Sky Pirate Girlfriends - EDITING BREAKDOWN (Patreon Exclusive)

Oho, what's this? A behind-the-scenes editing video!

Have you ever wondered why it takes so long for Dogs in Love-style videos to come out? Here's why! Watch this all the way through and then never ask me that question again!!!

At the start of this video I warn the viewer that the program might crash a few times. It does crash twice at the start, but it behaves for the rest of the run, so don't worry too much about skipping around or downtime.

Some parts of my process I didn't go over in this video that I remembered after I finished it:

• Watching through the original content. Obviously to edit a playthrough, you have to watch it a bunch. This time I was smart and figured out a way to watch the clips at 1.5x speed. I go through and rapidly cut everything that I know for sure I won't use, keeping every joke that makes me smile and every piece of information that I remember setting up a joke later. Typically my first pass ends up cutting about 7/8th of the raw footage. I then do two more passes of the remaining 1/8th of the footage, doing my best to cut it down to somewhere between 20 and 45 minutes.
• Cutting everything except the absolute best stuff. This used to be a lot harder before I made extra videos, actually. I felt bad about throwing jokes away, but the fact of the matter is not everything works in the edit, even if it's really funny. Here's a little sub-list of rules for cutting content:
  
  A) Cut anything that's too long. If a joke is great but it takes 45 seconds of setup for a 2 second punchline, that's too much screentime for one gag. It goes in the extra video.
  
  B) Cut anything that is too hard to explain. There are some great jokes that are based (in part or in whole) off of information that is not in the playthrough itself. These might be references to other videos of ours, references to other people's work, or just inside jokes in our friend circle. On rare occasions it's possible to salvage a joke like this, but generally any joke that requires homework or extra knowledge on the part of the viewer gets axed.
  
  C) Don't include every beat of running jokes. In a full playthrough we go entire tens of minutes, hours, or even sittings between beats of recurring jokes (Vyse's gender, etc). This is great in the moment, but if you cut all of these bits together rapid-fire, they get overbearing and boring very quickly. It's important to pick the best jokes, and usually only the ones that flow well together. There were maybe 15+ jokes about gender identity and sexism in the first Skies sitting. I decided to retain a few of them to set up Vyse, then immediately pivot to Galcian to establish the Ar-man-da sexism joke, and then the focus stops being those jokes for awhile.
  
  D) Sometimes you just have to cut stuff for flow. This is a learned skill and it's hard to explain, but there's a natural flow you can create between clips. This can be done in a number of ways, both with visuals and the actual content. You can connect similar colors, do a bunch of clips that focus on a singular character in succession, do a few bits that take place in the same location, etc. As long as there's some form of connective tissue, the video flows like butter and people don't realize they spent 40 minutes watching something.
  
  A personal favorite technique of mine for this is "Line Stealing". This is an improv rule where you start a new scene by saying the line that ended a previous scene. So if one scene ends with someone exclaiming "I can't believe you!" the next scene starts with someone else saying "I can't believe you!" to a new character in a new context. I like to connect clips that directly take words from each other (maybe they share a word like "sailing" or "there"). I also like to do something I call "Idea Stealing", where sequential clips are connected together through a sort of vague word association that could almost be a conversation.
  
  For instance, in this video Will does a bit as Drachma and Aika that goes as follows.
  
  CLIP A
  DRACHMA: Aika, have you...?
  AIKA: I've tried. I don't know what to do.
  
  We then cut to Clip B, which has in-game Drachma's voice actor saying "THIS should work!" This creates flow because it creates the illusion of conversation:
  
  DRACHMA: Aika, have you...?
  AIKA: I've tried. I don't know what to do.
  DRACHMA: This should work!
  
  And because of that connective tissue, everything flows. This is my favorite trick and I often don't even realize I've done it until near the end of the editing process. Sometimes clips will be deleted entirely even if they're funny simply because removing them creates better Idea Stealing.

Hopefully someone finds this video interesting! Feel free to ask questions, I guess?