Sonic Mania - Behind The Scenes (Patreon)

Another couple of weeks has gone by and another video is here, this time with another fairly new release with Sonic Mania!

As usual I'll go into the three sections I usually do, but as I said in the video a big thanks has to be said to a viewer and Patron of mine, Myles.

How the video came about:

So yeah, this video basically wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for that donation by Myles. He had a spare code for the game going and as nobody else needed it, he offered it to me and I ended up with it.

This has all come about on the run up to doing another "older" game as a video, but given Sonic is a current trend, and people are talking about it I thought it was worth playing through right away and seeing if I could make something of my time with it.

I didn't know what to think of it at first but as I played more through the game I made my notes, and while I didn't have enough to say to justify a usual 12+ minute long video... I felt my thoughts as a newcomer to the series were enough to warrant some kind of shorter video about my experience with Sonic Mania.

After all, pretty much every review I've seen of Sonic Mania has been done by a pre-existing fan of the series, so I figured I've got a niche angle on the whole thing as a review!

How the video changed during production:

This entire video ended up being completely re-worked into the current run time after the initial script ended up being well over 15 minutes long. 

That wouldn't have been a problem if I had plenty to say but after stepping back and actually listening to the things I was saying and doing in the original script, I just seemed like filler.

As well as this, the whole recording for this original version of the script you could still hear I was kind of ill. I sounded blocked up and still full of cold, so either way I wanted to re-record the voice-over at the very least.

But with some trigger happy deleting of the more pointless parts of the script I ended up with this shorter and more straight to the point review, which still has the usual gags and stuff.

For what it is, I'm pretty happy with how this video turned out!

This shot of me holding Shadow the Hedgehog and promptly throwing it in the bin was always going to be part of this video, even in the original script.

However, originally it was both Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic Adventure 2 that I was holding up and throwing into the bin.

I mainly changed it because of the focus on the game I've legitimately played through, as I have done so for Shadow, but not Sonic Adventure 2... but yeah, I don't like Sonic Adventure 2 very much ether.

Still, at the end of it all this is what the project looked like:

Other Trivia and Info:

I filmed the "what the fuck is a Sonic" cut away after everything else, to save making a mess of my clothes during the other takes.

That said, the actual shot almost didn't make it to the final cut because I wasn't sure it was funny or in good taste...

But pretty much whenever I can I've been using this GIF below in response to literally anything Sonic related in the last couple of weeks...

People liked the GIF whenever I've posted it in response to a Sonic thing, and after posting the teaser on twitter I even had someone sent me the video clip as a reaction to it!

So I was pretty stoked to know for certain people would get the reference (an old, now deleted JonTron video from a few years ago, if you wern't sure).

And yeah, for the longest time I've said to myself I wanted to re-create that shot if I ever do a video about Sonic... so I did.

I added in some of my own flair to it with the higher contrast, use of text and a more drastic colour change but yeah... it's just what I wanted it to be. I even synced up the audio from the original shot to my own lips.

It's flour by the way. I was originally going to use talcum powder but I couldn't find any in the house. Also flour hurts when it goes in your eyes. Trust me, I know that now.

Another thing I'm actually pretty proud of with this video is the custom level title card thing I did featuring my username to kick off actually talking about the game play of Sonic Mania. This was also the image I used as the teaser on Twitter yesterday.

There was no template for it so I ended up making the whole thing myself from scratch. To do this I had to use gameplay footage of one of the levels starting up, and then I layered full screen colour over the video in time to whenever that specific colour was on screen.

After that I had to a bit of experimentation, but I found out if I layered the deform effect on top of the cropping, I was able to make strips of colour lean over to the side, just like how they are in the title card.

After that it was a case of key framing the crop up and down to make the colours appear on screen, then rendering it out as it's own separate video with a different colour to use as a key, in order to make the transition properly work.

It was a fair amount of experimentation and faffing around for something that is only on screen for a few seconds, and there were other ways I could have done... but regardless I think it worked out pretty well.

That's a wrap!

And that's it for this behind the scenes post!

I've got some plans for what I'm doing next, as I've been gathering assets for something new to the channel I've wanted to do for a while.

Reaching 2500 subscribers recently seems like a nice reason to justify doing it too, so we'll see how that goes.

Other than that, yeah I might just relax for a few days before looking into that and play some games in my down time. 

Thanks for reading, and for your support!

- Pete :)