Donkey Kong Dissection Behind the Scenes

Hey, everyone! You probably already figured it out from the community post a few days ago, but this week's video is (finally) the return of Donkey Kong Dissection with Donkey Kong Country 2! That's right. I've been working on it for a year, and it's finally time to bring it to the world in all of its 47-minute glory. I have a few more things to finish up, but it will be here for $10+ patrons today. Whether you've played the game or not, you're not going to want to miss it. In the meantime, though, I wanted to share a few images with you that might help you get a better idea of my editing process.

So the first image is the editing timeline I posted on the community tab last week. It's not the final timeline. I call it my first-pass timeline. The green elements are audio, and the blue are video. It starts with the green stuff, which is my recorded and edited audio. It forms the skeleton of the project. On a project this big, my initial goal is to simply fill the editing timeline with video as much as I can, covering all of my talking, getting from one end of the timeline to the other. There may be some elements I skip over because they require extra work, such as graphics I haven't made, text I'll save for later, audio that needs to be re-recorded, or book images I haven't scanned. The biggest, however, is game footage I didn't get. Despite my best efforts, I will find there is some specific gameplay outcome that I talk about in my script that I just don't have in my recordings. In this same image, you might notice a whole bunch of little flag-looking things. Those are markers. They allow me to make to-do lists of all of those aforementioned things I haven't done yet, so that, after I finish my first pass, I can go back and be reminded of all those things I still need to do. And this one was a doozy. I had a Nintendo-friendly number of 64 to-do list items after I finished my first pass. I don't think I've ever had a video where I had that many things I had to go back to do.

That's pretty daunting to think about, so that brings me to the second image. I took many of those to-do list items, the ones that required me to get new visual footage, and divided them into categories: things I would have to scan from my copy of the Official Player's Guide, images I would need to get from a web search, and gameplay I would need to sit back down and record. Obviously that kept me focused and prevented me from having to prep my scanner or hook up my game capture more than once. The fact that they're all struck through indicates that I have completed those items. With the help of lists like these I was able to check off all the to-do list markers on my timeline and finish the edit.

And that brings me to the final image. Once the project was finished and exported, I needed to watch it to make sure there were no mistakes I might have missed. While watching I kept a notebook with me and logged timestamps and descriptions I needed to fix. You'll see things like volume adjustment or putting in yet another new Player's Guide scan. The most common problem, though, was fixing renders. For some reason, my editing suite had a lot of render problems this time around, where there would just be small, visual glitches in the gameplay that I needed to keep track of and force the software to re-render properly. A lot of them are so brief that it took me until this point to notice. Oh, also there are some random symbols at the top of the page. That's not related. I'm just playing The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages right now and needed to write down some passcodes. Anyway, this list was actually pretty tame. I feel like when I did the first DKC, I ended up with a full page. I guess that's just because I had so many to-do markers beforehand! Likewise, the fact that they're all crossed out now means that I have fixed all of these issues.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this look. I just need to finish up the thumbnail, and the video will be out before you know it. I hope you enjoy it. It's certainly been a journey for me! Thanks as always for your support! Have a good week!