Spider-Man - Behind The Scenes (Patreon)

Hey everyone and I hope you enjoyed the first proper video of 2019 and the first collaborative video between myself and Alex from PAUSE BREAK! 

There's plenty to say with this one as we had briefly spoke about the idea of doing this quite some time ago, so let's get started!

How the video happened:

Around the time of the PS4 Spider-Man game released in September 2018, a conversation stirred up on the Petronious Discord server between myself, Alex and a few others about some of the other Spider-Man game we'd played and it didn't take very long for the conversation to land on this Neversoft one.

While the idea of a collab was almost thrown in as a joke at first, a few minutes after that conversation I began directly messaging Alex about it as I thought it could potentially become an interesting video on either of our channels.

I've been watching and enjoying PAUSE BREAK videos for at least 2 years or more at this point, and I really like the way Alex looks at games and presents his thoughts on them. It goes without saying I'd recommend his channel to anyone who watches my content!

I've seen others review this game, and very briefly bring up the different ports but I'd not seen one that had two people playing and talking about two respective versions and making full comparisons between scenes do truly show how visually polarizing they can be at times...

So yes, this video has been in the works for around 3-4 months! :)

We both had our own projects on the go at the time, with both of us wanting to make a video on the Spyro Reignited Trilogy and myself wanting to get my Grinch video finished in time for the year to end... 

And while I initially had different plans when we first spoke about it, along along came January and I hadn't made any progress on those plans... and we both happened to have free schedules in terms of upcoming videos so we just went for it!

We both played through our respective versions of the game over the course of a week or so, we had a shared document file to make our notes and I got to work with turning the notes into a script, allowing room for any alterations Alex would like to make for his lines throughout.

Making the camera-work... work:

In my videos I like to try and keen the on-camera segments as grounded as possible. What I mean by that is it's not very often you'll actually see Petronious interact with floating images on screen as I think it has to potential to easily look and feel a bit shit.

I have managed to make this work in the past by maybe blending that in with real objects that have been thrown around the scene. An example would be using a PNG of my Spyro 3 disc in the opening sequence of my Spyro Year of the Dragon review. I threw the disc to begin with, which gave reason for me to be looking at the "fake disc" bouncing around.

I mention this because I see far too many YouTubers doing a "fake conversation" (as I like to call it) where two separate people in two separate rooms (or even separate countries in most cases!) are pretending they're in the same room with this... frankly, cringe inducing dialogue trying to avoid the fact it looks a bit naff.

So in my videos I try and give people a more grounded reason for appearing. I've had TomatoGhost appear on my TV screen before now, for example. That way there's a reason WHY I'm talking to the TV, and not just staring at the camera and pretending I'm talking to someone who isn't there.

So with that in mind, I figured as Alex represents himself using his avatar on screen, it would make sense to have him appear on a screen along side me on camera.

I specifically went for minimal shots where the two of us are literally on screen at the same time though, as the timing required on Alex's part for the animation and on my part to space my own dialogue around the gaps I'd have to leave to Alex's dialogue... meant there could have been a lot of awkward cringey spaces between lines.

I did keep a couple in the video though as I felt it would add a sense of realism tot he situation, even if that meant doing a bit of extra work for myself.

There's a shot towards the end of the video for example, where my copy of Spider-Man 2 crosses over the mask I had already cut out of the screen for Alex to appear through. Because of this, I did have to go through approximately 6 seconds of footage and add a secondary mask to allow my hand and the game case to show on screen.

That's around 300 times I had to do this, for this one shot alone! I also had to do the same thing for the next shot where the game is against the mask I'd made for the TV on the other side of the room. While that one wasn't as big of a job, it had to be done for the sake of consistency.

While it was no effort at all due to me never crossing the path of the mask in the shots, I did the exact same thing for Square Eyed Jak's little cameo in this video.

The Editing...

Given the nature of how I usually transition between different game play footage of different games, and how Alex uses layers to have his avatar appear above and below footage at times, I proposed the idea of actually edited everything on my end.

My thinking was this would save the video quite clearly cutting between two different video's we'd separately edited and just thrown together at the last stage like most people do, and did allow for a few visual elements of our videos to be merged at times. 

Getting Alex's Avatar into the video could have been done in a few different ways, but again to save the constant editing, rendering and re-rendering of his avatar each time I even remotely changed the pacing of the dialog we tried out simply using a green screen

Alex did all of his Avatar stuff to the bits of dialog he wanted to have his avatar appear on screen, and then I dropped that in on top of the audio so everything matched up.

But the end product once edited was quite the scary looking thing.

I don't usually have my video and audio layers quite so jumbled up but this was basically the result of me wanting to edit the PAUSE BREAK parts of the video as closely as I could to how Alex normally does them himself.

I had to use layers with a 3D rotation effect applied to them in order to do this, as that gives the same perspective effect seen in the PAUSE BREAK videos themselves. The only catch is that this applies to everything on that entire layer which isn;t something I usually opt for in my solo videos.

So while the timeline looks a little messy,it actually ended up being easy to work with as I essentially separated the two editing styles into their own set of layers.

The Neversoft Logo:

This was one of the first things I actually edited together for the video, as I knew the actual Spider-Man logo in this game is a fairly simple still image and wanted something a little more impressive to be thrown into this video.

Given I'm not likely to talk about Tony Hawk games any time soon, I would have had no other reason to make this logo so it just seemed right. the "O" where the eyeball is being in exactly the right place for my username was too good an opportunity to pass up.

There were about 6 versions of of it in the end but I've slapped together the 4 most important ones together in a  single video for you to see if you like. 

I first made the custom logo like I would normally, then masked and key-framed each letter to appear on top of the original logo. Then I did a lot of masking to the original logo to only remove the lettering, and then I did a lot of cleanup to adjust positioning, colour correcting and adding a pixelate effect to everything along with the Spider-Man transition.

It was a lot of work to get right, and even then as I'm the one that made it I can STILL see very small details wrong with it... but to the average viewer I don't think it matters. Its unhealthy to keep going back over and over again for some of the small things I'm spotting so I left them be. I'm happy with it overall!

Other trivia and info:

Off the top of my head there isn't too much to report as we basically had an idea of what we were going to do in around December or so.

The initial idea I had for the opening would have literally involved me pressing the Pause Break button on my computers keyboard to summon Alex but I couldn't think of a reason why I'd be at my desk doing that in the first place so I left it out.

What's next?  (thumbnail not final) 

Spider-Man 2: Enter Electro will be next!

The game has already been played though and the script is nearly finished. It will be a solo video, as I jokingly mentioned at the end of this first Spider-Man video so I doubt I'll be editing it for quite as long this time!

I recently went to see Spider-Man Into The Spider-verse and I'd like to try and make part of the video heavily inspired by a scene in the film I really liked if I can.

Side Projects:

I've also been playing through, recording footage of and making notes for another series of games I'd like to do as a gradual series throughout the year. This series in particular I'm NOT fussed about chasing up and doing each game back to back as there's far too many of them to be bothered about... but I think I could have my own fun in discussing them.

That's a wrap!

And that's pretty much it! Massive thanks to PAUSE BREAK Alex for being cool to work with. I recommend his channel and his content to everyone who enjoys my own!