I'm sure I mentioned previously, I've been dabbling in learning how to use video editing software. I'm an online tutorial kind of guy, and the scene for those is extremely prolific. I made one stab at a video essay kind of format about the fairly shitty but almost enjoyable Red Sonja; for a first project I think I pulled off some decent visual effects, but overall it came out a clunky and I knew I could do a better job almost immediately. So, I followed it up by doing the same idea with the Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd movie. This went a lot better, I knew how to organize the workflow and was just generally more experienced with what I was doing, and afterward I was pleased with how far I had developed.
After finishing the work on a video project, there are 2 steps for getting it up where it can be seen; the project has to be rendered into a video format, and the time it can take for this is at least one quarter of hte final length of the video. Then, the video has to be uploaded and analyzed by the Youtube algorithm. I went through this, and got a message back. It said the video couldn't be shown, since it contained material copyrighted by Disney. There was a time stamp for the offending material, about fifteen seconds, so I thought "No problem, I'll just fix that and go through the process again." So I did! An hour and a half later, the edit was made and the video was just finishing the scan process. Surprise! There's another chunk triggering the algorithm.
What I learned here was that Youtube will only inform you of one of these at a time. This was a little frustrating, because after this I repeated the process of editing, rendering and uploading maybe 15 times. That's a lot of time! Suffice to say, I eventually gave up. It's a little demoralizing to have gone through all this and not have anything to show for it. I guess it isn't a loss exactly, I did improve my skill by a noticeable amount (at least I think so). I was able to figure out why I was having so much trouble getting consistent audio, and more importantly, I figured out how to get generally better audio too. There's a hard limit on that though, I don't exactly have the kind of setup needed to break through that ceiling.
Though all this I kept thinking about something I've talked about before, how media monopolies make everything worse. Disney just keeps buying things, and they're so risk averse that everything they touch turns to, well maybe shit is too harsh, how about lead? The mass makes you feel like you're full, but consume too much of it and your brain turns to mush. I get that I'm completely out of touch with whatever people like regarding mainstream entertainment. I don't have the ability to put myself into the mind of someone who hears about a live action remake of Aladdin and gets excited. We already saw Aladdin, with these same characters and this same story. Why does Will Smith change the deal suddenly? Yeah I loved the Fresh Prince too, but that was 25 years ago, you're supposed to move on and grow as a person. Live action Mulan remake? Hell yeah man let me spend 30 dollars on top of a service that already costs a monthly fee for that! It's not like the economy is falling the fuck apart or anything!
They've been losing a shitload of money since this all started too, but I have no illusions they'll suffer any actual losses. At this point I figure they're big enough that they'll get the "Too big to fail" treatment and just get massive bailouts.
So anyway, I realized that it would be a good idea to figure out a new format for practice videos. I still haven't landed on it, so in the meantime I went back to working on my magnum opus.
That's the end of part 1! I wanted, at the very least, to get to this point. I originally wrote this like 2 years ago, and in making it since then I kept smashing into bad ideas that were mostly built in. Now I feel like I can do a better job with the next part, and since it's original content, Mickey can't tell me shit.
I think one of the important things to focus on is whatever set design is called for comics., because god damn my interiors do not convey what I want them to. As sloppy as the character design is, I'm actually kind of satisfied with it, because the goofiness keeps it grounded and prevents me from getting overly dramatic/serious with it. I'm thinking Groo the Wanderer is about where I want to be tonally.
