Knack Review - Behind The Scenes (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Once again I find myself saying sorry for the alonger gap between videos but I'm pretty sure that'll be the norm this year.

Nonetheless, it's video time! Obviously from seeing the video you'll know I decided to tackle the utter pile of garbage that is the PS4 exclusive title, Knack for this video and... what a decent into insanity that was.

Anyway, here's some BTS info, fresh from the oven!

How the video came about:

Anyone on PS+ will know that Knack was one of the offerings included with the subscription service in February 2018, and that pretty much opened the idea to me doing a video on it.

I had heard the game was bad, and for some reason I decided to play it anyway to see for myself exactly how bad it was and... well, the rest is history.

It really is that simple for this one. I was never going to willingly buy a game fully knowing it was bad, but when one is given to me for free... I can't complain too much.

Except I did... quite a lot actually...

How the video changed during production:

The main thing that changed is that this was originally going to be a fairly short, borderline shitpost video for April Fools day.

But, when thinking about it... I've seen so many videos that meme it up when it comes to talking about this game (as funny as it was at the time, we have Dunkey to blame for that mindset), and most of those videos don't even begin to properly explain WHY the game is bad...

So I figured I'd be one of the people to take the time to actually do that, albeit in my usual goofy, sound effect riddled way.

This is why (compared to last year at least), my ACTUAL April Fools Day video may have seemed a little less inspired. Because THIS was originally going to be that!

Outside of that, this video changed quite a lot in it's own ways, for what it is. Most of the changes come from me stripping back the vast majority of camera footage for this video.

Part of that was me not being happy with the way I acted out my script as I've been feeling pretty uncomfortable with the idea of being on camera for a little while now.

But also, they seriously weren't needed. They were all just shots of me sat there talking into the camera, so nothing very visually interesting anyway.

This was something I HAD to do for the Portal video, as the whole point of the camera segments in that review were to play around with the idea of having an actual Portal gun. Here, there wasn't really much need for it.

There was this one shot of me randomly appearing to answer the woman's question from the opening cut scene in the style of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" but it was pretty dumb so I just got rid of it.#

THAT, plus... all of the camera footage had really shitty quality audio because for some reason I thought it'd be fine to use my camera's on-board microphone for this one...

This I only ever really do if I know I'm not going to need the audio, like for the cartoony sound effects live action stuff I've done before now.

But, honestly... I think the video worked out fine without me actually appearing in it outside of the opening shot.

I enjoyed going overboard with the keyframing at times to make up for it, and I feel I'm getting pretty good at making my avatar bob around to the sound of my voice!

Not to say I'll always stay off camera, but I'm kinda fine with not appearing  in them so often at the moment. I always have more fun with the actual writing and editing side of things anyway... so, yeah.

But I change my mind about this sort of thing all the time, so who knows.

Other Trivia and Info:

This video was uploaded on my birthday! Huzzah!

Other than that, I don't know what else to say really.

Most of everything you see and hear in the video stayed the way it was written, so any lines that were cut from camera segments got redone as voice over. So wen it comes to the words used, this video stayed pretty true to the ones I originally had, just the visual presentation of them that changed a bit.

The main thing is that yes, if you stayed until the very end and saw my little post credit sequence... Spyro is very much in my line of sights for a video next time. At least for my next full length (10-15min) video.

Originally that shot was of me grabbing ALL 3 games, but honestly... I could do without the outright commitment to it at the moment.

These 3 videos will happen eventually, and after the recent announcement I know exactly how long I have to do them before the Reignited Trilogy gets released so.... yeah.

That's a wrap!

And that'll just about do it.

As usual here's a shot of how the video ended up looking in the editor, and it's the norm at this point! Organized chaos! There were a few instance of where it looks like I'm wasting entire layers, but that's mainly from wanting to have the PS4 advertisements show up without a drop shadow falling down onto the Knack game play below it!

So, that's it. As you know Spyro is on the table and I'll likely sit down and play through that again within the next month, recording it and making many notes.

And while I'm not 100% dead set on giving my videos a full blown narrative, I have been thinking a lot about how I can link them together and make the occasional callback and joke about previous videos.

Nothing major but I have a dumb way of perhaps half explaining the reason this Knack video had less camera footage of me in the opening to Spyro... maybe.

But I honestly have no idea when anything will happen now!

Thanks very much for your support and sticking with me despite the longer gaps between videos!

Until next time!

- Pete :)