Delayed Input 303 Post-Show Assessment

This was a weird episode. Last week I knew two things: I had to finish my episode by Thursday morning, and I’d make an episode centered around whatever happened with the final Smash character. All I had to do was make a nice, simple video about whatever feelings bubbled up from the eventual painfully disappointing or unimaginably surprising reveal.
Immediately after Sakurai’s presentation, Sora’s announcement seemed take-proof to me, just a natural, great, not-entirely-shocking inclusion that doesn’t really generate any drama. Given that, I figured I could just take this opportunity to come up with a Kingdom Hearts Franchise Score. Throughout that script, I started bringing up Smash Bros a bunch, so I eventually just wrote “Sora Analysis” on top of the page and worked out from there.

The adult version of myself sprouted into mind when I really felt maybe I was being a little too nice. There’s a tiny bit of introspection there, but also I liked the idea of doing a dumb character who could have dumb jokes.
There are a couple of things about shooting the two characters I’m embarrassed about. First, I forgot to record myself reacting to myself, which is something I think even anyone making a video for the first time would make sure to do. You know, just get some footage of Kyle sitting there listening to Lyxek. For some reason I totally just blanked on this, so any time you see the two characters interacting in one shot, it’s probably even more janked up than it originally appears. The shot of Lyxek appearing has a bright white flash only to hide a jump cut between two shots I thought kind of resemble Kyle seeing a person suddenly appear.

The second thing I was really upset about is the framing of the closeups, and more importantly my eye lines. Basically you only see the sides of their faces, even in closeups, and you almost never see Lyxek’s eyes. So setting up, I’d look in my monitor, I’d move my head to where it would be when I’m talking, and look back at the monitor really fast to see if it looks good. Imagine trying to use a mirror where your reflection turns away immediately as you look at it. Anyway that would be easily avoidable if I just did some test recordings, but that didn't occur to me either. Complicating this issue, when the characters aren’t looking toward the camera, the camera’s autofocus was not finding eyes and faces and would frequently just choose to focus on my wrinkly backdrop instead of the human in front of it.

Those mistakes were at least workable until I got to the part of the video where I had to talk about what I actually like about Kingdom Hearts. The closeup was poorly framed and out of focus, and the wide shot required a great deal “Lyxek not talking” footage, of which I had less than 2 seconds. And I thought about cutting that stuff out, always the simplest solution, but the video sort of had no point if I just ended with a few dumb jokes. So I looked at the script, turned four weird paragraphs into two, got the shirt and contacts back on, and did a quick reshoot with a better eye line. While I hate doing reshoots, this was a nice chance to fix something immediately, and the second script worked better too.
This is what I’m talking about:

Actually looking at this, the background should be at more of an apparent angle in the reshoot. Let's just look at these as massive opportunities for improvement.

One more thing I’m embarrassed about is that I did the Kyle closeups after the Lyzek closeups, so you can see where my skin is clearly irritated by where an itchy wig and turtleneck used to be.

QUESTIONS FROM YOU!
Is that red denim or is there no denim this week?!
It’s a Wrangler light denim shirt, but you were not the only one who did not recognize it as denim. I realize now If you’re going to go denim, you gotta Go Denim.

Getting nervous for that tattoo?
No.

Why that wig?
A few years ago I picked up a few wigs on post-Halloween discount from Party City. This one actually had a college professor on the bag.

That’s all for this week. I’ve actually been typing this at the airport, and I've had a nice break this weekend. I expect this week’s episode to be less weird than the Lyxek thing; you can’t go weird back-to-back. Or at least the same kind of weird. If the new episode is weird, it will be an entirely different kind of weird. Oh, over my vacation I did have one good Delayed Input idea: I’d like to try writing one good joke.