Ramblings

Wouldn't you look at that, I'm coming back for some more mindless ramblings.

We're still on the subject of myself, or well, the content I make. If you really want to know things about the actual me, I can reveal that I am currently doing laundry. Think about that for a second.

Or don't think about it. Instead, kick back and don't take anything that's being said in this post with more than a grain of salt.

The last time I talked about presentation, something I thought I had perfected with my FoF videos but still hadn't done so with my current ME2 videos. But why aren't they perfect? Because nothing is perfect. There's always improvements to be done. I often let small frames slip through that bugs me. Watch any dialogue video for this, it can be as little one or two frames (for reference, all my videos are done at 30 frames per second, which means that one or two frames are basically a quick flash). To show you what I mean, I'll just put up a random dialogue video below.

As confident as I am, I'm not checking if an actual error appears in it, but I do know it appears in plenty of videos where a lot of clips are rounded off in quick succession. So any apologies if my example above doesn't have any actual frame errors in it!

We also have the subjects of the LP videos. The production values of these, are well, not very high. I mentioned this in the earlier entry, the care I put into them is me basically trying to make sure that I don't cut out the video in the middle of a sentence. How much production value does a LP need though? Now, I don't even know if I plan on doing any more LP's for a while. These projects to me have felt pretty overwhelming to me to begin with. Even with me not doing a complete playthrough of ME1, the runtime of both LP's combined clocks in on slightly less than 40 hours (last part not yet recorded though). But if I do return to LP's, perhaps one of ME3 if there's no save game editor to help me with content, they should recieve some more loving in terms of editing.

The above is my most popular video. To me, a job I guess well done. Because it's the first video with Hidden Dialogue. It may not have the most content, it may not have the best editing, but it shows everything in a simple and straightforward manner: BioWare clearly had different plans originally for the game's structure. What plans you might ask? Well, every squad member has dialogue for every location in the game (with the exception of Thane and Samara who has no dialogue on Horizon). Any by every location I mean every mission outside of the tutorial.

Naturally, things like this are interesting. The most common question on videos like this are "How do you do this?". Save Game Editing is the short as well as the long answer. This isn't the point though. I am more interested as to why this specific video is popular. Why have almost 400k watched through something I threw together in less than twenty minutes? I quote my previous blog post: "The right content at the right time will generate views on it's own".

Do I market my videos in any way? Do I viral them? I have linked them at a few places yes, but mostly on sites like 4chan where the post won't last more than a few hours at most. I label my YT channel as my website on sites where I have a profile. That's it though. The rest of the "marketing" isn't done by me. And the right content gets viral'd by others. I think I remember seeing links to some of my videos appearing on places like obscure video game forums or even the Mass Effect wikia. Eventually videos will get views simply because I've built up the subscriber base for it.

But the LP's of ME1 and ME2 aren't getting views are they? I'm fully aware of that. They simply are a bit niche and aren't being released at the right time. A lot of my videos still very often get commented on and still generate decent traffic even this long after release. The issues with the LP's are that they have me in them (with me being perhaps not the funniest and experienced guy to listen to along with perhaps too much content altogether) and they are simply being released quite a while after the game has been released. Everyone is looking for ME3 at this point, who in reality goes crazy or really interested for ME2 videos at this point? Not the masses.

But I'm gonna stop rambling now. I need something to talk about for the next time as well. We'll round up with possibly my favorite video. It even has one of the frame errors in it (cuts in too early) and was, believe it or not, released at exactly the right time.