Delayed Input 307 Post-Show Assessment

This was a weird episode. It was almost a nice, simple episode that I was pretty sure I could get produced and posted at an acceptable time. I guess we've all got a "Let's drive to Vegas tonight" voice in our consciousness. The script was pretty much finished and I was in the final step of coming up with the intro and bonus bit. The Drive to Vegas part of mind thought, "Hey, bro, wait. What if we do Pixie Paw's Pickle Shop??"

And the problem here is that while it wasn't a particularly good idea, it was a fun idea. Originally I imagined doing this full pixel art graphical style, but then I remembered last season's Andy Jassy World segment and how long that took with even its ultra basic art. So I went with this sloppy/squiggly style and even that took hours upon hours. 

Every week I forget that it's the tedious stuff that actually takes the most time. Drawing the characters and giving them a couple of expressions is breezy, but making a new speech bubble for each time they talk and lining it up to their dialogue just eats up the minutes somehow. The ugly shot where the camera pans down to the vats of goo, I can't explain why but that was actually hard for me to figure out.
I even had this insane issue where there was this little black ring that appeared on the pickle shop's wall and wasn't on the original image. So instead of figuring out where that black ring was coming from, I just covered it up with a small square that's the same color as the wall. Just lots of stupid stuff like that.

Probably also worth bringing up that this was also a tough brain week. Sometimes I have it, ready to pop into creative/funny mode in a moment, and sometimes I just don't have it. I accept there's only so much control you get over circumstances like those, but I'm just saying an animated sequence is better as a Tuesday Night Idea than a Thursday Night Idea. I suspect this wisdom will have little-to-no bearing on mistakes I'm sure to make in the future.

QUESTIONS FROM YOU!

Did Kyle not play Death's Door? Giant pot man doesn't hit as hard after that
I'll probably play it when it comes to PS5, but also I frankly think the zoomed-out isometric perspective gives those characters less impact. It would be harder to cover a video focusing on just 74 seconds from Death's Door. It almost feels like you're Pixie Pawing me right now.

I guess compositing in the "most liked comment" was one of the issues?
Yeah that was just my best solution after forgetting to hang the frame. The way it moves to avoid my head was my way of being extra overt with it, but strangely there are a bunch of YouTube comments that see this as me trying to pull one over on everyone. Really it was just one of those crazy moments where I'm thinking about how I need to pin it up and then completely forget about that four seconds later, concerned with some other thing. Similarly I forgot about poor Shrek again.

Have you played any Souls games besides Bloodborne yet?
I've only played through Dark Souls III, half of Demon's Souls, and watched a roommate play through Dark Souls I. Sekiro I wasn't really vibing with.

Tech issues aside, what's it like editing these things and figuring out how to make it all flow right? Is it any easier or harder than Final Bosman?
Editing the show down for flow--basically everything but graphics/footage/music--usually just takes me around one or two hours. It's easy for the most part because I usually only have one good take so there's no real decision making to do. Sometimes I'll trim pauses out of a good take for the sake of brevity, like you don't need to see me take a long breathy Um.
The hardest parts are two characters talking to each other, like the exchanges with Kaitlin or my adult self. That kind of pacing I have a lot of improving to do still. Worth noting that I never edited any Final Bosmans, so my editing experience prior to Delayed Input is pretty limited.

I dont think the vest needed an undershirt.
This is a good note, I'll consider this is in the future.

Next week is the last episode of Delayed Input for season 3, the end of the denim arc. So far I've liked to do something a little extra special for the season finales, but I feel like season 3 has had a few special somethings already. So it'll likely either be something double special, or I'll collapse under the pressure of expectations and come up with a weird bad thing. I'll talk more about this next week but there will be a 4 week break between seasons as I'll be gone the week of the Game Awards, so I'm trying to think of what kinds of things I can post to make up for the extended gap. I think we'd all feel better about a four week Delayed Input break if I can cap off the season with the show's first-ever good joke.