Crash Bandicoot PS1 Trilogy - Behind the Scenes (Patreon)

Here we are, 3 videos on 3 different games in the same series all uploaded around the same time, and being relevant thanks to a new upcoming game release!

These videos ended up ticking a lot of boxes when I put it like that, and I'm glad I was able to make it work. A combination of starting a new job and trying to make these videos happen before the release of the N Sane Trilogy meant I may have stumbled at the last hurdle with the video for Crash 3, but it worked!

As usual I''' categorize everything into sections for you, but I'll be bullet pointing things from across all 3 videos, and specifying which ones along the way.

How the videos came about:

The short version of it is that I fancied playing Crash Bandicoot on the run up to the launch of the N Sane Trilogy, and I figured that in itself warranted me making some videos about the original trilogy. 

I actually fancied just playing Crash 2 to begin with, but I've sort of fell into the mindset of tackling games for my videos in order if I can, so that meant I may as well go through the first one first, and by the time I'd finished with Crash 2 it made sense to just carry on going!

From what I can tell, I actually started playing the first game in the trilogy on the 22nd of May, and as I mentioned in the videos I ended up basically blitzing them in the course of a week.

To show you a scale of time, I started playing Crash 1 on the 22nd, started editing on the 24th, and rendered the final video for Crash 1 on the 14th of June. I think I actually finished the video on the first game around the 1st of June, but I had a lot of running around to do that week so rendering had to wait.

Crash 2 and three weren't quite as draw out, with Crash 3 being edited in pretty much 2 solid days over the weekend of June 24th-25th, which in itself was only the day after I uploaded the video for Crash 2...

What happened was that in the 2 weeks before the N Sane Trilogy launched (19th-30th of June) I've been getting trained for my new job, full-time... which basically meant I'd have no time to finish Crash 3 unless I went full-time working on it over the weekend!

Still, I worked out in the end.

As for the location... while in the video it's somewhere completely different, in reality it's our garage.

I had to ask if it was alright to do it at first, and I had to drag everything surrounding me in there in order to make a "set" but I'm pretty happy with the results.

The main thing was getting a video done in a location other than my usual room. As much as I like this room of mine, I don't want people to get bored with it. And while going outside is beyond me at the moment due to me having nobody around to help with holding the camera, I figured this was the next best thing.

The lighting was a little dim, but that was through choice. We have a lot of soft lights in there for when we set up things like a pool table in there, and I wanted it to be dim enough to allow the actual CRT TV to emit light onto me, so yeah!

How the videos changed during production:

The biggest and main change for these videos is that this setup wasn't originally the plan for the Crash games. The idea of going into the garage for filming one of my videos has been around for much longer than the idea of covering the Crash Trilogy.

I shan't say what the original plan was as I've shuffled things around to accommodate it into my future video line-up, but it was just going to be for this one game I've had in mind...

So the final result is actually a combination of an already planned out video and the reviews I would have eventually done for the Crash games anyway.

In the end, I feel OK about it as it just means I've now got 3 videos doing something I originally was only going to do the once, and I managed to do the Crash games while they were still a fairly hot topic on the run-up to the N Sane Trilogy.

Other things that changed aren't as big, but still pretty noteworthy.

First of all, there was originally going to be a sort of ghostly booming voice talking to me, and telling it it was my job to review the games presented to me.

I got rid of this mainly because it would have involved me reacting to a voice that wasn't there when filming, and I screw up enough of my takes as it is so making that work would have been more effort than it was worth.

The other thing believe it or not was a totally last minute decision, but easily turned out to be a good thing for the videos. The CRT TV.

Originally I was going to have the camera pointed in such a way that I wouldn't have needed it in shot, and pretty much 10 minutes before I geared up to start filming I changed my mind. I'm so glad I did.

While the screen isn't totally visible, you can clearly see I've got each game running, even if I'm just making Crash run around the warp rooms or early levels. Another reason I'm glad I did this is as I mentioned before, the TV itself actually emits light onto me, which kind of gives it that old-school comfy gaming feel.

Other Trivia and Info:

While the lighting probably doesn't show it very well, these are my first videos using a new camera. I've done some test shots of my garden with it and it does look much nicer with better lighting, so hopefully that will become more obvious in the future!

But this camera is capable of 50 FPS footage, which was actually the main reason I gave rendering the entire video at 50 FPS a shot. Turns out, it doesn't actually take that much longer to render, and it makes the rest of my videos look much nicer with the arrows, images and everything else I do with animation... so I think 50 FPS is here to stay!

While on the lines of filming, I actually filmed all of the camera segments for all 3 videos in one go, which is why  the shots and lighting is consistent throughout all 3 videos.

In reality, this mean I was in the garage for a total of 3 hours one evening because buses regularly go past my house so a lot of takes were ruined thanks to the noise, but I got there in the end.

I also filmed a few extra things like me setting up the TV and making sure it was working properly, as well as setting up the lights and stuff like that. None of that was ever going to be in the videos but I might use it fora future Behind the Scenes styled video going over how I actually make certain videos... Not sure how interesting that would be?

And that's a wrap! (for now...)

Big thanks to everyone who watched and especially to anyone reading this for supporting me on Patreon.

Like usual I won't go into too much detail but doing these 3 Crash videos back to back like this was in some way a test.

After I finish a video on the N Sane Trilogy I'll be leaving Crash alone for a little while to focus on some other games, some of which belong in a series of games which I might do consecutively like I have done for the Crash games.

I have lot of games to cover, many of which are parts of different series, and I have this loose plan of doing those in phases.

Basically, these three videos and the N Sane Trilogy will have been the first phase of my Crash Bandicoot videos.

This way I can take a break from the series to save feeling burnt out on it, and come back with other games in the series in another small phase, and so on!

That's not to say every game I cover will be part of a series. In fact, I recently started playing a game that's as standalone as they come, but shortly after that I'll begin the first phase of another series I've been planning to talk about since I started this channel!