# Behind the Scenes of *The Games That Got Me Through Our Miscarriages* <div class=iframe-container> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/wyVbSjWQ1M4?si=JM6CgZKZOapDy19t" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div> Apologies for the much later than usual behind the scenes. This one just sort of got away from me. I suppose as is tradition at this early stage; I did not plan on [[The Games That Got Me Through Our Miscarriages – A Video Essay|releasing another essay]] so soon. Inspiration and determination are funny things, especially when combined with hyperfocus. I almost guarantee the next one will be a little ways off. Swinging back heavily into the personal side of an essay, the idea for this one hit me at 3:40 in the morning when I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep. I can trace the entire lineage of this essay back from idea seedling to the final product. The topic, I realize, is weighty and could be uncomfortable. I felt a compulsion to make and share this story though—almost a responsibility. That was the driving factor behind turning this around in just over two weeks. I put a lot of myself into this one; creatively, emotionally, and personally. It sort of drained me to sink my teeth into it so rapidly. So let's sink back in after some time away and explore the creation of this essay. ## Timeline - 8/13/24 - Outlining - 8/14/24 - Writing Draft start - 8/19/24 - Figured Draft One Out - 8/20/24 - Captured *Hades* footage - 8/21/24 - Initial recording Audio - Finally earned the *Hades* Platinum trophy. - 8/23/24 - Final Audio Mix - 8/25/24 - Started *Death's Door* - 8/26/24 - Bought a 20TB Drive. Began migration of *a lot* of files - 8/27/24 - Dove far too deep into font choices and visual design - 8/29/24 - Designed Thumbnail - 8/30/24 - Released Video - 9/3/24 - Earned the PS4 *Death's Door* Platinum trophy 😉 ## Writing The writing took just over a week to lock down. It wasn't hung up by figuring out what to say, but how to say it. I started out going for this dramatic approach; think [the beginning of *Up*](https://youtube.com/watch?v=XO77YuyMOek). I was drawing in from *What Remains of Edith Finch*, a game I love, but did not even play during this window. I was breaking the story up in a sort of real-time chronological way. I was trying to model the structure of my [[My Journey to Becoming a Map Maker – A Video Essay|first essay]]. In trying to fit this story in this format, while upping the cinematic drama, I was finding myself frustrated. Nothing felt right on the page. Sitting here and writing this very paragraph, I am reminded of Troy Baker's [many takes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=yH5MgEbBOps&t=2551) at the Sarah death scene in *The Last of Us*. The first go around was dramatic and over-the-top. It wouldn't be until re-shoots and a talk with Neil that the scene became what it is today, a much more raw, natural feeling reaction. > [!quote] > I realized that the reason why I wanted that first take to work was cause I wanted everyone to look at me and go "wow what an actor" and that's not what the scene needed." I realized I was forcing drama in. I wanted people to look at me. I was making the miscarriages and their presentation about me. When I realized that, I pivoted—hard. The last thing I want with any creative work of mine is to make it about *me*. I want the work and quality to speak for itself and myself. I wrote this down a couple days into trying to write the script. > I think I almost need to just establish what happened. Then talk about how I felt and discussed it at the time. Power of hindsight, I see how I poured myself into games and projects to cope with the struggle. This wasn't conscious decisions. My brain was protecting itself. And how I handled the five stages of grief with these games. Then I can go game by game. That's a tighter intro that establishes a story/event and then we can process the event through these lenses. When I got out of my own way, the script came together. I let the story come forward and let the video become what it needed to be. ## Audio I went a bit deeper than normal with the audio on this one. I tried new techniques and I think went a bit overboard with some musical transitions. Up first, I re-recorded lines. Multiple times. I rewrote some chunks and had to re-record parts of the essay. I don't love doing this—you never sound the same in successive sessions—but I was tweaking on the fly and wanted my voice and script to be super polished. I think it went well over all on that front. Given the importance of the beginning of the essay, I hammered home the opening mix and kept returning to the opening three minutes constantly during the edit. I share early versions in the small Discord I am in and got some feedback. I was struggling with balancing my dialogue and the music underneath. I bumped up my own audio for fear I was drowning myself out with Austin Wintory's superb score. My pal [[MFP40 - "Peering into My Soul" with wizawhat|wizawhat]] recommend adjusting the EQ on the music (sorry Austin) to pull down the mids and "nestles your VO" in their place. This turned out to be true when I tweaked the EQ and it saved me from making more high decibel-related mistakes. Because I definitely let the music track transitions come in hot for the *Hades* and *Death's Door* chapters. I just put them at 0 dB. I didn't really think to bring them down a smidge for the game montages. I don't know why, probably because those soundtracks are so good. I think this is a prime example of being too close to a project and missing some real simple fixes. If I had maybe shared this around before publishing, I could have caught that feedback. Next time. Not all was mis-mixed in audio land though. I found a fun excuse to use iZotope RX to smooth some voice over related transitions. First up was the late addition of Logic's *Death Planet (skit)* where I censored out the curse words. I *really* didn't want a bleep. It's such a jarring sound. So I just ducked the track down. The problem there is the environmental audio in the track was going to come with it and sound off. So I used iZotope to remove the vocals, but keep the blips and thrum of a space station that Logic worked so hard to weave into his storytelling. This made the censored curse words sound smoother. I applied the same logic (sorry, not sorry) to incorporating Razbuten's [The Games That Got Me Through 2020](https://youtube.com/watch?v=HmDcQzC2Si4) video. I clipped out the middle of the quote because it related to specific 2020 Raz moments, but I liked his music track selection. Thankfully, [[MFP41 - "Life is Weird" with Razbuten|Raz is a good YouTuber]] and sites his sources and I was able to find the musical track easily. But I made one more tiny problem: There was about a 23 second gap before the *Hades* transition. I needed some music beneath my own VO. Why pick something different? I just used the same music Raz chose and let the track keep playing. It was a super subtle way to keep continuity between his quote and my transition. It all helps the flow of the video in a way that is, hopefully, unnoticed. But now you know about it and, heck, maybe you noticed it the first time around anyway. ## Video/Gameplay I made some long overdue upgrades during the production of this essay. I finally addressed my PS5 hot-swapping capture problems and bought a Big Boi™ hard drive. I mentioned the hot-swap upgrade coming my way in the last [[Behind the Scenes of Zelda Stole Fortnite's Best Mechanic|behind the scenes]] post; >I already have a HDMI 2.1 splitter and a switch on the way to remove this barrier. And oh my goodness, it was/is glorious. I just have to push one button and then my PS5 is routed into my capture setup. *chef kiss* I did have some kinks to iron out though, as is with any video capture solution. The first HDMI 2.1 splitter I bought was DOA. That was...disheartening. I switched from an ezcoo model to the [Monoprice Blackbird 8K Dual Function Splitter/Switch](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BL2MXQF1). That one worked without a problem.[^1] Now I can play my PS5 on my tuned HDMI input on the TV while being able to capture the footage with a press of a button. I did have one key issue though and that was a failure to test the audio capture. My primary card is the standalone Elgato 4K60S+, which doesn't require a computer at all for capture. It makes my life so much simpler, but without being able to see or hear what is being recorded, I have to put *a lot* of trust into my setup.[^2] Turns out my default audio settings were not compatible with the card and it just captured silence. So most of *Hades* and beginning of *Death's Door* were completely silent. I had to set the PS5 to linear PCM to get the audio to come out correctly. Always check and test your settings, folks. Thankfully, this medium rarely requires the game audio, but I am still bummed. All of this footage meant I needed more hard drive space for it. I have years of scattered footage across five or six drives. I needed a consolidated spot for everything, so for the last three or so months, I have been saving up for a 20TB external drive. I bought it during this production, and that was good timing because I ran out of space on my iMac while making this video. There are a multitude of factors at play here. It is [[Behind the Scenes of My First Video Essay – My Journey to Becoming a Map Maker#Gameplay|well]] [[Two is One and One is None|documented]] that I loved capturing gameplay at the highest quality I can. I know 59.2% of you are watching on a phone. That doesn't stop me from craving native 4K resolution gameplay. And those files take up serious space. The catch to storing all of this on a mechanical external drive, is that Final Cut (or any editor) can't retrieve the data fast enough for accurate playback while editing. I know I could dig in and learn about proxy media, but I haven't yet. So I need super fast storage for the project, but large, slow, long-term storage for the videos. My current solution for this is using the 20TB drive as a library of sorts. All my gameplay has been consolidated there. In turn, this has freed up my other drives, including my two external solid state drives, with high enough speeds to edit and export off of. So now, my workflow is basically putting the entire current working project on a 2TB external SSD, while keeping gameplay on the Big Boi™. Sure, I'm copying the files more than I'd like, but this gives me so much more breathing room. I can wait a couple minutes for the files to copy. After publishing the essay, I realized that I could have used more dynamic footage from *God of War* (2018) in the portion on comfort food gaming. For some reason, I harped on the older *God of War* games and *Symphony of the Night*. Not sure why, probably more sitting too close to the project and not taking a step back often enough. This is where having a personal library of footage will come in handy as I can recall a diverse slate of footage and maximize diversity in what is shown. Once again, there was no A-Roll in this essay. I found myself very resistant to the idea of putting myself on camera this time. I assume it is because this is such a personal topic. I did try filming A-Roll, but, I kid you not, my hoodie was laying down my chest and looked totally lopsided. I have no clue how I missed this during all my setup for the shot. When seeing the footage on my computer, I dreaded at the thought for reshooting A-Roll I was already resisting. So I dug into the personal archive for family videos and supplementary B-Roll, like Mike Birbiglia's *The New One.* I actually think this decision was the right one for the feel and flow of the video. Be ready to adapt and pivot. For me though, I was more aware of my feelings toward not wanting to be on camera and trying to actively overcome that feeling. ## Editing Trying to remember and make this a standard addition, so here is the final video timeline. ![[240910_MIS FCP Timeline.jpg]] Video editing wise, the overall flow is sticking. I am hooked on implementing this top/bottom approach, which I think is similar to Premiere.[^3] My big focus points this time around were motion graphics and text. It may surprise some folks, but way back in the day, I used Adobe After Effect heavily and totally [ripped off](https://youtube.com/watch?v=rNKj_9MfMrM) Video Copilot tutorials; like way back when YouTube had a 10-11 minute time limit on videos. Since leaving that behind in high school and pivoting to Final Cut Pro, I sort of ditched motion graphics/effects as well. There has been a time or two where I tap into Apple Motion, but I rarely was trying to figure out effects. That has really changed with this video in particular and it all started with text. There were three moments I wanted to show off quotes: my opening quote and the aforementioned Planet Death skit and Razbuten's 2020 video. All three are rather lengthy quotes. My knee jerk reaction is a big wall of text, but that is often ill advised. It's like that PowerPoint/Keynote rule of thumb about not jamming a slide with top to bottom text. You want to guide an audience along and not just have them read what you say. So I trimmed the way I would *visually* present the quotes way back. Starting with Logic and Raz, those were actually the easiest to implement. I let them do the talking. Raz is easy. I played his video and stylishly presented it, instead of screen recording a YouTube window. I grabbed some key colors, rounded some corners, and added a ambient glow. I added some extra vibes. Same goes for Logic. I let Apple Music's superb, real-time lyrics do the talking. I just added a lava lamp-esque bubbly background that I generated in Keynote. The key element was getting out of the way of these quotes. I let them carry the weight and trusted my audience to follow along without compounding material on top. The real challenge was in my own opening quote. I couldn't rely on anything else to present key words stylishly besides myself. So I had to dig into graphic design and motion graphics lessons. I first go at styling my quote was presenting a sentence or two and highlighting key words. My approach to this was two-fold: I wanted a handwritten font and a highlighter effect to emphasize the key words. The long and short of the font selection was, I didn't like any pre-existing fonts, so I made my own handwriting a font. I used [Calligraphr](https://www.calligraphr.com/en/) to whip up one. The process was super simple.[^4] With my handwriting digitized in some way, the highlight effect made more sense. I followed [this tutorial](https://youtube.com/watch?v=kE9qELYIwCI) from the Dylan Bates aka [The Final Cut Bro](https://www.youtube.com/@TheFinalCutBro), which uses Apple Motion. The video was super clear and worked. I just wasn't feeling the effect in action. What I was really chasing was this wiggly handwritten text effect I see from time to time. I was inspired by [8-Bit Music Theory's implementation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViO3RE2QtxI&t=674s). i love the subtle shake and the tactile nature of the font being handwritten.[^5] My problem was I didn't know how to search for the right term for recreating this effect. Instead, I asked my friends and was given the term "turbulent displacement." This yielded ["not-what-I-was-looking-for" results](https://youtube.com/watch?v=r2rvzFN9cI0) with Apple Motion and YouTube. Then, I don't remember why I watched it or remembered it, but Dylan Bates' [handwriting tutorial](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yqsd1ufL-LY) adds a "quiver" that looked like what I wanted to produce. The key though was combining the lesson learned in the highlighter tutorial to bring *just* the stop motion-y quiver into Final Cut Pro. It was the fusion of two tutorials to recreate the effect I wanted. The other half of the equation was fonts. Picking fonts is hard. It's shockingly feel oriented. That's why I like using my handwriting. It adds feeling to the words, but using my handwriting for each word was not the right call. Heck, maybe I should have ditched my handwriting all together. For "empathy," I just found on I liked that was already installed. I don't *love* the pick, but it works. For "detriment," I leaned heavily into *Death's Door* for inspiration. The font on the iconic ["DEATH" screen](https://gameuidatabase.com/gameData.php?id=1353&autoload=52853) is Plakette Bold and it called to me. I just straight ripped the style from the game. It works and works well. So well in fact, that I used it in the thumbnail as well. ## The Thumbnail This one was quick with only a few iterations. I wanted a Sad Dad™ and my mind immediately went to Joel and Kratos. For some reason, the boat ride in *God of War* stood out in my mind and I fell in love with the frame you see in the thumbnail.[^6] My edits involve tweaking the lighting and masking Kratos out so I could put a big bold, five letter word behind him. I feels strange to market this struggle Abby and I had, because that is what the thumbnail is—marketing. How do I convey in a single image that the video is worth watching and has a story to tell that is worth a viewer's time? *God of War* and "GRIEF" feels click-baity at a glance, but I hope doesn't diminish the work. I like the thumbnail—a lot. It's stylish and evocative, but I did think the thought process on a meta level behind its creation is odd. ## Performance / Stats Before I wrap up, some stats for you. - Final essay file/folder size was 1.13 TB - Final video file size was 7.6 GB - Final essay word count was 2,404 - Final behind-the-scenes word count was 3,450 - After one week of being published, - 281 views - 240 unique views - 16.4K impressions - 13.8 watch hours - 0 subscribers - 24 likes - 0 dislikes - 7 comments ## In Closing I'm a few months and three essays in to this "video essayist" spurt of creativity. I have two videos I am kicking the can on—I think this post and some other projects have turned into to-do's before I can begin work on those in earnest. There will be more video essays from me, just a little ways away. One is going to require playing *checks notes* at least four games. The other seems to be extremely script heavily and dependent. Work on this particular video was rapid and obsessive. After pushing publish, I felt like I let out a breath I had been holding for a week. I think that's part of why this retrospective to the process slipped: I needed to catch my breath and be still. Thank you all for watching and your patience. ## Inspiration - [The Games That Got Me Through 2020](https://youtube.com/watch?v=HmDcQzC2Si4) by Razbuten - [The Games That Got Me Through 2021](https://youtube.com/watch?v=kpjsmkw6mgI) by Razbuten - [The Games That Got Me Through 2022](https://youtube.com/watch?v=JuTA8kTaWi8) by Razbuten [^1]: A huge thanks to Try from My Life in Gaming for some PS5 video setting advice! [^2]: Perhaps I need to invest in a tiny monitor or repurpose an older on for checking my capture. I think it has to match the specs though, so I've need a 4K monitor... [^3]: But, you know, Final Cut actually exports the videos successfully. [^4]: Although scanning my font in black and white was trickier than it should have been, but that's a Max and his scanner problem, not an issue with Calligraphr. [^5]: In the case of 8-Bit Music Theory, that's his wife's handwriting, which [[MFP29 - “Sleepovers with GameCube Games” with 8-Bit Music Theory|we talked about on MFP]]. [^6]: To be fair, I love that entire segment of the game. A truly powerful moment of confronting your past to move ahead.