Sympathy & Empathy video while making this one. The first came to the writing of my script. Since I was writing this script for a video from the get-go, I felt like I was able to craft it to work better for a video format. I kept reading my lines out loud to myself, making sure that they flowed well and sounded natural. I imagined what scenes I would be showing on screen during certain arguments and crafted my script to fit around them. The end product was something much improved from my first video but there are still quite a few lines I listen to now in the final cut that I wish I could have worded a little differently for the sake of flow.Recording
The next thing I wanted to improve on was mic quality. After doing a little bit of research I found that a reliable mic was out of my price range and I didn't want to take the risk of buying a cheaper model without being able to test them first. The idea eventually came to me to go see if the Harvard Med School Library happened to have a mic I could borrow. They're the library for one of the top med schools in the country after all, it wouldn't be too much to hope they'd have a mic laying around. Luckily for me, they did, and it was a pretty nice one at that. To get away from the heat of my apartment and also have a quiet recording environment I also decided to do my voice recording in the basement near the archives room. Just picture that for a moment. Here was a guy sitting in the basement of the Harvard Med School Library doing voice recording for a video game video. The absurdity of the situation.Before I started my recording, though, I did some research on voice recording tips. The biggest piece of advice I took away from it all was to listen to your voice playback in real-time with headphones as you do your recording. So I tried this and boooooooy was it strange for me at first. My headphones aren't noise cancelling, so I could hear myself talk as well as the feedback at the same time. On top of that, the feedback had a second or two delay, so I would accidentally repeat words I was hearing in my ears unconsciously. If you were to listen to my raw audio you'd find the first 30mins or so an absolute mess as I tried to adjust to the strange set up.
Adjust I did, though, and eventually I was able to parse out my own voice, from my own thoughts, from my own feedback and the result was worth it. Being able to hear exactly how you will sound like on recording in real-time has obvious benefits. I was able to vary my delivery of lines in all sorts of ways, and keep repeating them until I had a slew of different takes to work with in the audio editing phase later on. For a video that ended up being 16mins long, changing up my delivery and making sure my voice never became grating to the viewer was extremely important and I hope I was able to accomplish that.
Even so, it's quite obvious in the video that I had to "warm up" in the first quarter of the video as my delivery of lines became much better later on. I tried doing retakes but do to slight differences in mic settings and other things, the difference in audio was rather significant. I did end up using some of those retakes and you can definitely tell where they are in the video. I felt like the improvement in delivery was worth the sudden shifts in audio tones that I tried to minimize as much as possible. I hope to next time have one, smooth audio file so I don't have those jarring transitions again.
Editing
The editing process for this video was, all in all, much easier than my first video. Instead of pulling footage from 36 different episodes of anime, I only had to worry about six videos of game footage. Since the Treehouse footage was only 40mins long, I watched it through a few times while taking notes with timestamps of particular scenes, my thoughts, and things that caught my interest. This made pulling footage later on much easier as I just had to refer to my notes for the timepoints of the scenes I wanted.
Working with Derrick's Xenoblade Chronicles streams was a little bit more difficult. Each video was upwards of 3 hours long, and I certainly hadn't watched every moment of each. Luckily I was able to use my own knowledge of the game to skim through each video to find the scenes that I wanted, although finding generic battles that demonstrated some of my more specific points was a little more difficult.
Using the lessons I learned in making my first video, adding in effects proved much easier this time around. I had fun using the arrows to point things out and timing their entrances and exits. I wish there was a way for me to do a mechanical zoom in for the scene comparing BLADE charge times but that's apparently not a feature available in Lightworks. Luckily, doing "Dissolve" scene transitions worked just as well and served their purpose for making a time lapse.
All in all, I definitely felt a difference in efficiency editing this video compared to my first. In a solid Saturday's worth of work I got through a whole 7mins of the video, which is almost as long as my Sympathy & Empathy video was. This impressions video did turn out to be 16mins long, though, so it all balanced out in the end. I still spent nearly all my free time after work editing this video, hardly playing any games in the process. Luckily I finished last night, just in time for Splatoon 2's release today haha!
Things to Improve On
This list is more for myself than anything else but there are still tons of areas I need to improve on moving forward. I truly do enjoy making these videos and want to continue to hone these skills to make them better and better.
- Make my openings better: Boring. Just simply boring. That's what my opening is after having watched it countless times over. I feel like the amount of time you have to grab someone's attention with a video is even shorter than you do with a piece of writing. You have two or three lines of dialogue in video form before your viewer's attention flies away. I definitely could have gotten to the point much faster than I did. Speaking of...
- Get to the point faster: This video could have be much shorter. I feel like I could have argued my points much more concisely than I actually did. I think you have to say less while trying to argue a point in video form because you already have video playing. I tried to account for that while I was writing my script but it definitely became too long winded at points still. I bet I could have cut out 3 or 4 minutes of video if I was more efficient with my arguments.
- Better delivery. Consistent energy: Sixteen minutes is a long time to maintain viewer interest. Even if I did manage to cut out the fluff and slice that down to twelve that's still a long time. A way to maintain interest is to get the energy level of your narration high, and I don't think I accomplished that. While my deliveries were leagues better than my first video and I still have a long way to go. I need to do better to keep my viewers engaged, possibly adding in more comical elements like my release date plea towards the end of this video. Along the same line I really need to focus on slowing down sometimes as I spoke way too fast during some dialogue. I tried to focus on that after feedback I got on my first video but I really need to conscious of that going forward.
There are many other things to work on, like working out some weird audio hiccups, but I think these are the three biggest ones. If I can improve in these areas I think I'll see a remarkable improvement in in my video content quality. If you read this far I hope this gave you some insight on what I put into making these videos and that I am very serious about improving them. Thanks for sticking with me and I hope you enjoy the product of my labor.
TL;DR
I applied many lessons from my Sympathy & Empathy video to make this one and the effort shows in a better product. That said, I still have plenty of room for improvement and I hope to work towards those improvements in future content.
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