BTS - Ty the Tasmanian Tiger (117) (Patreon)

G'day everyone, hope you're all enjoying this series so far. Apologies, I lost the run of myself the past week and failed to get this up when I would have liked, but it's here now. I'd like to start off by saying that the response to this review was SO FUCKING AWESOME! Not only did the video itself perform a little better than I was expecting (thanks Krome for launching a Kickstarter to port the game the week prior) but also, there were just so much positive feedback. So thank you!

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How did this episode come to be?
Starting the series off with something a lot different, with the Thylacine mini-doco. The first actual episode being a review of the first game, I setup to be the simple, standard Square Eyed Jak video of the series. It's a review of the game in an interesting location... that's it. That's all that had to get done here. However, it was also designed to reinforce the travel documentary format that the narrative is based on.

Difficulty writing the script and cut ideas!
I was stuck for a long time trying to write this episode in a way that would get those ideas across to the audience, while also being entertaining. I was stuck for a long time on names, locations. Where are we going? Why are we there? There are a lot of interesting and beautiful places to film in the state but it took me a while to realize that using actual places, means that there is all of a sudden, some level of realism/law to be accurate to the real world. So to overcome this, I decided to just show the map and say "hey, this is where we're going" and be done with it.

Once I got that out of the way, there was still the question of how do we actually initiate the review from this documentary. Since it's the first time I've done a multiple part series on location (road trip style, not counting Tony Hawktober) that'd be kinda funny if I was actually playing the games at each stop. I got the idea from Viva La Bam, the skateboarding/Jackass spin-off series. There was an episode where the crew went on a road trip to New Orleans and stopped to skateboard at each location along the way. Well I don't skate but I do play games. A lot of people questioned how this TV was being powered. Electric generators and car batteries do exist you know? But this shot here was actually a very basic masking effect.

Finally the last part that I had trouble writing was trying to figure out a reason, that I would actually venture off away from the camp site and start looking for the tigers. Since I'm supposed to be a dim witted explorer who stumbles into his discoveries by pure luck, I thought a good idea would be to fall down and realize that I was actually sitting next to some tiger tracks the entire time, a didn't even notice. The original idea was to actually make some kind of footprint mold and stop a heap of tracks into the ground that I could film with, however this was cut due to time and logistics, which is why you never actually see what I'm looking at. So that concept didn't translate too well in the final product.

Shooting the episode!
This episode was mostly filmed in the days following the first FAILED effort to film in Launceston city. Across 2 days for the vast majority of shots, it was a real morale booster. Fun fact: despite being advertised as a journey across the state of Tasmania, this episode was actually filmed 2 minutes from where I live! Without much of an idea of where to film, we just wandered around until we found some good looking spots or landmarks. But the general flow of the episode, while very subtle, was to convey that I was travelling upwards, slowly climbing. You can actually see in a lot of the shots, I'm going up a hill, which leads to me being on the edge of a cliff by the end of the episode. Nobody seems to have picked up on that and honestly, it's not an important detail AT ALL. But this was done to try and give the random, generic looking bush location some kind of consistent geography which is turned into somewhat of a character in it's own right, by the time we reach the final shot.

This final cliff shot looking down was filmed in the same place I shot some of the skits in the first Sly Cooper review back in 2017!

How the Christchurch Shooting Impacted this episode!
The script for this review was finished by early February and originally included an edgy joke, for the sake of adding an educational element to the episode, to reinforce the documentary aspect. Port Arthur is infamous in Tasmanian and Australian history in general, for a mass shooting that occurred there in 1996, which resulted in the tighter gun laws we have in Australia today. Given that at the time Ty was released, many cartoon franchises were dying off or evolving to include more gun combat (look at Jak and Daxter), I thought it was a perfect opportunity to push the boundaries with an edgy joke, to then initiate a quick history lesson while also making fun of the games weak level variety. Here is the CUT joke in question:

This was actually a joke I had written down sometime in 2018, while the series was still in the idea phase. Honestly as a joke, I do think that it offers something, if only shock value that I'd say such a thing. But I also feel like it was a topical game element to discuss in a way that was related to both Ty and Tasmania in general. Still it might sound in poor taste to joke about something like that, given how serious and disgusting of an event it is. My only explanation for that is that we're kind of lax about these things in this part of the world. They're FAR less frequent than a lot of other places. I remember a handful of times in school, we would joke about school shootings WITH teachers, INCLUDING troubled students in the discussion... and it was all just a big joke. I was even voted by my art class in College "most likely to be the school shooter" which my teacher initiated the discussion on... I know it's fucking gross and I'm sorry but it can be like that sometimes. On a personal level, I must say that the Christchurch shooting was incredibly shocking for me as a result. That something like that could happen so close to home. So a week later when I came back to revise this script, I stumbled across the joke I'd forgotten about and felt really sick for it. 

So of course, it was cut. I don't want people to think that I would condone or celebrate something so fucking cruel as that. I'm only sharing it here, because it's probably the most interesting detail of not about this episode.

Moving on from that...
On a lighter note, the logo for the episode is absolutely one of my favourites I've ever done! It was a time consuming one, 2 hours just to create the actual elements and another hour or so to animate everything alongside the Thylacine intro which replaces the normal one. I had to actually use the shapes in the TY letters to create my own letters which is something I haven't had to do before (and if I have, I can't remember). It's the animation that makes it though. Any kind of motion always helps them to feel a lot more special and the bounciness of the intro to Ty really sells the end result!

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That's a WRAP!
Well things got a little dark there unfortunately, but I'm thankful that the episode overall was received so positively! Like I said at the top, this was actually the simplest video in concept out of the entire series so aside from some of the different mechanics thrown in, it was really just another at the office for me to get this one finished. And that about does it! Be sure to check back when the next episode goes live to read the Making-of Ty 2 and until then, I hope you have a great fucking day. Cheers! :)