BTS - Apocalypse (138) (Patreon)

G'day horsemen of apocalypse, it's really good to have a new SEJ episode up finally! 2020 has been a rough year but the Apocalypse episode I felt was a major return to form: both on camera and behind the scenes, so let's explore that right now!

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How did this video come to be?
Given its importance to the Pro Skater series which is obviously a major topic on the channel, I always wanted to take a look at this, even just for my own curisority. I got the game off a friend of mine early in 2020 with a bunch of other stuff, where it appeared in a Game Testing episode first. It got a strong response so when the THPS remake got announced, I thought this would make an excellent lead in to Hawktober 2020. Of Crash 4 got in the way and shifted things around, so I just wanted to make sure this episode was released before the remake, so here we are!

A new spark of motivation!
It's clear I've been struggling to find my groove since moving. But after discussing wanting to make this video with a friend of mine, Chris, suddenly I just got super in the mood to finally pop it in and see what happens and I'm so glad I did! The game is incredibly short so I had the entire game beaten in a single sitting at a little over 2 hours and the following day, I had the entire script written within ANOTHER 2 hours... it was absolutely mental.
It's an incredibly simple episode but given I'd had trouble producing simple episodes, it was a major victory for me! I think the topic of the game was just perfect for critique given it's history, a lot of the strange stuff in the game made for amazing observations and jokes. Then finally it's importance to THPS, it's just such an interesting title very few really have appreciate for. Feedback was good too, I think a lot of people felt the same way, that it was just a quality episode.

Struggles Filming:
It just so happened that I'd planned to take a couple nights away prior to getting super motivated to work on the project, so the idea was to immediately get the episode shot and edited when I got home.

However due to the freak weather, it snowed for the first time in my town in 50 years or so, which was really cool. Problem is the snow led to my apartment leaking lots of water AGAIN and I was forced to spend my time moving into a new apartment and setting all my stuff up again which really got in the way.  So by the time I was able to film, I really wasn't in the mood and I found myself reverting back to my negative, unproductive mindset. But I got in and got it done and once I was actually recording, it didn't take long to get back into enjoying the project! Being a simple video and easy to get done really helped that and again, it was only about 2 hours to have everything filmed and ready to edit!

Post-production:
The first day of editing, I really struggled to find the motivation. Clearly I was feeling burnt out after everything that was happening. That night I had one of the worst night sleeps all year and was up at 5am the next morning... which meant that I started working by 7am and had the video finished in the early afternoon that same day. So it was almost like a blessing just to get this episode completed!

Logos and Thumbnails:
Apocalypse has some excellent imagery that made it fun to work on logos and thumbnails. Again, all of it was incredibly simple to execute.

I absolutely love how this logo came out, I drew the A symbol myself tracing the original. I was given an old drawing tablet from a friend last year and it makes job like this super quick. The font as well was easy to hunt down and dress up with some basic details. As for the thumbnail, this is another that I'm very happy with how it turned out but it led to maybe the most difficult task of the project: deciding on a name for the episode. "Apocalypse Review" just wasn't good enough as the THPS relation is a bigger selling point than the topic itself. The problem is that for the Game Testing episode, I actually WASTED my best option. 

"Bruce Willis Pro Skater" is THE PERFECT title for an Apocalypse review, especially with the logo and all that but I'd already used it so I needed something else. Given this thumbnail was very minimme esque, I actually shot him a message for some help working on a suitable title for the video. So here were some of the options we brainstormed:

• "Apocalypse: The THPS Prototype" 
• "Apocalypse: The Foundation of THPS" 
• "What if THPS was a SCi-fi Shooter?"
• "THPS but it's DOOM"
• "Apocalypse Starring Bruce Willis"

As you can see, plenty of good candidates there but now in retrospect, maybe Bruce Willis was more important than THPS to have in there, so that last one might have been a better option. 

Video Performance:
So it seems that possibly due to the nature of a few jokes in the episode, specifically referencing both Covid-19 and the US riots by name and visuals, YouTube's algorithm has suppressed the video. It's performed incredibly bad which is a real shame given how happy I was with the episode and at the time of writing this, I am very much considering to unlist the episode and re-release and edited version, removing that content and trying again. It's not something I've ever been a fan of doing as that can potentially screw up the algorithm even more. BUT... I would really like to see people SEE this video.

EDIT: Since writing this, I ultimately decided NOT to remove the video and re-upload. Using YouTube's edit function to remove one of the two problematic parts did at first seem to help, however I feel like it was a fix that came too late for the algorithm to start promoting the video fully. But it's placed in the Hawktober playlist so hopefully over time, it will see a rise in viewership similar to the rest of the content found in that playlist.

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That's a WRAP!
In the end, I really did enjoy myself working on this episode. It's a real downer that it didn't perform well but at least it's an episode that can still be looked back on and be proud of the end result! So with Apocalypse completed, I hope you're ready for an onslaught of Pro Skater and Pro Skater related episodes in the coming weeks so until then, thanks for reading and as always, have a great fucking day. Cheers! 😊