ArTorr Updates: September 2022

Hello everyone! Checking in to let you all know what I worked on last month, and what I expect to be working on in the month ahead...

First thing's first: Mass Effect 3.

Back in February, right after finishing the video for Mass Effect 2, I started working on a video for the third game in the Mass Effect Trilogy. As I recorded and took notes from my Paragon Playthrough, I conducted research on the development behind the game, scattered across various interviews, reference books, and Reddit threads (to better understand the perspective around the game's launch and endings, mainly). By the end of March, I had written a rigorous outline, and 80% of a rough draft. I knew ME3 wasn't going to be the very next video though, and so all this work was going to help me jump back into the project with much greater ease after finishing The Mandalorian video (this was a lesson I learned from doing The Bad Batch video in-between the ME1 and ME2 videos).

This past month could best be summarized as a month-long process of 'jumping back into it.' 

I try to push myself as a writer and editor with every video I work on, and upon revisiting my ME3 rough draft, I definitely underestimated just how much I would learn from making The Mandalorian video. I tweeted out this gif the day I read through the ME3 rough draft, and it still couldn't sum up the experience better:

It wasn't bad-- but as anyone who writes (or creates anything really) will understand, it can be very hard to look back on things you created months or years previous and not cringe; especially if it's something you didn't finish. It's just a sign of growth, and in my case, a sign of what I could still improve.

While recording and taking notes from my Renegade Playthrough for the video, I went back through my rough draft, paragraph by paragraph, and tried to raise everything to a standard that was much more to my liking. Part of the challenge is not only remembering the *what* of certain themes and points of analysis, but *why* I wanted to approach them the way I set out to in the rough draft. It's a bit like brain time travel. 

I haven't finished going through the script, but I'm very close. My goal is to have it recorded and off to editing by mid-to-late September. It will (unsurprisingly) be titled...

Other than that, I've dedicated very little time to any other projects-- besides outlining what my projects for the rest of the year will be. The Mandalorian video sorta threw a wrench into my planner for the year, which wasn't unexpected, but a bit inconvenient now. As a rule, I don't want to announce anything I'm making a video on until I've *actually* worked on it, but I imagine I'll be working on something other than Mass Effect 3 before the end of the month, so stay tuned.

Oh, and speaking of finding ways to improve things you worked on awhile ago... has anyone been playing The Last of Us: Part I? Questionable price point aside, Naughty Dog really did a bang-up job elevating an already masterful game. It really feels like you're experiencing it for the first time again. And say, remember when *we* did a video on The Last of Us: Part II? Would be cool to talk about that universe again, at some point...