The Editing Is Done!! Video Monday (For Real!!!)

Wow! I have finished editing my video review of The Final Fantasy Seven Remake. It is about three hours and five minutes long. I won't know the exact running time until I slap all the sequences together in Premiere. Though wow: it's done and it is wild.

I will spend tomorrow and Saturday finalizing the audio and making sure I didn't put any typos in the on-screen text. I will export and upload on Sunday. I will launch the video Monday.

I gotta tell you: there is no bigger relief than this moment in the process of making a video. All the creative decision-making is done. All that's left is busywork. I love busywork. I love not having to make observations, take notes, think of jokes, write a script, do graphic design, record myself on camera--every step of the process involves a hideous spiderweb of decisions, until the very last step, which is just boring, common-sensical busywork.

I'm not kidding: I love busywork.

With perfect ironical timing, the brand-new chair and the pop screen for my Shure microphone that I ordered back in March both arrived on the last day of editing. The pop screen in particular stings--I had just finished manually editing out (or adequately reducing) about 1,000 plosive pops from my recording. (I really thought I'd been far enough from the microphone . . .)

I am really, really excited to launch this video. It's wild. It's huge. It's got a little bit of everything I've ever done in a video.

With good reason: I had to build an entirely new template (not to mention brand) to contain the insidiously thorough method I've devised for these reviews. You all backed this Patreon without even hearing the vast majority of my sales pitch. Well, you'll hear it all soon.

I went so deep on this video because it's going to be the first one publicly available on my new YouTube channel. I want to be able to link people to a video that I made and fully own, so it had to be the biggest and wildest one possible.

Also, now that it's finished, I have a completed project with which to train whichever editor I decide to hire.

At any rate, video number two is already in production, and this time, it's thankfully for a game that takes me only about 12 hours to beat. I estimate this next video will be slightly under an hour long, though maybe it'll wind up being longer than that. It'll definitely be easier to make--I'm working with a finished template, this time. That video will be up on June 12th. (If you're wondering how I can be making two videos at a time, it's simple: as I said in an earlier post, the first part of making a video is "playing the game," which in this case I am gladly doing "for fun." Part of the reason I chose this job is that it lets me play the games I want to play, whenever I want!)

I never expected this Patreon to make any money at all, to be perfectly honest. So to keep seeing that number go up blows my mind. It may interest you to know that I haven't clicked on the payout button yet. I haven't even entered any sort of bank account information yet. I feel like I don't deserve it until the first video is live. And once that first video is live, finally, I'll start looking through the video editor resumes I've received since launching this campaign. 

I've received a couple wild, detailed messages from people over the past couple of days, and I understand where they're coming from.

I don't want to make a habit of this, though I absolutely have to tell someone about this one guy who DMed me on Twitter: He  told me to "just upload what you have."

"All the other YouTubers have already reviewed the game," he said. I asked him, in what I deem was a Pretty Good Response, "How many of those other YouTubers reference the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead?"

His response: "Literally no one is asking for that." 

I do declare that me and this fellow stood at something of a philosophical disagreement on that particular matter. I believe everyone is asking for that. 

Still, I see where he's coming from. I, too, have on occasion wished to sooner see the fruit of my spent money--and recently, with this fancy chair that took nearly three months to arrive.

Though on the other hand, I gotta say, as I sit in my fantastic new Steelcase Gesture chair, I don't see how it could be possible for this video that I just finished editing to disappoint anyone who would pay me money to make a video. (Unless they have me mistaken for someone else.)

I'm sorry it took so long! And I'm sorry I didn't say anything sooner. I honestly thought today was Tuesday. I don't know what day of the week it is anymore. I haven't been outside in months because New York was already a nightmare Before The Virus and now, With The Virus, I throw up just thinking about the subway.

In addition to the highly stressful element wherein this video represented the huge, bold beginning of a new brand and thus necessitated me to fittingly introduce you to the five Core Segments of the show, the 160 hours of production / editing work on this video proved exceptionally draining for a cornucopia of reasons: Baffling technical difficulties abounded (I encountered an error I had never seen in ~15 years of using Adobe Premiere, and subsequently lost four days of work), the situation in the world slowed the deliveries of vital components (camera, lights, chair, etc), and somebody was hammering nails all day when I was trying to record voiceover. Also, I'm not gonna lie: my lungs hurt! I got that stupid coronavirus two whole months ago and it still hurts to breathe. I'm sitting here with a heart rate in the 120s all day every day.

Furthermore, at some point during the script-writing process I realized that the only way to honestly review The Final Fantasy VII Remake was to also review Final Fantasy XII, XIII, and XV in the same video.

Those are pretty decent excuses, though they're still excuses. Oops!

So, I'm sorry--though know that you will immediately know that this thing was hilariously worth the wait. And for me, it was worth the time, because now I have a structure to work with.

In summary, this might be the only review of The Final Fantasy VII Remake to (appropriately?) reference the film Nocturnal Animals. This video is luxurious. I think you might not have ever seen anything like it. If it disappoints you, Backer Of This Patreon, I don't believe you. 

Now I'm gonna go sleep for six hours, and then wake up and start finishing ironing the breathing sounds out of three hours of my voiceover. Good night!