Destroy All Humans Revisit! - Early Access & Behind the Scenes (Patreon)

Hey everyone, and welcome to the first big video of the year! April fools day with the Elmo video was fun but ended up being made in between working on THIS!

Work technically began on this video (or rather the series as a whole) back in November, but work on this video specifically has probably been going on since late February...

THE INVASION IS ON!

Basically instead of jumping in and starting work on Crash Tag Team Racing, I decided to just sit back and play some games I'd been thinking about a lot... (doubly so thanks to a certain remake coming out later this year...) and out of habit, I recorded the entire lot as I went along.

And yeah, from there I set in motion the idea of doing these videos with the main mindset being "I'm going to to it properly this time" 

From day one.... three years ago... the plan always was to talk about all 4 of the main entries in the Destroy All Humans franchise as I think they're a cool idea, conceptually... and not that many people talk about them, at least not in a full-on in-depth kind of way. 

But the gap in-between this potential DAH2 video and the one I did before for the original game became so big, and my skills in editing and writing have gotten better in that time I just felt I was justified in doing my very first re-review!

A RETROSPECTIVE!

Yeah, so as well as this first game... my currently plan is to talk about the others and as I've stated somewhere or other before... ALL 4 games are fully recorded and ready to go, each with a bunch of notes for writing the scripts!

 240 gameplay files. 341GB in size. Totaling in at 29hrs 35 mins!

All ready for some more Destroy All Humans videos later down the line!

THE FIRST GAME

The idea originally was to perhaps make all 4 videos ahead of time and then upload them in a more systematic and regular schedule over a month but... you have to pick your battles.

I'd already been away from uploading videos for a while (outside of April Fools) and in doing that I would quite literally have been gone for most of this year so... here we are!

All being well I shall be able to carry on making these DAH videos for a while which may nicely end off on a video about that remake that's coming out...

As it stands right now, all 4 of the main games in the series have already been played through and had gameplay recorded along the way so it's just a matter of using my notes to make some scripts, really.

TIME TRAVEL!

One idea I had very early on to play around with the idea of re-reviewing a game was to literally time travel back to the point of me originally reviewing the game and somehow interacting with my past self. The idea sort of came from a combination of that time AVGN did something similar when revisiting his past self... but also Avengers Endgame. I really liked how that game did it's characters meeting and avoiding themselves and kinda wanted that for myself.

Anyone familiar with the video will know that at one point I throw myself towards the floor (it was a recurring "joke" at the time... don't ask!) and as an editor I found my way in thanks to that shot.

The motion of myself falling down towards the floor 3 years ago was a good way for my to edit it into some sort of physical attack, and in order to do it I mixed things together like green screen and a LOT of masking.  That one 15 second shot in particular where I lean into shot behind myself literally took about 3 hours... I think? 

For anyone unfamiliar, masking is when you basically take a digital pair of scissors and cut your way around shapes to either hide or reveal them during a video. Doing this, and changing the shape frame-by-frame was how I was able to appear "behind" my younger self.

Again, thanks to circumstance I had a clean shot of my shelving behind me at the time thanks to that prat fall, so I was able to use that behind EVERYTHING else, to still appear in the same room. It's a little messy to explain but I've put together a little diagram.

It's not very often I feel the need to do this sort of thing, but the challenge was worth it as I'm very happy with the result! Keep in mind the image above only demonstrates a single frame... and I had around 15 seconds... at 50 frames per second to do! 

I had to take in some changes to my room in the present day when filming the surrounding shots so I cleverly kept "present day Pete" to the right of the room, as all major changes to my room have been on the other side where all of the new shelving is.

None of this shelving existed back then... so I made sure that only the very tip of the shelving was on show during my rant at my younger self.

Of course, the other alternative would have been to meticulously recreate my old shelving, by moving everything around to match what was there... but... I very quickly decided against that as it really.... really wasn't worth the effort!

FRANKENSTEIN'S MONSTER EDIT

Another reason the video took so long is that on my part I really didn't help myself.

I'd been very reluctant about appearing on camera and even decided to write them off entirely in future in between working on this and Crash TwinSanity back in November so while most of the video was made with voice over in mind...

I eventually got back round to the idea of wanting to appear on camera again so I re-wrote a few lines surrounding where I wanted these camera segments to be and came up with a fairly basic intro to the video, following on from the explosion that occurred at the end of the last one...

I'd actually finished all of this, and the entire video... and even uploaded it to YouTube before deciding to back away once more. I went to bed and the thought kept nagging at me.

This is the first re-review I've done... AND it happens to be perfect for this time travel idea, as other games I'd like to re-review weren't filmed in ways that would allow for me to confidently do this... So I spent best part of an entire day adapting my original idea into a new intro and re filming the entire thing, complete with all of the green screen elements JUST to satisfy my own curiosity of where it would look decent...

And.. I was happy with it! I took a couple more days doing some heavy editing to make it look as good as I could and in the end I'm quite happy with how it turned out... considering the mess I made for myself with my indecisiveness!

WHAT'S NEXT?

Well, I don't need to be so secretive in saying that yeah... Destroy All Humans 2 is something I'll be working on soon... but not right away!

Next up I'm thinking of making another short video in a similar style to the Elmo one... but for something that will fit nicely into the theme of Star Wars Day on May the 4th!

I'm still currently at home away from work and while I have the time I think I'll be able to get that done so, that's what I'm working on at the moment. The game is already finished and I'm in the process of putting the script together today!

Thanks for your support, and as always any questions or suggestions for the Patreon page are welcome.

- Pete