Last of Us Part II - Update 1

Hello!
Here's this month's update and what I've been working on :)
Get ready for a lot of typos!!

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The Video, Topic, Progress, ETA

As stated before, this upcoming before will be on The Last of Us Part II! It won't be a video absolutely hating it or loving - it'll be a little bit more even handed but still skewing on the critiquing it.

While I do like certain segments of the game, Part II personally falls short for me since I wasn't getting the intended effect from what Dev's wanted to make me feel. In a game that wants to make you feel guilty and bad for not just main character but also generic NPCs, I felt quite numb to the experience. So then I explore why it's gameplay didn't affect me while other games have.

And to illustrate this post, I'll be comparing both Shadow of the Colossus and Papers Please gameplay loop. I've got some great art to accompanying these segments!! Look above if you haven't already seen 'em :)

While we're here, might as well take the time to credit these artists!

• Ellie Animation WIP - https://twitter.com/EnnuikalART
• Shadow of the Colossus WIP - https://twitter.com/revemorie
• Papers Please - https://twitter.com/Michafrar
• Expect to see these animations play beside me during my talking head segments, hope it turns out good!!!

Alongside the gameplay, I'll obviously be talking about the narrative as well. And with how good certain segments of the story are, this amplifies specific narrative decision that dumbfound me with their inclusion.

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So that's basically the broad strokes of what I'm working on! And with a word count of 8500 words, it's 1500-2000 words longer than my HBO Last of Us video - so expect a video that'll be longer than that one. Will be recording footage + audio soon!

I'm hoping to get this out by the end of the next month, but since I'm trying out a new workflow I think they'll some unforeseen hiccups. Which leads me to...

Finding a New Workflow

Because I'm trying out a different approach to making videos, I'm learning a lot of new things regarding editing, lighting, cameras, and etc. And all of it has been really rewarding and fun! Here's me playing around with some lighting.

For the first image, It took a lot of trial and error to arrive to this shot!
As simple as it looks, there are 5 lights being pointed towards me (excluding the monitor) to make this shot work.

• Key light - the light that’s illuminating my face
• Background light - self explanatory warm BG light
• Kicker/Rim light - a cool light hitting screen right of my face and shoulder to give the impression that the moon’s light is peeking through the window
• Fill/Chin Light - a very small light that hits the darker side of my face. Without that there wouldn’t be a separation between the shadows of my cheek and my hair
• 2nd Kicker light - used to add the orange rim light on my screen left shoulder. The big orange light source can’t reach my shoulder without being overpowering, so there’s a smaller light hidden behind the monitor specifically to create that rim light - to better seperate myself from the background

So while it looks like theres 2 lights going on (The Keylight and Background Light), there's a lot more going on the amount of depth the shot has!

Then there's me being bathed in red light accompanied with some hard shadows! I wanna play around with lighting this way in future videos, it' just a fun way to add some personality to a video that I I'd like to see more in other YouTube videos. I hope you like these results!

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Also a lot of time has been spent just figuring out familiarising my self with this new workflow. 

So there's quite a bit of start up cost with equipment alongside a 'learning tax', and hopefully once I've standardised my process there'll be more time video making and less time figuring things out.

And I hope this new format will allow me to not only take it easier on myself when working, but to be able to hire other editors to help me out with my videos.

As much as I love my motion graphics format, asking someone to edit to that standard is costs a pretty penny - since it involves artists creating new assets and then editing those assets to match my style. That's too much for me to handle!

So I can foresee a possibility where I can handover my talking head footage to someone else, and then they can splice together a rough draft, and then I can go through it myself to clean up and add my own visual flair - so let's see how this goes!! Excited to try this new workflow out.

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Other Scripts I'm Working on in the Background

• With the Scott Pilgrim series coming out this November, I'm planning out a tier list video of Edgar Wright's work to celebrate the release of the show. I always wanted to try out these sorts of videos since they seem fun and relatively simple to do. I'll approach videos like this similar to the one I made on Joe Pera's show, the sorta inbetween videos to fill in the void when y'all are waiting for the bigger / deeper dive videos. (Fun fact, I initially started trying writing a script for a Black Mirror tier list video but I forgot how much episodes there are in that show. So with Edgar Wright's filmography being much smaller, I'll tackle that instead for now)
  
• Having completed Narcos S2, a part of me wanted to tackle the show's gross romanticisation of Pablo Escobar - specifically how they showed that he was a really loving guy who cares about his family. Only for his real son and his wife decry his portrayal on the show. And with how well received the show is online, this is something I wanna talk about at some point, alongside the broader conversation of biopics and how they're handled. There's a document with all the dot points I want to address, so I'll let it simmer and see where this goes.
  
• HBO's How to With John Wilson is ending this year, and is one of my favorite shows in recent memory. I just wanna share it with my audience similar to the Joe Pera video. I wanna make more content talking things I like, hence this possible video idea and the Edgar Wright tier list. So if this does come around, expect to be one of the 'inbetween' videos.

There's other scripts I'm working on but they are a lot less fleshed out, so I'll keep them to myself for now.

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PLUSH UPDATE

LOOK AT HIM HELL YEAH DON'T HURT HIM

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Anyway, that's it! Pretty big posts with a lot of updates and information to share with you!

If you want more frequent and smaller updates, be sure to check out my Discord server!
Here's the link - https://discord.gg/ezpP9DaaMH 

Once again, thanks for the support!
Catch ya guys soon, hopefully with a video out :)