Video: Camera Design in Wario Land 4

January 28th, 2014

Updates. Updates. Updates.

A few weeks ago, I finished the video you see above, and now I’ve made it public. If you like it, then please share it around with your friends. You won’t believe the trouble I went through to produce it, though. Before I get to that, I was interviewed for the Go For Rainbow podcast recently, so check that out (there should be more of this kind of stuff on the way soon). I’ve also been covered by a few gaming sites. You can find links here (yes, it needs updating). And we finally did the Kindle version of the book, so look out for the update email if you’ve already picked up a copy. Although the book is up on Amazon, I recommend that you pick it up through Stolen Projects as you’ll get access to all the versions (.pdf, .epub, and both .mobi versions for old and new Kindles) and will get any updates to the book for free, if I do choose to make any amendments (and I probably will; I’m looking at you “well-designed”). I’m wrapped with the Kindle version. I was originally worried that the images would be too small, but after a few tweaks it’s turned out magic. Props again to the excellent Daniel Purvis for his technical wizardry. We’ve extended the discount too, so it’s going to remain at $5 until the 14th of Feb. I’m also humbled by the positive comments I’ve been getting through Twitter and email. Keep letting me know what you think.

Producing the Video

After doing the script and recording the video and audio, I focus-tested the final short amongst friends and revised and rerecorded everything four times. For the final video, I had to:

Record audio in Audacity and adjust sound levels.
Record myself playing the game to the audio.
Play the video and audio recordings separately at the same time while screen capturing the video in Quicktime.
Repeat the last step for each segment.
Upload video segments to YouTube.
Tidy everything up in the YouTube editor.
Watch the video on YouTube and check for any sound spikes from when my computer’s performance dipped from the strain of simultaneously recording live audio and video—something which YouTube’s compression sometimes decides to accentuate.

This was all after:

Screwing around with the emulator folder auto-locking and thereby preventing me from saving my game and forcing me to repeatedly play through significant chunks of the game until I gave up and did it in Windows.
Updating my OS to Mavericks so that I could screen capture a select portion of the screen in Quicktime.

As such, I don’t I’ll do another video like this. I’m cool with doing stuff like the previous video on the Hall of Hieroglyphs, though. Again, let me know what you think.