Portal - Behind the Scenes (Patreon)

I know it's been a while since the last proper video but today is that day. and as usual I've got a whole bunch of stuff to document going over the process of making this video, so let's get started!

How the video came about:

Well, I've actually had Portal on my "to-do" list for quite some time... so much so that since around June last year I had an idea to do a Portal themed month on my channel.

I'm aware there's only 2 main entries but there's actually a fair amount of others through valve-endorsed fan-games and even a certain LEGO Dimensions set I own to talk about...

Needless to say, like the planned "Jakuary" (Jak and Daxter Month) I scrapped Portal Month a while back. This is through a combination of knowing I'll need to slow down on videos at some point... and the inevitable burnout that would happen during working on the project.

I'm pretty sure I'll still cover the other games in the future some day, but I don't think tackling series of games in a row is my kind of thing. The burnout from playing and working on videos for the Crash games so much last year still haunts me to this day... so breaking them up with other games in between is probably the best thing to do for me.

The other thing is that once I started getting to grips with Movie Studio I knew at some point it would be cool to do some on-screen portal effects but... Movie Studio wasn't going to do what I wanted it to do, at least not in a way I thought looked good enough at the time so I let the idea rest...

Until December 2017, where you may have seen Humble Bundle did a ridiculously cheap price for a software package which included Sony Vegas Pro 14. Which is what I used to make the video, and will be using from this point on to create future videos!

How the video changed during production:

One of the main things that changed was the video being centered around multiple versions of the game, instead of just one. Originally I played through and recorded all of the footage for the PC version of Portal but... the footage ended up looking like crap.

This is just a matter of my PC being "decent" but not great. I can play the game just fine, but recording it at the same time isn't really a good idea. I'm actually amazed at how the footage I did use of the PC versions' ending actually looks. Some of the footage is outright unusable.

I didn't think much of it though as the game is only an hour or so long, and with Still Alive being backward compatible on the Xbox One, I didn't need to do any juggling around with my console setup either which was nice.

Either way, I think it ended up being for the best as by the end of my second playthrough I remembered all about how the endings differ on the different versions, so I thought it was a fun thing to point out in the final video.

And then the day after I finished editing and rendering my video... Did You Know Gaming made a short video going over the exact same thing. Great timing(!)

Anything else that changed is fairly superficial. I went about changing the thumbnail a couple of times, with different poses of myself and different ways of showing the text...

In the end I figured I'd leave the word "Portal" out, as the blue logo is fairly iconic enough on it's own along with the same stylized font for "Review"

That, and... the word "Portal" is literally the first word of the video title so I think people should be able to put two and two together and get the correct answer.

In hindsight, I suppose I could have gone more into the Still Alive specific challenge maps... but what's done is done.

This is a review of the base game more than anything, I just happened to use Still Alive as it was easier to record on my end...

I can always reiterate that sort of stuff when I eventually talk about Portal 2, and the other Portal fan-games. 

Other Trivia and Info:

So it's official, this video is literally the most I've ever spend editing a single part of a video together, and the part in particular is maybe something you didn't even spot...?

There's a part in the opening when I get up, spin around and shoot the Portal Nerf gun up into the ceiling and in doing that, I actually stand IN FRONT of the portal on the wall behind me.

It's only on screen for a second but I had to key out the image of the portal effect, and the photo of the ceiling inside of it 44 times EACH.

It took well over an hour but I'm actually pretty bloody happy with how it turned out... and it's one of those things where if people don't point it out, then I've done my job properly.

THIS is the sort of stuff I couldn't do before with Movie Studio... so I knew my first proper project using Vegas Pro was going to make me use it to push my editing skills further than before.

It's a bit messier than the usual project layout, but the main reason for that is a couple of shots where I end up needing layers beneath the background without drop shadow applied to them. So, I guess it's an organized chaos!

Another thing I enjoyed making was the  custom logo. I've taken a lot of inspiration with my thumbnails and branding this video (and future ones) from a few places, the main ones being Nitro Rad and Square Eyed Jak.

In the past I've made some of my thumbnails unnecessarily complicated and over crowded, which is something I have recoiled at in disgust for some bigger YouTube channels doing so I've taken measures to simplify and clean them up a bit.

The custom logos is something I've been keen on doing for a while, and my friend Jak had been doing it for the openings of his own videos for a while now. The idea stemmed from initially wanting to make myself a completely new logo for the channel. But, after a few different attempts, nothing seemed to work.

This is around the time I did some graphic design to make this meme-y image and uploaded it to Twitter, which a lot of people saw and liked. On the back of that I made another one for my own username...

and that's kind of where I started making one for Portal.

I've also got several others for future videos I'd like to make which are all in storage ready for when their time comes!

Another thing I took into though was the idea of drawing a different version of myself in the style of each character but... given how I fluctuate between being in the mood or not to actually WANT to draw... I went against it. With something like this it'd have to be all or nothing, as some thumbnails with drawings on, and others without would look stupid in the long run.

Plus, this was I can use some of the costume props I have lying around and pose in a way to reflect the game best! (I've got this neat idea for a thumbnail for a platformer I'd like to review in the future)

That's a wrap!

Well, that's it from me for now. I'm not entirely sure when I'll be back (hence changing the page to per creation)

The plan was to to a channel update explaining everything in a video, but I've been pretty ill the last couple of weeks and I felt I was being unnecessarily cryptic about this Portal video in the update, so I may as well get this public first before tackling any update videos.

Thanks for sticking with me on here, and I can only hope it shows I'm still very much keen on making these videos when I find the time do do them!

I don't know when, but at the moment I've got my eye on two games I'd like to do shorter videos on in the future.

After asking on Twitter about peoples thoughts on shorter videos and it getting a positive result... so that sounds like a decent plan to me.

Thanks again for continuing to pledge, as every little helps!

- Pete :)