March Update (Behind the Jak video)

Hey hey hey!

Welcome back folks, for another update to clock out the month. I took a little break after finishing the Jak video and then got back to work on a bunch of other stuff, including some Patreon rewards you’ll be seeing shortly. Next month is going to be a little busy, so I can’t guarantee the next big video will be done in that time, but it’s coming together fairly well and is a lot less technical, so hopefully won’t go through quite as extreme a process as Jak did. To hear more about that, I’ve got another post-mortem post on the subject detailing all the crazy ways this video challenged me. Take a gander below to read all about it!

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Remembering Jak

The idea

Some of you may remember way way back I’d done a video on the ratchet series. It’s not my best work, very haphazardly made and with a few jokes and references I probably wouldn’t make now, but at its core was an idea I was very happy with, finally voicing how I felt the Ratchet series had morphed from the thing I liked, a fun game that turned out to be a smart commentary on consumerism, to a bland Pixar franchise. This ended up being the ball that fellow Youtuber The Gaming Brit (Charlie) grabbed and ran to the end of the finish line with in his own series of Ratchet videos, so I didn’t feel too compelled to revisit the subject in great detail. But I did plan to talk more about the other franchise I brought up in that same video. And it was going to be very different.

Originally it was just going to be a short video talking about all my issues with Jak 3 specifically. Back then I was making videos that were around ten to twenty minutes alone, and had started becoming friendly with Charlie. We’d shoot the breeze about how much we didn’t really care for the game and all the funny ways it bothered us. I felt incentivised to sum up all my issues with the franchise within that video, and as I wrote this, way back in like, 2015, I realised I actually had what I felt was a cool point to make in relating the series to the riddle of the sphinx, and present my own third game pitch. I was very excited about that angle and kept redrafting, telling myself I’d do it over the years. Then Charlie (who had sat on his own ideas long enough) released his excellent Jak video, which raised most of the points I would have, only better than I had in my draft, with many ideas he hadn’t shared that I hadn’t considered, and I decided to file the project away.

But last year, I got thinking about it again. I looked at the draft and realised I still really liked that analogy, and with even more time having passed and more thoughts coming to me now about the rest of the series, that could make for a neat video commenting on the inconsistency of the Franchise and how that actually made for its consistent Legacy, of Jak’s nature as an adventurer. It set me going, going back to dig out my old games and strategy guides, and made me schedule it as part of the next block of videos I wanted to tackle, to finally get it done and out there by the fall of 2022.

And things didn’t quite go according to plan.

Troubles

For a start, I felt like I was kind of working backwards. The new Draft now went into all the games to best represent the point, and I had plenty to say, but I also didn’t want to repeat what everyone else was saying. Charlie in particular had raised points I didn’t want to tread on and I didn’t want it to be an overly long piece, either, as I had made quite a few of those at the time. I also had no clue how I was going to visually represent the pitch outside of drawing it myself or via commissioning another artist, and I didn’t want to tackle it until the video was mostly done, in case I found it wasn’t working and could cut it from the timeline. I was feeling a little insecure about it all of a sudden- but at the same time I wanted to get the video done and I pushed myself to get a final draft I was happy with, record it, put the video on its feet and see what it looked like.

Getting that original final draft was very difficult. I didn’t like how it was flowing, I got kind of twisted and tongue tied on the overall point I wanted to make, and the more research I did the more I felt I needed to add. When I finally felt like it was good enough and made a recording, I kept listening back to it in the edit and felt demoralised at how it just wasn’t coming together for me, dragging my feet in bringing that final edit into being. There were other new technical processes involved- I was making the switch in recording old games through an OSSC to produce the best quality footage of the original copies, and not only was I making strides to do this with the Jak trilogy, I knew I also needed to do the same for Ratchet 1 to Deadlocked, which of course I knew would feature in quite a bit of the video.

Tragically, the Jak 2 and 3 footage I had corrupted on an old disk drive which I had to replace. It meant I couldn’t get the work done to my original deadline and in the end I let other projects that were coming to me faster take control, so I could ensure that more content was made. This is how we got the shorter, more concise Medievil video, another idea I’d sat on for a long time. I’d been hit with inspiration that month on how to word it and felt compelled to put that together out of nowhere, so I figured I should power through with that while I was inspired. Still, I worried about how much further Jak would be pushed back. I didn’t want it to come out at Christmas, it wasn’t really a Christmas video, so I switched to another long held plan. January I wanted to hit because I thought it would be funny to call it Jakuary, but once again it wasn’t coming together fast enough, and I switched over to Oz.

Feb was going to be my time, I thought. Charlie had graciously offered me his Jak 2 and 3 footage which in the end was probably for the best, as he played the game better and had more coverage than I’d ever had in my original files. But as I put the entire video together, I realised it just didn’t seem right. There were things I didn’t explain earlier that would have set up aspects raised later, points that suddenly sounded like nonsense, and a very odd structure where ideas didn’t flow from one place to another. The worst part was that I felt the pitch now felt a bit hollow- I hadn’t drawn it up yet and it seemed to not fit with the rest of the video, which was just me talking about the jak games, ruminating on if it could come back, and then pitching a concept that didn’t really comment properly on anything. At least, that’s how it was coming across to me.

I sat on that edit, feeling like I could release it anyway, but it didn’t feel right, and as showed in a behind the scenes video that edit was abandoned on the last day of Feb so I could completely rewrite the piece around the current edit and try to improve it again.

Jason

Charlie messages me and says hey, have you seen this 2003 speech from Jason? I was like, no, I’d done a lot of research both for the video and over the years as a fan, but hadn’t thought to look at Jason’s interviews specifically outside of the Jak or Crash based searches or content. He sends it my way, and my entire perspective on the matter completely shifted. Partly because it was a very good speech- Jason is a great speaker with a passion for the craft and it was a real intriguing piece of history, but also because it redefined my understanding of the people behind this very odd franchise.

I realised the whole reason Jak works, in spite of all the reasons it shouldn’t, is because his adaptability was inherent to the people who brought him to life. They were playing the market to produce art and promote talent, and while it was messy, it was a passionate fight to stay relevant and to prove they had something to say even without all the conventional wisdom at their disposal, that they were just as good at creating worlds as any marketing department assigned to help them. It was such a clear message that it suddenly recontextualised a lot of what I’d been trying to say anyway and made me commit to having Jason as the major through line, the voice that drove Jak into existence and benefitted the people he brought with him.

This also reaffirmed the pitch at the end as proof that the franchise they changed to adapt to new audiences could continue to do so, but that it would only be half the battle. The ideas were suddenly flowing together a lot better than ever before and I was getting more excited about how that could shape the video and better create something that hadn’t been said. I went on a full binge of every possible interview ever given, I went back to the further reading like the design bibles and strategy guides to see if they cross referenced with that material, and I managed to re-shape the video into a much better draft that final felt like it was aiming for something specific. And I even got to keep my pitch in at the end, which now felt like closure on the idea of Jak as a franchise at the time of recording, rather than a question mark to hang onto until something new came along.

Looking back on it now, it’s probably been one of the more difficult videos to put together, in same way Sly 3 had to be pulled through from almost nothing other than some core ideas I knew I wanted to express to an incredibly lucid video, and one of the things I’m most proud of. I’m not sure if I feel the same way about this video, but I am incredibly happy with what it ended up as. I noticed that so many other creators had produced Jak videos around the same time, and while I didn’t watch them so as to not be tainted further from being able to make a more personal take, it did make me feel like perhaps I was wasting my time. But I knew it was one of those things I’d always wanted to make, and that if I didn’t offer the project up I’d really be kicking myself later on.

Perhaps another thing that gave me extra courage was having Charlie offering both criticism and support on the sidelines, having waited for this video from me for years and wanting to see me get it done. One day a week or so before release, he said something incredibly encouraging- that while I always tend to struggle to pull a video together, in the end I always seem to come through alone and pull off something great out of nowhere, which kind of galvanised me to try and prove that could be the case here, too. The fact that I’d wanted to do this for so long on top of all that really felt like a major confidence boost- with this one finally ticked off, it feels like even more subjects are possible.

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And that, as they say, is that!

As you may be aware, more Patreon offers are on the way for the Usher and ASM tiers who will in addition to this post receive behind the scenes videos, both showing aspects of the process of making the video as it happened, and a video that goes through the timeline of the final edit and gives further commentary on some of the choices made. There will also be commentaries on other, older videos for the ASMs, revealing some stuff hidden in the B Mask vault. I’m still experimenting with the look and level of detail with that stuff going forward, any feedback on what you guys think is or isn’t working is all greatly appreciated.

Oh, and don’t forget that there are still two confirmed videos from my roadmap to get to….

- A video on a beloved sitcom character

- A video on a famous TV show

And of course other, smaller projects will probably emerge around those. Saul and Monkey Island are still in the drafts, as well as the Marvel Project scripts crawling towards completion. Were that there weren’t just one of me, alas, it’s just me. I’m still figuring out how best to approach more frequent, shorter content without taking away from those larger videos, and given I feel good about the Patreon rewards finally getting cracked I’d like to think it’s all possible down the line. 

Will keep you all updated, but til then have a great Start to your April!

Catch ya next time,

-B