July Update (Behind the Don Bluth Musical video)

 Hey everyone!

 Now that the Don Bluth video has finally gone public and the dust has settled, I feel like I can finally give you guys the details on how this came together and some of the processes I went through to make it. I’ll also be talking a little about what’s next after the breakdown as well as what I’m up to in the coming weeks. So, let’s get to it!

————————

Getting the idea

 I’ve always wanted to do a larger video on musicals, specifically animated ones, but couldn’t think of how to do it. For a while video essays were getting kind of ubiquitous- they’d pick a subject the creator liked and call it a masterpiece while making stroking gestures for however long, and I worried all the things I wanted to make would be the same. I love Sondheim’s work, same for Howard Ashman, same for a lot of creators, but I had nothing specific or interesting to bring to the table even in analysing their work that hadn’t been said better elsewhere, and I didn’t want to leap to those subjects just because I liked them. Felt like I needed a more compelling reason to want to make those videos.

 Cut to a few years later, during my recent surgery. I was sitting in the back of a taxi in immense pain as my family rushed me over to the specialist clinic after finding out my kidney was in trouble. I’m partly drugged up and thinking about everything ever, and for some absolutely baffling reason, the real Ludmilla song from Bartok- which I suppose I had watched again recently with my sister and friend- comes into my mind. And I think about how perfectly it’s put together as a set of lyrics, and how wonderfully the final reveal is handled, how specifically I wanted to talk about that while dunking on the obvious and sadly unavoidable fetish bait jokes and I’m laughing to myself and going ‘hey, that’s a video.’

 But you know me. Never one to do anything by halves, what started as a 20 minute idea to talk about Bartok became me thinking about all the Bluth movies and how many of them were musicals, and deciding to follow that rabbit hole and see what I’d discover, rewatching all the films with friends and realising there was more to say that hadn’t, as far as I knew, been discussed. Other video essays in my experience had always talked about Bluth in the same way, either as a god or a joke, and never about the intricacies of what I felt was clearly happening in these films, things that I felt explained why they connected or didn’t. Seemed like a very good angle to take- and as I discovered, it wasn’t unfounded at all.

The research

 It was a total surprise to me that Bluth actually had any interest in Musical theatre.

 I mean sure, I had some suspicions, but I’d believed for years he’d made those musicals to compete with Disney or that he was just doing what he expected from animated films, that was what I’d always been told- but the first piece of research I uncovered was that Bluth had owned a theatre company with his brother. The man you see them speaking to in the image I flashed up on screen early on is Meredith Wilson, the creator of one of my favourite musicals, the Music Man. This was clearly a much deeper thread than I anticipated and the real key into structuring the point of the video came from a lecture he’d given to a group of university students that I found on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69YutIrM7Rw

 This made me want to make the video more than ever. I had already written the bulk of my analysis for each of the films and was going back to see what else I could find and if it added to or contradicted my points, and it caught me off guard to hear him saying things not at all unlike what Howard Ashman had been saying in his own lectures at Disney. It’s a fascinating watch if you want to see the whole thing- Bluth was high on his success from American Tail and looking to poach some students for his upcoming projects, but you can tell he’s also pleased that he managed to make Disney react and try to improve their quality, it’s clearly a big time in his life caught on film.

 And of course it only spiralled from there. The huge amount of different studios that Bluth worked at or created, the issues of ownership with the distributors, one piece of information lead to the next and gave me plenty of material to work with next to my own beliefs on how I felt the movies were conveyed. It was difficult to get all the details right, as there were a lot of conflicting anecdotes from some unreliable narrators (including Bluth himself, honestly) which I tried hard to simplify without losing the points they needed to serve as evidence for, but it wasn’t always easy. For example, Fox were asking Bluth to create animated versions of live action musicals, but they didn’t own the rights to My Fair Lady specifically. It was Warner Brothers instead, who also produced the King and I. There was clearly some connection however because Fox distributed the VHS of My Fair Lady and openly discussed both musicals with Don. As you can see there was clearly a tangle of rights to unravel, but I hoped the most important thing came across- that studios were trying everything to get what Disney had.

 When writing the script I had planned to try and keep it under an hour and a half at least, even knowing there would be a lot of cutaway clips to show the songs and the examples I was pulling from, but all these extra details seemed important to mention given how much they explained a lot of the analysis I’d already laid out. I think in retrospect I might have pared it back even further. One of the fears when you make a video are the comments telling you that you missed something or that something you knew but didn’t mention invalidates the entire discussion. I know it sounds like a small thing but it can be pretty daunting to spend so long on a project and realise you’ve missed a mistake, because the person on the other end doesn’t see that work or understand why you would be exhausted enough to miss anything, they only see the end result. I ended up with a very comprehensive video which I’m happy about, but a part of me still wants to see if I can make it even simpler and not worry so much about the idea of being wrong. It’s certainly been another great learning curve, and in more ways than one.

The editing

  I think of all the videos I've made recently this was maybe my favourite to conceptualise in the edit, even if it became totally exhausting in the later stages. I'm always trying to find some hook or angle in what I present so that the way the video is made kind of matches the subject, and in this case I think the way the songs were presented managed to achieve that, even if i'd have liked to go further. 

The subtitles were an idea I had early in the process of actually editing the video. I felt it would be one thing to show all these scenes and songs but that wouldn’t emphasise the points being made enough. What would be cool would be to basically do annotated lyrics- have the viewer see how the songs are constructed by showing the rhythms and rhymes as they happen while also, kind of, invoking a bit of a karaoke/singalong vibe. However, I wanted to take it further- the rhymes and techniques used in the lyrics were going to be colour coded, so that you could see specifically which songs were really going for it and which were kind of dropping the ball. This unfortunately proved a step too far- I was out of my depth and unclear on my own rules on showing something I wasn’t specifically well read up on enough to demonstrate within every song, so I left that for, potentially, another project. I think you all get the idea anyway.

 Of course as I laid these all out under those songs I started to get kind of bored- it was a long laborious process, especially as the video got longer, and I wasn’t enjoying putting them together, so I started, as you do, having fun with them. I moved them around to match how things were being said or where they were being said and threw in a bunch of emojis to try and give them a bit of their own comedic language outside of the rest of the video, a lot of it added on the fly as I stupidly laughed to myself and then felt ashamed for liking my own jokes. I think that told me I was going in a good direction though and I kept up with it through the whole thing, adding to it wherever I could. This got a bit more sophisticated as new ideas came to me and helped me illustrate ideas with the songs I liked I couldn’t have done had I not experimented like that. I’ll forever be proud of what I did for Guys and Dolls’ ‘Fuge for Tinhorns.’

 I was also pushed a lot to solve problems I didn't have solutions to that I think made it better than I imagined. The elephant seal number, I don't know what I was thinking before editing. I had no idea what I was going to do visually but I'd just written it as excerpts into the video anyway. I guess I thought I was just going to show the album cover? But then I thought I could recreate it as drawings. Well, dang, that's a bit of a tall order. Isn't there a more low effort way to do it? Maybe that would be funnier? And then I started searching them up on youtube and the rest just fell into place from there. Way, way funnier- though the other punchline (and payoff to referencing it earlier) was always in the script.

 But I ran into a problem I sort of experienced with the fantastic four video. At 2 hours long premiere began to freeze up and the whole thing became very difficult to edit. The Uk was hit with the hardest hot weather it had seen in years, turning the process into what felt like moving through soup, and even though I’d broken up the video to make it faster to work with, bringing it together again and having to do minor checks proved a nightmare. I want to stick to keeping the videos reasonably under two hours again, and in fairness I’m impressed at the turnaround- a month to do 2 hours, especially after a short gap where I was part of a stage show is really not bad all things considered- but it still became a chore at the very end, and not least of all because of the copyright bots.

Copyright

 Okay so, a part of me knew I was possibly going to be hit with copyright notices. Youtube is generally fine with whatever footage I use, I tend to go for very short clips naturally as well as talk over them a lot, but music always gets me. Any time I use copyrighted music I am constantly double checking myself to see if it’s been flagged on YouTube on other people’s uploads, which, when you’re trying to analyse musical numbers, makes things very difficult. You never know what will and won’t be targeted, but you also know you have to make the audience feel the effect of what you’re talking about by playing the clips. A bit of a catch 22.

 When I did the Hercules video, YouTube flagged them at first until I made one or two minor edits or after I filed disputes, which were very quickly dropped. It didn’t seem to be Disney flagging them- the source was always some random channel or other party holding the claim. However the system has changed each time I’ve done this and made it harder at each step, no matter how much of a song I use. (The Better Call Saul video is also un-monetised because of this.)

 For this one, I did a lot. I used some shorter clips, I cut out bits from the songs and footage, I swapped some scenes around, anything I could think of to get across my point while making those concessions. Still got copyrighted. I then made another edit with harsher cuts, hoping that would pass the system. When that was copyrighted, I had to give up. I’d made several edits at that point of the master file and the process had become so slow and exhausting, especially as I had already combed through the video several times looking for minor fixes and edits I felt needed to be done, that I decided I might as well stick with the original upload and let people see it as intended. This had been blocked worldwide due to the Anastasia footage, and I knew fair use was on my side, so I waited for that to be dropped. It wasn’t, but it was un-blocked a few days later, allowing me to make the video public at last.

 As we speak I have 20 days left for those claims to either be dropped or rejected. It’s entirely possible more copyright bots could hit that video leaving me to wait again, and I can’t pretend that it’s not somewhat disheartening to see. I essentially ended up crunching for a month because I knew I had to get back to work on this after my show ended and I really wanted to be able to move onto other projects after spending so long writing and putting this one together this year, and to not be able to make money off of that effort specifically was somewhat galling. However, this only emphasises the importance of my external support on Patreon, and it made me appreciative of you guys who’ve stuck around to help me see this through. Even if this video never makes money I just wanted to get it out there while not feeling like I have to scramble for another project to keep funded- so, as usual, it’s a big thank you to everyone here, past and present, who’s helped me get to this point.

 This has also got me thinking about my future big projects. Part of the reason of making this and the last two big videos I have coming up before the Marvel project is that I want to see what I can and can’t do before launching into something much more ambitious. It’s made me think about copyright differently and what I can bring to the table to maybe work around that, how I can use this platform and the funding to work beyond those limits and deliver something I have more ownership of. So I’m very glad I went through this now rather than later- it’s given me plenty to think about for the future. Onwards and upwards!

 And one last thing- doing this video, or indeed any video about musicals that got enough attention, was always going to be a backdoor way for me to talk about more of them. The Hercules video started some of that but really I didn't get the opportunity to talk broadly enough about a range of different pieces and to set a strong, noticeable precedent on my channel for casually throwing in more of those kinds of videos, to be able to reference favourites that I would be able to provide more context on later. I like and hope to think that this will help me do that in the future- so if you liked this, stick around. We ain't done yet. 

————————

 There’s probably more tidbits I have to offer, but those were the major talking points I could think of for now. If you guys have any further questions feel free to let me know here and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

 Which brings me to what I’m doing next…

What’s Next ?

 As mentioned in the last big update, my next major project is a Jak and Daxter video. This is a series I’ve wanted to talk about for a long time and I pretty much have a nearly complete redraft of the script ready to go. Won’t be anywhere near as long as the Bluth video (phew), but will probably still take a little time to get together. I’ll keep you all updated.

 I have a few ideas for some smaller projects I might put forward too. I recently completed the expansion pack for Cuphead, which brought a couple small thoughts to mind, and Better Call Saul is only a few episodes away from its season finale, with me making a few notes as it’s continued on, already plenty to say. There’s the two major projects after Jak which are also still making their way through the writing stages. I'm also trying to think up ways I could reward the patrons further, and think I might have some cool behind the scenes videos I can share without taking away from the schedule. Has been a generally productive time here at B-Towers!

 And you know, that big Marvel project is starting to get an awful lot closer to production, dangerously so. Marvel Studios just made some huge announcements at SDCC this month with more to come at D23, and I’m starting to think I should make an announcement of my own soon. Now that I know what their plans are, I think I have a good chance to tell my story before they tell theirs- and maybe you guys should have an idea of what story that is so you know what to look forward to, and most importantly, that I had the idea to do this way before whatever their take ends up being. Two years ago, in fact…

 Right, enough nattering on from me. Thanks again for sticking by and for the support as the work’s continued. I’ve had a decent little break but now I have to get back to it and begin the next one. Will let you all know how that’s going real soon!

- B