# Behind the Scenes of *Skyward Sword* is the Most Influential *Zelda* Game Sometimes an idea just hits ya while bopping through the stars in *Super Mario Galaxy*, ya know? The beauty of this idea was how it grabbed on to a specific format for its execution—the all-mighty(?) YouTube Short. Tackling a video specifically from the vertical aspect ratio and the new 3-minute time limit is what sparked a fire in me to create this one. A couple of years ago, I just would have tweeted out this observation, throwing my two cents into the change-to-cash machine that is the algorithmic ad apparatus. Since the idea itself was so succinct, I knew the Short medium ([heh](https://youtube.com/watch?v=BR7ASQADexo&t=18)) was the avenue for expressing my idea. It was fun and frustrating. So let's take a look at what made this tiny project come to life. ## Timeline - 10/11/24 - Idea hit - 10/25/24 - Rewatched Outer Wilds doco - 10/27/24 - Watched the *Skyward Sword HD* Commercial and Game Informer interviews - SOMEWHERE IN HERE I OUTLINED AND WROTE THE SCRIPT - 11/6/24 - Recorded Script - 11/7/24 - Began Working in Final Cut Pro - 11/8/24 - Exported and Uploaded the Project - 11/21/24 - Day it Short-ified ## Writing As you can tell from my very detailed timeline of events, I wrote this own out somewhere within a week. Very accurate. Really, this essay wrote itself.[^1] It should have taken me a day. With the thesis being in focus from the outset, I just needed quotes to "prove" my point. This was made even easier by the fact that the *Outer Wilds* quote was the source of inspiration for my clickbait-y title. I spent the bulk of the time (however little that time actually was) figuring out the *Zelda* half. I needed to guide the audience to *Outer Wilds* and the best way to do that was a little history lesson. I remembered from writing [[The History of Breath of the Wild]] almost eight years ago (🫠) that Nintendo was gung-ho about motion controls in future *Zelda* games. Obviously, that did not happen and so I figured I could use that stark contrast to show how *Skyward Sword* was received post-launch. The real nugget was [the interview from Game Informer](https://youtube.com/watch?v=CAqOq435K-I) that directly addressed the development team listening to fan feedback. Eiji Aonuma and Shigeru Miyamoto both had perfect quotes. Since the "point" I am trying to make is so short and sweet, I knew I didn't need to linger too long on proving myself. Alex Beachum of *Outer Wilds* does that for me. I rewatched the documentary and found another quote that really showcased the stark difference between *Skyward Sword*'s design ethos and *Outer Wilds*. I let the words of others do the heavy lifting for me. Then I just close out the essay with a very brief pitch from myself saying to play *Outer Wilds*. No spoilers here. That's against [[Joining the Outer Wilds Club - Good Blood|club rules]]. I am proud of the closer in particular. Kind of the inverse of one of [my favorite lyrics](https://youtube.com/watch?v=M2PZQygoEqc&t=76), which is an inverse of [a famous saying](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4324-shoot-for-the-moon-even-if-you-miss-you-ll-land). I am a staunch defender and lover of *Skyward Sword*, but I do know its issues. There is a lesson to be found in failure though and not just for the creator. Mistakes or just plain changes snowball. They don't just roll down the mountain by themselves either. Their influence on the environment around them can lead to an avalanche of new ideas and innovation. ## Audio This script was a breeze to read because a third of it was pre-recorded quotes. I will admit that I was a ding dong and did not read the English translation for the two Japanese quotes because—I don't know. It was a total misfire of my brain. I went back, re-recorded it and mixed it in. Actually, that mixing was a bit new to me. I did it in Logic instead of Final Cut. I lined the quote up and ducked Aonuma and Miyamoto's quote under my own spoken translation. This allowed the quotes to be shorter than they actually were spoken out, which helped everything fit in the three minute time limit. I picked two songs to play in the background, one from each main title. For *Skyward Sword* I originally was thinking the flying theme or the main theme, but they were too grand for what I was talking about. It didn't match up. I wanted a lighter, jovial, bouncy piece laced with curiosity. That's where the Knight Academy tune came in and matched up perfectly. *Outer Wilds* pick was a big ol' fat "no duh" with the main theme. So good. ## Video/Gameplay Another beautiful part of this video was that I did not need to record any new footage. I had every thing I needed or could download it. The quotes were pulled from their source videos. I had gameplay from *Skyward Sword* that I captured for my "[*Zelda* Stole *Fortnite*'s Best Mechanic](https://youtu.be/1AeK5PUW7Yk)" essay. I recorded every second of my *Outer Wilds* playthrough thanks to my new 20TB hard drive and my new YouTube channel—[Max Frequency Library](https://www.youtube.com/@MaxFrequencyLibrary). I just had to assemble the pieces in my timeline. This essay helps reinforce my goal to record and keep as much gameplay as possible. It makes the creation of essays easier when I can pull from a library of footage.[^2] It's a wonderful asset to have and I hope sharing it with everyone will be a gift to those looking for footage too. The other side of the "no need to record new footage" coin was I had to work within the constraints of a vertical aspect ratio. I made it work, but some shots were far from ideal. When you aren't filming with a certain angle or perspective in mind, then the footage becomes harder to adapt to other canvases. Take MKBHD, one of the biggest tech YouTubers out there, for example. He and his team record almost everything at 8K RAW on insane cinema cameras. They only output 4K videos on YouTube. They are framing and shooting the video for its intended avenue, but having all those 8K pixels lets them crop in insanely close without losing the detail. In my case, for this video, all of the source footage I downloaded was at 1080p. My own gameplay did give me some cropping wiggle room, but the interviews and commercials did not. This led to the question of do I use the footage I have or do I spend time getting new footage? Since this was intended to be a YouTube Short, I went with keeping the footage I had. This isn't to say that I was not putting my best foot forward in my work. It's just the reality of pouring time in compared to the end product. The more time poured into this, the less time I could pour into my next big project or even medium sized one. I have a tendency to go overboard. I used the medium to keep me in line. ## Editing This one had some unique "Shorts" challenges. Before I talk about those though, here is the timeline. ![[241120_SS to OW_FCP Timeline.jpg]] First challenge what trying to be funny. 😬 I was using some *Breath of the Wild* footage to fill time and came up with the idea of using the shot of me reflecting a Guardian laser as a visual gag for the way Nintendo would go on to reject motion controls in future *Zelda* titles. I kept that gag overall, but my original implementation was tossed aside. I wanted to stick the *Skyward Sword* box art to the Guardian and track it across the shot as Link moved through the space. Final Cut had some trouble tracking a fake video game robot that blends into the scenery. Whoops. I could have done this manually, but again, it was that trade of time poured in versus what I'd get out of it at the end. Instead, I just cut the shot short, before Link started moving toward the exploding machine. I filled the leftover time with a shot of Aonuma and Miyamoto together, which helped ease into their introduction. The much bigger challenge was captions and I failed on that front pretty hard. It feels like any Short I watch has captions baked into the video. This obviously helps people know what is being said if their sound is low, but it also keeps the image somewhat dynamic as their is always something popping in and out of the shot. It keeps attention, in a way. I wanted to have some in my video and I had three ideas to go about it. Idea number one was to use my tried and true MacWhisper to take my audio and generate a .srt subtitle file. From there, I'd just edit as needed and make the titles. MacWhisper had an issue with my audio this time though. At first, it was not liking the muffled Japanese beneath my English. I tried removing the Japanese in an alternate track, but MacWhisper kept producing a strange, repeated line in the *Outer Wilds* section. > In a noclip documentary, I was told that the game was a "noclip" game. I was told that the game was a "noclip" game. I was told that the game was a "noclip" game. I was told that the game was a "noclip" game. I didn't know why this was cropping up, since that line is no where in the script. I figured I'd just move on to my next idea. I had seen some [videos](https://youtube.com/watch?v=g3wUaXb3DlQ) about a Final Cut Pro plugin called Captionator that uses a Large Language Model, like MacWhisper, to generate captions and titles for FCP. This seemed like a super smart solution for me, further streamlining the process. The big catch was that the plugin cost $20 and seemed super fiddly. I bought it hoping it'd solve my problem, but that fiddlyness proved to be too much to overcome. I could not reliably correct the text, styling, effects, and export. I was struggling to mass edit and resize. It was proving to be far more tedious than I bargained for with too many inconsistencies. In the interest of time (and my own sanity) I went down to my last idea. Worst case, I figured I could just use YouTube's built-in caption tool. I tried it out once before for this [little *Fortnite* dub I got a month ago](https://youtube.com/shorts/V448HTH_b6Y).[^3] Again, large language model at work, you style and position the captions and YouTube does the rest. It's not as pretty as what I could have made on my own or with Captionator, but they'd be baked in subtitles and that was the ultimate goal. The catch here was that these are only accessible if you upload from the YouTube app on mobile; and the company has not updated the app to support three minute shorts yet. Those have to be uploaded from a computer. I was dead in the water. I am bummed I did not make captions happen in this video. I wanted to lean into the medium of the Short and this felt like a vital piece of their design and consumption. I could have gone back, been more patient with Captionator, and reuploaded, but that would have reset the clock on YouTube's own processing (more on this in the next section). The real stinger was that Final Cut Pro released version 11 one week *after* I bought Captionator. FCP11 includes a built-in captioning tool that, as far as creating subtitles, functions the same.[^4] It felt like I missed every step of the way with this process. ## Release The release was a bit strange. Since I had to wait for YouTube to flag the video as a Short, it just sat in my backend waiting and waiting and waiting. It took two weeks for it to be Short-ified. I did link to it in my newsletter—[[Memory Card 14 – A Shorts Fuse]]—if any readers were really curious before an official release. It was done! The biggest catch with all this waiting was I couldn't upload a correction since that'd reset my clock on the whole Short-ification process. YouTube needs to not announce a feature as available and then have it *not* be available in the same way as the previous version. ## Performance/Stats I was really curious how these stats would pan out. Behold! Final essay file/folder size was 28.45 GB - Final video file size was 284.2 MB - Final essay word count was 435 - Final behind-the-scenes word count was 2,700 - After one week of being published, - 921 views - 893 unique views - 1,775 impressions - 13.7 watch hours - 2+ subscribers - 65 likes - 4 dislikes - 3 comments Shorts-specific stats - 51.1% viewed - 48.9% swiped away - 94.9% discovered via Shorts feed Let's address the gigabyte-sized elephant in the list. Over 25 GB of that was just previously recorded gameplay. The project folder itself, sans gameplay, was just 1.5 GBs. The rest were some audio files that didn't make the cut or where those alternate scripts when trying to make the subtitles. The video plateaued after day two. The gains almost half day by day. It's steep. Some factors at play I think *are* the new maximum length of Shorts. Audiences are used to the one minute. The only comments on this video were asking if Shorts got longer! The feature is far too new to be widely accepted, both for creators and viewers. I went to bed with 78 views and 2 likes, but woke up to 327 views and 28 likes. That felt good. It's small, but it felt good. All of this was the Shorts feed algorithm. It feels like a mystery, more so since I don't actually use this feed at all. The endless barrage of content wigs me out. When I accidentally tap on the Shorts feed I spaz out, trying to return to normal YouTube. I am a foreigner in this land, unable to understand the robot language. The total watch time is alarming to me, in a *Metal Gear Solid* guard on alert sort of way. How has my little three minute video been watched enough to roll into half a day's worth of time? That strikes me as a lot. And I am getting a pittance of the views Shorts channels and creators get. What those numbers must look like... ## In Closing This was a unique project in more ways than one. I took on a video format I rarely engage with, both creatively and personally. The curiosity of the challenge is what sparked my passion for this one though. I wanted to push myself. I stumbled along the way, but now the way is marked. I can go further down the path, the previous dangers flagged. I have some experience, just enough to get me to the next set of challenges. Is creating a roguelite? 🤔 Overall, fun was had and a video was *made*. It's vital to make. I didn't let those challenges stop me. Sure, I made the journey slower than I could have, but I *made* the journey all the same. I hope this encourages you to make your own journey, thing, creation, video, project, etc. a reality. [[Memory Card 9 – A Reminder to Make Make Make|Make, Make, Make]]. If you're interested in the "as I go on this journey process," check out my newsletter all about how the journey is taken, how The Thing™ is made. It's called **[Memory Card](https://buttondown.com/MaxFrequency)** and I think you'd enjoy it. [^1]: Can we call this an "essay?" My dictionary says the literature definition of "essay" is "a short piece of writing on a particular subject," so I guess we can call this project an essay! [^2]: I had to. Go [subscribe](https://www.youtube.com/@MaxFrequencyLibrary?sub_confirmation=1) for when my *Outer Wilds* videos start dropping. [^3]: Pro tip: Don't place the subtitles at the bottom. The Shorts UI [[241121_YT Short Captions UI.PNG|completely blocks them]]. Perhaps I would have known this if I actually watched Shorts, but the UI never disappears. There is no "full screen" viewing for Shorts. MY captions are basically useless in that video. C'est la vie. [^4]: Captionator has a bunch of built-in tools and animations from making subtitles into titles, which can be animated and whatnot.