Current work

 Since this is meant to be the production side blog, I will talk a bit about the coming episodes.
I just really want some creative and constructive criticism, hint hint,  and figured I'll be vocal about the process so that hopefully someone can give me helpful advised.



First and foremost, I have several ideas for improving the video in general. I will change how I shoot footage so that the cuts don't have to be that sharp (I wanted at least some kind of basic transition, but none of them looked good, and the best, a fade transition, showed faded footage not meant to be shown, making it unuseable,) and have changed the set-up so that the microphone wont sound as terrible.. it's something most people probably didn't notice, or barely noticed unless they were wearing headphones: then it would be unbearable to listen to.

I got some weird interference.. it came out fairly cleanly with Audition's noise removal feature, but still gives the latter half of the episode a tinny sound. I have coiled up the far too long microphone cable, and hope that by keeping that out of the way it'll avoid the obnoxious noise I was getting before.

I also plan on putting more work into editing, finding some kind of decent transition, and putting effort into leveling the audio.. it's alright through most of the video, but I'd like to remove the sound of me taking a breath from future episodes, and do a bit of leveling. During episode 0 I couldn't find the right button to use that function, and my friend helping me out assured me that I worried too much about the fact that one side of the stereo input was slightly quieter than the other. Unable to find the function through basic experimentation I wound up releasing it as is since I really just wanted to get something out as soon as I could, given how many delays and frustrations I had doing that much already.

My friend suggested I record every line and every take into individual videos.. this was WAY too troublesome. Even more trouble than just having one single long video for the entire shooting. If I did that again with episode 1, it would likely result in over 300 individual videos to go through.. and I would probably spend over an hour stopping and starting the camcorder as well. Time consuming, and the frustration of messing with stopping the camcorder leads to me starting/stopping suddenly before and after each line.. that is not an effective way to film video, I have found.

It's at this point, and I hate to put it this bluntly, I realize he is a talented graphic designer who has just wound up fiddling with most of the other programs in the Adobe suite for one reason or another.. he can work his way through most of the programs, but I'm getting the impression that in no way does he fully understand video editing; he just knows what has worked well enough for his home videos and doing full-length recordings of plays and things.

Now I plan on shooting each individual line as one long take, and then view them one by one to cut out the best take into the episode. Minimizes the number of videos I have, but will make it easy to pick out which video goes to which line. Since I will still cut between each line, this seems like a more efficient and less frustrating way to go than either his method, or doing one long shoot.

I am also hard at work on the scripts.. episode 1 will not only be improved due to the experience of the currently released episode 0, but will be much longer. I currently suspect it may break half an hour, even. I may stick in a commercial break with Blip..

I have 4 pages of information written to put into the chosen topics.. pretty much a whole page of that is devoted to Lauren Faust, as when I talk about specific people I want to cover what they've done before and what they're doing now/next as well as their relevance to MLP.

Next I need to turn four pages of information into an actual script.

The script writing process is mostly just breaking up what I want to say into a given line, and leave it to shooting time to improvise it, or find the way of expression the line that is most comfortable to me.

 Trying to interject some ideas for jokes or sprucing up the lines beyond just rattling off information as well, though not a lot of that has really been happening. Best I've done so far is just throw a couple of standard MLP puns into the lines, and those dumb references I made in Episode 0.


I also have picked out the topics for Episode 2 already.. I haven't written anything since I want to finish Episode 1's script first, but if I can finish Episode 2's script before I film Episode 1, then I could get the following episode out just a few days later.

Episode 2 currently looks like it'll probably be longer than Episode 1. And there are still things I consider really important to mention that wont come up until later. Namely talking about Art/fanfics/music as a trend in the community..

There are too many things I wanted to talk about first, and due to the self-imposed "no more than two items per topic" I can't do all those in one episode anyway. I'm thinking of currently talking about them one at a time starting episode 2, then do the next during 3, and the final during 4..

There's just way too much to talk about, and I have all the material I need for a couple months of episodes just from making a cursory glance through my bookmarks folder.

I could probably double that if I looked into more detail at individual artists/musicians/authors/projects, but for now I have all the material I need to work with for awhile. I can spend one lazy evening finding links to more topics later.


So.. as a final note; what sort of topics exactly will I talk about?

Firstly, both major websites and notable individual produces of art, music, and fanfics. If any particular piece of work stands out, I may make a short piece on that, though I will probably do that for music and fanfics in particular.

The occasional big video game or software program.. admittedly the latter currently exists exclusively for the Desktop Ponies, though Twilinux could make it on the show.. but is currently unlikely due to the fact that it has poor public documentation, and their stated goals are pretty shoddy as far as a Linux distribution goes. They pretty much have more-or-less programming original software so that they could have pony themes as their goal.. sounds like a good learning experience for programmers; but not much of a Linux distro, so even though I'm interested I don't think I'll add it.

I will cover major websites for shopping. Skipping over major companies (Toys R' Us, Amazon, ETC) for those that especially stand out (Welovefine, Pinfilly, Toywiz, and perhaps Madman.)

I will talk about conventions, but leave it at stating what the specific convention is about, due to the fact that if the web show is paying well enough to live off of, and then a bit, then I may start going out to conventions with my camcorder strapped to me, a bunch of spare batteries and SD cards, and just do and shoot footage of every last thing I can and release the footage in a series of convention-exclusive episodes. I admit I don't have much of a concept of what exactly I'd try to do there since this is a longer term goal outside of my current ability; it just sounds like a fun way to go about it if I can ever afford to go to any conventions, brony or otherwise. Not just go, but have something to show for it back on the website.

I will talk about individual people behind the show, talk a bit about what they did before, and what other things they are doing now, basically just highlighting major names like Lauren Faust, Tara Strong, Andrea Libman, James Wootton, Daniel Ingram, Sabrina Alberghetti, and many others behind the show.. I also have plans to talk about John De Lancie since he is more intentionally diving into the fanbase.. but will wait on that until after I've seen the documentary and have a better concept of everything he has been doing with the bronies these last few months since he stopped being so intentionally reserved about and with us.

Finally, I will end the episode on a "ending thoughts." Just repeat some silly idea I had, wrote down, and want to put out there. Will probably be the closest the show every gets to something inappropriate, but only because I will be referencing the titles of R rated films and things in a couple of the ideas. So what I have to say itself wont be vulgar.

I imagine most of the audience for this show will probably be older anyway, even though I intend to keep things kid friendly.


And.. I guess that's it.

That's the process of the show as I have thought it through going into this..

Now I just need to hope that my inexperience will go away pretty quickly and the effort I have put forth will start showing more in the completed product.