Early Access: A Better Late Than Never Criticism of Sonic Frontiers

What a march this has been. I've worked on some videos that felt like they took forever, but nothing like this. This felt like the project that would never end. Some of that's because, after pushing myself so hard on the Sonic Adventure 2 video, I tried to be a little more casual with this one. I think I started the script around the end of April, a couple weeks after finishing the game on-stream. The idea was to avoid burnout. 

And then the script grew, and grew, and grew, to be the longest script I've ever written. After doing voice over, I had three hours of material I had to cut down. I captured more than 60 hours of gameplay from more than 50 games. Thank goodness I took the time to stop and "storyboard" out this review like I did with the SA2 video. It actually proved to be extremely valuable here -- with a video this long, that takes so long to put together, it's hard to keep all of your ideas hot and ready in your head. Often I'd fall back to the storyboard and realize I planned something months ago that was way better than what I was doing in the moment. 

And then in July, a sponsor came calling again. Suddenly I had a real deadline. The last four weeks have been a race to move this mountain of material into something resembling the shape of a video. The last couple days in particular have felt something like a miracle. A work ethic I hadn't tapped into in years suddenly roared to life as I locked down 30+ minutes of video in a matter of hours. It may have involved several actual panic attacks and me running on about four hours of sleep, but here we are.

Included with this post is the script I worked from (with color coded notation). You'll note there are technically two versions of the script in the main PDF. I actually dumped and restarted writing the script around June or so once I realized just how big it was getting. Big videos need lots of structure in order to make sense for me, so the original version of the script is more off-the-cuff and unstructured. 

And then the storyboard itself, structured just like it was in the Sonic Adventure 2 video. The storyboard is using an older version of the script before most of my later revisions/additions. I was revising the script all the way up until a week ago. You'll also notice boarding for the sponsor read, which isn't actually in the cut if the video you guys get to see. In retrospect, the sponsor segment probably leans a little too much on SAGE content, but by the time I realized that the train was barreling down the tracks too fast to stop. Thoughts for next time, I guess.

I'm off to go relax for a bit before I have to make thumbnails/write descriptions for the public upload. Thanks for sticking around, folks!