Production update 2020-09-22

Hello everyone!

I hope you had a great week. This week was quite fun for me!

First, the SMB3 Credits Warp video did very well. It came down crashing pretty hard after a few days, but honestly, even if it gets 0 views from now on, I still consider 200,000 a success!

Perhaps the best success was learning that Nicholas Weaver, computer security teacher at UC Berkeley, saw and liked the video so much that he gave it as required viewing to his CS161 students. I had a brief exchange with him about it.

Now, onto the next video. Research has been going pretty well, and although I took the week lighter than usual, I managed to get about 60-75% of the script done. So we're looking at this progress:

• Script: 60-75% done
• Recording: 0% done
• Editing: 0% done

The research part is actually pretty much done - all that's left is consolidating everything into a nice script. Like I said in the previous update, the tone will be a bit different than what you guys are used to from me, so that also reflects in the writing. I plan on spending a bit more time than usual polishing not just the information, but how I present it as well.

This bring me to my next point, and this is a big one. There will be a major change of tone in the background music of my videos. Consider this video series as an experiment in the matter, but I will most likely extend it to every future video.

The problem: video game music is protected by a copyright that, and this might come to you as a surprise, I do not own. By using it in my videos, I am trusting the good faith of companies to let me be. And that's not just Nintendo, but also stupid recording labels that release blatant copies - sorry, "remixes" - of copyrighted game music and then claim the original as their own because their "remixes" are so similar.

A copyright claim, legitimate or not, has never happened on any of my highly viewed videos, but honestly, I've been playing with fire for years. Ever since the release of my very first Speedrun Explained in March 2018, I've been considering changing how I approach music in my videos. The easy solution was too enticing and I let myself choose it every time, but the little voice in the back of my head is now screaming loud enough that I'm finally taking the steps to make a change.

So, what's going to happen? HOME, perhaps? Arthur Benson? Nope. It will be music from Bismuth. You know, the speedrun YouTuber?

As some of you may know, I am a bit of a pianist myself. I have a few recordings on soundcloud here: https://soundcloud.com/bismuth9. I haven't played much piano in recent years, however, and currently, the biggest barrier is that I do not have a piano. Well, that's why I'm about to fix that today. After I'm done typing up this update, I'm going to the music store and getting myself a new digital piano. Tomorrow at the latest, I will have a new keyboard to play with.

So, what kind of music can you expect? Well, I do still plan on rearranging video game music, so while technically, I won't truly clear myself from the copyrighted material issue, but since I don't plan on selling the music on its own, I'm 99.9% sure everything will be fine. It's definitely a large step up from straight up using the official soundtrack of a game as my own background music.

I will record my music in a way that I can loop it, so I'll be able to record probably 5 to 10 minutes worth of music and use it for an entire video. I'll need an initial bank of music which will take some effort, but over time, I'll be able to slowly build up on it, adding a couple of songs every now and then, so eventually, it will be rather low-maintenance.

I hope everyone is excited for this change. I know it means a stark change of tone, going from upbeat, cheerful video game songs to soft piano background versions of them, which means the rate of people falling asleep to my videos will soar. But, like everything else I do on YouTube, I'll be sure to put quality first, and I'll try to make the music enjoyable without being distracting.

That's it for this week. Hopefully, I'll finish up the script in the coming days and I'll be recording by the next update. Have a great week everyone!