SUPER Star Wars! - Behind The Scenes (Patreon)

Hey guys! Happy Star Wars Day!

After wrapping up on the first Destroy All humans video I had enough time spare to think about making a Star Wars Day themed video on... well, a Star War game!

I've actually wanted to talk about a Star Wars game on May the fourth for a long while... with the very first video I uploaded to my current YouTube channel originally supposed to be about Star Wars: The Force Unleashed!

SUPER STAR WARS!

I have a small selection of Star Wars games to choose from but the one I went with was Super Star Wars due to it's length and general game design as I knew it'd make for a nice, quick game to talk about.

Considering the amount of time I gave myself to make the video and the fact there's not... actually that much to say, I'm quite glad with how this one turned out. While I originally intended the video to be around 5 minutes long, it ended up twice that length but was still fairly quick to make due to some changes I've made to my editing...

Due to my PC getting very slow and generally wanting to change it at some point anyway you'll notice I've now ditched using quite so much drop shadow on most parts of the video, but especially on the gameplay layer.

I always did like the way it looked... but in the last year or so I've started feeling like it makes the video look a lot darker than it needs to at times, as well as the fact it does take significantly longer to render videos... especially as this PC is pretty much on it's last legs judging on how it's been performing lately.

So instead, I've settled on a lightly blurred version of my blueprint background and I think that still gives the video some depth, as the game play looks more in focus!

There's also quite a bit less of the usual "PNG's flying around all over the place" in this video as I just wanted to use my words along with the occasional funny edit, instead of just constantly throwing more and more layers on top of the game play and... I think it worked out quite well.

I suppose I've felt like I've painted myself into a corner with my videos, constantly thinking I should be editing them more and more intensively but... I kind of don't want to do as much of that any more? At least to the same extent I have done in the past anyway.

There's still plenty of little moments of over-editing for the sake of helping to make jokes etc.... including...

THE INTRO

The vast majority of this intro I left until the morning I started filming to come up with it's choreography... but I think that worked in it's favor. I knew the key things I wanted in the intro, and I knew I wanted the entire thing to be around 20 seconds long, so I just then crack on and quickly start talking about the game.

The main things I wanted were:

• a shot of me looking bored
• a shot of the Vader helmet
• an "Indiana Jones" styled shot of me taking the Vader helmet
• the crazy arm flailing with the light saber
• and some sort of fast cutaway to the Star Wars inspired logo

Outside of knowing I wanted those on screen at some point, I just sort of winged it and made up everything that happens in-between as I went along. I was quite happy with the whole... randomly finding the Vader helmet sat there and just rolling across the room to it kinda thing. It's dumb, and it over before you know it!

THE PROP!

The Darth Vader helmet itself is something I've lad tucked away for a long time now. Not necessarily for using in videos but I've used it for fancy dress a couple of times over the years... but will now always work as  a quick thing to put on for future Star Wars videos should I make more!

It's actually a toy that I was given as a present from when Star Wars Episode 3 released!
I believe it was part of the whole cross-promotional line of toys that came out around that Christmas but yeah... I just ended up keeping it!

I don't have the packaging or anything like that, as this wasn't kept as a collectible as it was played with... but I just never threw it away. Obviously... I'm quite glad I didn't!

Ideally I would have been in full Darth Vader costume at some point by slapping together some dark clothing, some heavy duty black motorcycle gloves and a cape (again, we happen to have one in the house somewhere thanks to previous Halloween costumes over the years) but... I can always do that another time!

There's plenty of other Star Wars games after all!

THE LIGHT SABER

Now, the actually prop itself isn't particularly interesting. Again it's one I've had for a VERY long time (since even before the Vader helmet) and is just a sort of generic off-brand "laser sword" toy but... you know exactly what it's supposed to be!

The thing that took the longest was making it glow... as the toy itself doesn't.

So... this is the one big instance of me still applying some of the ol' over-editing but... I think it made the video look better so screw it!

I after speeding up the footage to make it look cartoony (as I intended) the arm flailing ended up being just over a second long... and at 50 frames per second we're looking at around 50ish times I have to paint over the video using a simple red shape...

Except not really! As you'll notice two red layers! The second one was to add a soft glow around wherever the Light Saber is... which I also had to animate frame by frame. This one didn't require any masking to change the shape of the red, which made it far easier and faster to animate but still... I ended re-positioning shapes about 100 times...

To make the glowing look better than just "red on top of the video" you can mess around with setting in Vegas called "composite mode".
I don't know the full technical explanation as to what this does, but it essentially changes the way colors on one layer affect the layer below it...

And one of these settings makes the reds sort of glow within the original video instead of simply appearing above it.

(Left: compositing modes off. Right: compositing modes on, using "Add" and "Dodge")

So yeah, despite me making the rest of the video easier for myself to edit... this one second of footage probably took around 4 3-4 hours to look right.

Just for fun I thought I'd show you what the intro alone looked like after I'd edited it all!

THE GOOF

Probably the biggest goof I made with this video is I forgot to mention the frickin' PS4 port of this. I've no doubt I'll get comments about this but by the time I realized I figured it doesn't matter. I'll just leave a pinned comment in the comment section.

WHAT'S NEXT?!

Well, it was only a few days ago I posted a blog update about how I felt cornered  and unsure about Destroy All Humans... and yet here we are a few days later and I'm feeling petty good about it again now! Huzzah!

So at the moment I'm tidying up and trimming down the script I've written for Destroy All Humans 2 and hoping to get started on recording voice over and begin editing soon-ish.

Only concern is how much longer I'm able to stay away from work for as

• 1) it'll obliviously slow down my progress
• 2) I don't really want to be dealing with masses of people again right now.

Either way I'll make whatever progress I can while I have the time.

Stay safe and thanks for your support.

- Pete