BTS - Jak & Daxter Return (136,137) (Patreon)

G'day lurkers, in this post I'll be covering both the Jak & Daxter Trilogy Revisit episode AND the Every Jak & Daxter Level RANKED episode! Despite the runtime of these combined spanning over 2 hours, they're more technical/analytical videos so for the most part, there was no need to get into any crazy or complicated shenanigans!

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How did these videos come to be?
Ever since I first covered the series way back in 2015 when the channel was just getting started, I never like my videos on them. It was a moment when I found my creativity growing a bit lazy and forcing myself to do certain things, which really hurt them, so it was always something I wanted to come back too.
Fast forward to ELR becoming a thing and I felt that the franchise offered so much to that format and starting working on it by total coincidence, in time for the 5 year anniversary of my old videos. The trilogy review was a very last minute decision, given I had to replay everything anyway, why not revisit the games and finally fix my old mistake? I have actually had very creative and fun ideas to revisit this series and introducing some location/cosplay into the mix. But that can still happen some day in the future, given I'm trying to lessen the amount of that stuff I'm doing for health reasons, it was good to just focus on a more simplified format for this.

Logos and Graphics:
As with a lot of my projects, some of the first work I complete while playing through the games in the background is getting the graphic design elements out of the way so they don't hold up production time when I'm ready to edit. Thankfully I had some MAJOR help with this project!

I have to give a HUGE thank you to friend Petronious for doing a lot of the work on the logos. As we both create customized logos for our individual channels, we often collaborate and share what we're working on for feedback, as well as share ideas. Using a bit of a Frankenstein method, Pete was actually responsible for making all of the letters for the ELR logo for me to then put together to create the final product. He did an excellent job on them. Then when I decided I was going to review the games as well, I followed his method and frankensteined some of the other letters I needed and I think all in all, we both did a great job on these!

I also have to give full credit to Pete for making the nameplate graphics within the ELR absolutely boss. The plan was to always have the precursor text scrolling behind that says "Every Level Ranked" but the previous ELR videos also had a second element as a background for the number. I knew it had to be either a precursor orb or power cell but I wanted something animated. I was totally stumped for what to do so I asked Pete who just simply responded "Uncharted" and BOOM, the day was saved!
Of course the orb is a hidden treasure inside all of those games so I simply jumped into Uncharted 4 gameplay, whacked a mask on it and thankfully, it scrolls at the exact same speed as the text and it looks great. Cheers mate!

Production Timeline:
I wanted these episodes ready for June so in March, I begun replaying the games. I was almost at the end of Jak II and had just completed the Underport mission with Sig when my game locked up and froze. Thankfully I didn't lose any data thanks to autosave so I decided to take a break for dinner and planned to finish the game later that night... turns out I wouldn't be able to play the game for another 2-3 weeks.
While preparing dinner, one thing led to another at home and I left knowing that I wasn't going back and through a lot of drama, 24 hours later, I'd secured my new apartment. I didn't have a TV I could use for playing games until my second week in so it was a crazy time. All I wanted to do was get these games played while I was in the mood for them, which I feel did possibly hurt these projects in the end.

I am very happy with how they both turned out, but the actual process of getting them completed REALLY burnt me out due to that troubling time because suddenly, like a lot of my projects in recent years, it had a lot of personal negativity attached to it which made me uninspired to work on it.

Jak & Daxter FREE CAM!
The one thing that did get me back into the project somewhat though, was exploring the original trilogy in debug mode with the free camera. I'm really into this type of thing and it's a trend that I feel helps to make ELR videos special, by offering a rarely seen perspective on the games. It's something I hope can be a feature of every ELR in the future.

This can be done by anyone in any copy of the games, just look up Jak & Daxter Debug Codes and you'll find them. This was so much fun honestly, getting to explore the low poly horizon close up and zoom out. For Crash, I waited until I knew exactly what shots I needed the free cam to get but here, I just explored most of the games so there was a tonne of stuff that didn't get seen in the episode. JAK II didn't really work well though which was a pain but I think these shots really enhanced the dissection of individual locations and worked great for the titles in both the review and TOP 10 of the ranking!

This is a flythrough of the low poly map seen while climbing the tower cable in Jak II.

Workload!
The idea behind doing both the review and ELR together was to be in that zone and hopefully things would be more efficient. Working on 10 Hawktober videos at once seems like a lot of work, however really, it becomes a well oiled machine, like a conveyor belt effect where things naturally seem to get done quicker; a single video out of a set gets finished quicker, than part of a single video. Problem that I discovered working on these I was testing, was to see if I got burnt out looking at so much of the same stuff... the answer is very much yes.

6 and 1/2 pages for the review, 26 pages for the ELR is A LOT of Jak & Daxter all at once. Recording wasn't too bad actually, the full raw voiceover was about 3 hours for the ELR which is on par with Crash and filming the camera segments was 2 hours for both videos as I tried to keep things quite limited in the ELR.

This is the final timeline for the Every Level Ranked and it was the editing of this that REALLY killed the project for me. After 4-5 days of editing the review, I was a spent force after everything. So I found myself inside a job that should take a week, instead taking 2 weeks to get done, with a lot of days only getting maybe 3 or 4 spots edited (about 5 minutes worth of the video) done in a single day. It was a REAL problem but it got done in the end and unlike the previous ranking episodes, there was not a single fuckup in the render (thank fuck for that) and surprisingly, the render was a total of 2 hours instead of the previously seen 10+ 😳

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That's a WRAP!
I've got to give a huge thanks again to Petronious for his major help on this one, all in all, I'm so proud of both of these projects now that they're completed. Unfortunately the review seemed to be dead on arrival, I'm sure no thank to YouTube screwing up as the video went live. But ah whatever, despite the issues or burnout and such, I still had a lot of fun working on these and I'm glad to finally clean my hands of a 5 year abomination.
Thank you all so much for supporting the channel and allowing me to continue doing this, I love you. If you've got any further questions, let me know and until next time, I hope you have a great fucking day. Cheers guys!