Wait, isn’t an animation a video as well?
In this assignment, I had to make a minimum 3-minute video and publish to YouTube. Unlike the last project, however, this one is about making a commercial, instructional promotional video or a trailer, and while animation certainly is a video, this one does not have to be an animation (you can record in real life for the video, or even do a compilation of others’ videos). Thanks to how similar this is to the last one, I had a perfect chance to reflect on the issues I had with the last project to improve on in this video.
A good topic and a good tool
With the content of the video being restricted to commercial, instructional or promotional materials, there were not many options for topics to begin with. I could do a game trailer video by compiling the promotional materials for the game that I could find online, but that would be incredibly uninspiring and I would have little chance to actually learn or improve. I could also do a video essay again, either on another character design, animation breakdown or game design analysis, but the content and editing styles would be a bit too similar to the last video (albeit there would not be a talking human model on the screen all the time). In the end, I decided to do a boss fight guide, specifically a guide on Nightmare King Grimm in Hollow Knight, since the fight is fun to play and analyze, and technically this would fall under ‘instructional’ materials.
As for the tool to edit the video, the one that was given to everyone was WeVideo, another “free” tool that locked many of its features under the premium plan and basically tried its very best to annoy its users into buying premium. Luckily for me, I happened to have a Macbook, and in MacOS there is a great free application called iMovie. This app comes with great features that allows one to edit video quite professionally (at least as far as I can tell), and its intuitive interface had probably saved me hours from cutting video footage and editing audio for the project.
‘How to defeat the boss’ in 5 minutes
Even though there was technically no maximum length requirements, I was writing the script under the assumption that it should not be going over 5 minutes. This is partly because of the 4-5 minutes length requirement/limit from the last assignment, is also a decision I made so that I would have enough time to actually prepare and make the video in time of the deadline. If the script were too long, I would have to spend much more time recording game footage, recording audio and editing.
On the other hand, there are a vast number of different parts I could break down and discuss in the guide. I could talk about the anticipation animation of each attacks and how to recognize them, different strategies to dodge or counter an attack or different builds and play styles to go against the boss. For reference, this guide by Perpetual Noob for the same boss fight is 26 minutes long, and if you subtract the lore and story part of the video, it is still 20 minutes long. I need to figure out a way to reasonably remove contents and keep the script at about 5 minutes at most.
That was when I came up with the concept of ‘Casual Play’. The idea is that it is a series on how to defeat difficult bosses or challenges as a casual video game player, meaning instead of discussing all different approaches to a boss fight, I only need to keep it simple and discuss the easiest way (although this might also be subjective to an extent) to defeat that challenge. This allowed me to cut down the script to the most basic contents and keep the video from being to long and time-consuming to make.
Recording footage and audio
While I certainly could use online footage for the video, I wanted to record my own footage since it does seem a bit weird if a video about boss guide does not even show the attempts of the video creator, and I also have more control over the environment and variables (and I have an excuse to play more Hollow Knight as well). I ended up spending about 3 hours purely for recording gameplay footage with over 10 different clips and probably over 20 attempts with both failed and successful attempts. I also realized that recording footages myself also has some disadvantages, most notably the occasional frame drops because of the recording software (I used OBS for video recording) opening at the same time as the game. In the end, I also had to used 2 outside videos, as there are some skills and interactions that were basically too difficult and time-consuming for me to try and pull off myself.
Learning from my past mistake, I decided to not use text-to-speech at all and record audio myself instead. It was certainly a hugh pain to find a good time and place to record the audio without getting disrupted, and it also did not help that I got quite anxious every time I have to record myself (or, to an extent, hear my voice recording). In the end, the result was far from perfect, but it is still much better than hearing a robotic voice.
Editing video? Easy
With all preparations finished, all I had left was editing the video in iMovie. The process was pretty easy and straightforward with the good UI of the application. For example, I did not even need to cut the footages beforehand since I could just add them into iMovie and use drag and drop to crop the way I wanted (I could also preview them so that I know where to start and stop).
Compare to the last project, I also made a few different decisions that I feel did improve the result in the end, one of which includes not meeting some requirements of the video. One particular example is the requirement that I must have 3 layers of videos at some point in the video, which I could not find a suitable place to utilize without disrupting the overall flow and feel of the video, so I did not use it at all.
I also decided to add a 3-minute unedited footage at the end of the video, which is a successful attempt of me defeating Nightmare King Grimm, as I found it a bit unsatisfying to watch a guide video without the actual attempt of the video creator defeating the boss using the guides, strategies or tips they provided in the video for the watchers. It did increase the total length of my video to over 8 minutes, but since it is an unedited footage, I did not have to spend much time adding that to the video or recording commentary audio there.
The end result
In the end, even if I was not able to meet all the requirements, I am much more satisfied with my end result. There are still issues here and there, such as the audio being a bit unnatural (which is partly because I was reading the script word by word and was pretty anxious at the time of recording), but the video does have a much more professional feel to it and is a definite improvement over my animation project.
Casual Play 