Behind the Scenes: Overwatch/Battleborn "Review" (Patreon)

How the video came about:

After a fairly lengthy gap in between my main videos I wanted to come back with something that would firstly get peoples attention and secondly, be a short and fun project to work on to help ease me back into the mood of editing these videos of mine.

Combine that with the timing of this gap, an April Fools special was just the thing I decided to do. Now, this wasn't a spur of the moment decision as I've wanted to have a go at an overly stupid April fools video since I saw a couple last year that inspired me.

Namely, Sonic the Fighters - Caddicarus  and SONIC 06 - NitroRad.

Not so much because they were poking fun at Sonic in their videos, but because they both went about making a video in their usual format, and then bending that formula around the fact April 1st is the one day you can get away with being silly for the sake of being silly.

So I've actually had a year to sit and think about how I'd like to tackle my own April Fools video, and originally it was going to be an overly stupid remake of my ill-fated Dead Rising Chop Till You Drop review.

I had a loose idea of how I would have done it, and even edited together parts of the video around December 2016 to see if I could get things to work...

But after all of that and having a  think about it, I've decided I'm going to drag that forced joke out for as long as I can and make it a milestone special some day!

This was also around the time I bought myself a copy of Battleborn (which I'll save my genuine thoughts on for an actual review of it sometime soon) because of how cheap it goes for these days. And so I figured given how it almost became a joke in of itself against the massive hit that Overwatch became,  and how so many people compare the two... why not poke fun at both of them at the same time?

How the video changed during production:

Originally this Overwatch/Battleborn video was going to be a Today's Topic Review but that quickly changed into Petronious Episode, as it allows for more stupidity and warrants me to going all out with animations, memes and general silliness... much like I do anyway with those sorts of videos!

That, plus I've always said I like having Today's Topic be my outlet for more genuine thoughts over an outlet for comedic reviewing. I think my trail of thought was to be analytical in a silly way, like how NitroRad handled his Sonic 06 video. But nah, I'm better at adding goofy sound effects.

For the intro scene before the Petronious Logo comes up, I originally had a shot of myself flying over a motorway, with every game I've reviewed so far flying past with it's own audio cue referencing some of the jokes found within their respective videos. I cut this because I had no idea what to follow it up with, and decided in the end to go with the shots from Superman and Man of Steel. I'm not fully sure why,  but I guess it's because it was better to have this video become obvious it was overly stupid from the outset, given it's an April Fools video.

The only other thing I wanted to make sure was to keep it short and sweet. Having an overly stupid video like this with barely any actual review content is  fun as a one off, but its not something I'd want to do again any time soon. I also certainly wasn't going to want to drag it out for 12 minutes or so. It being around the 4 minute mark also served it's purpose of being a smaller, but still heavily edited project to help ease myself back into editing these kinds of videos after 2 months!

Other trivia and info:

The intro shots of the beach and the shot of myself take off into the sky was all filmed while I was on holiday visiting a friend last year, around August. The intention was for them to be the opening scene to a completely different review that still hasn't happened yet. But after all this time, I was getting sick of seeing it sat there on my hard drive not doing anything and decided to re-purpose it for this video instead!

The "Current Quickies" parody after the title card has also been something I've had planned for a while. Not for any particular reason, and certainly not as an insult toward Caddicarus. Just something silly I've wanted to do for a while!

There's 3 instances I reference Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop in this video, not including the fact it's in plain view on the shelf behind me for the majority of the video. This is partly because it's what this April Fools video was originally going to be all about, but also because I find it funny. Forced jokes are funny, right?

The jester hat was bought specifically for this video (which in hindsight was kind of stupid, and I probably won't be buying things specifically for videos for a while) and the only reason I'm wearing it on top of my regular hat is because that's how it looks on the thumbnail for the video. I'd already filmed my camera segments when making the thumbnail so I ended up going back and re filming them wearing both hats.

That's pretty much it for this, my first behind the scenes post! I'll be sure to do more of these in the future, mainly for the Petronious Episodes!