This is a continuation from my last post. I really can’t understate just how much of a shock it was for me to discover longplay videos. It was like when I discovered that BBQ ribs with sauce is delicious… after spending a couple of decades avoiding ribs with sauce. To quote Aladdin… it was a whole new world. So I have spent the last few days thinking about longplay videos. I have also been doing my research including watching a lot of existing longplay videos.
And after all of that, I think I will go for it. I have noticed that the main trend in longplay videos is to either go for a playthrough approach where your audience will see the entire game from beginning to end… or to go for a relaxed and mellow approach where a given project is completed… or not. But the point is that these latter longplays are meant to be something that folks kind of have running in the background and apparently tune in and out while the video plays… and there were a couple of times in my research where I got sucked into the experience.
So I am convinced that this is indeed a thing and a legitimate video type that some people will appreciate and want to watch. And therefore, it is something that I can and probably should start doing. After all, I normally have all the raw material anyway.
So… I am working on my latest Andover episode and then I will work on my next Mod Deep Dive… and this one is probably going to be my biggest ever. I am even thinking about having to break it up into multiple parts. However, once I resume work on Gryphon Manor after that Deep Dive video… I will incorporate the longplay format into the mix.
But this opens up all new questions to answer. For example, I plan to generate my longplays while doing the work for my regular Gryphon Manor episodes. Normally, I play the game to achieve the goals… and film myself doing that. Then I use bits of that footage and some more polished cinematic views of the finished project and combine them into the final video… which is more of a “look what I did” affair.
However, the longplays would actually show all of the “sausage making” that goes into the episode. So… the question is whether I release the longplays for a given Gryphon Manor episode before and up to the actual release of that episode… which kind of potentially spoils the surprise and wow factor of the regular video… or should I release the regular video and then release the longplays… which would not spoil the wow factor but would then be potentially confusing to show me working on something that is in fact, already done and published.
I have thought long and hard on this over the past few days and like my preference for Pepsi versus Coke, I have wavered back and forth. However, I think the best approach would be to release the regular episode and then release the longplays for that episode afterwards. My thinking here is to maintain the wow factor, and releasing the longplays after the fact is more like the “behind the scenes” footage you get in the special features of a DVD or Blu-ray movie.
Finally, there are a few more considerations to… well… consider. One of these is length. I was originally thinking that I would do one hour episodes, but it looks like the minimum in the genre is 3 hours… and that is a little bit of a hassle as my video editors kind of choke on projects that reach around 45 minutes or longer… and I use the Xbox app to capture my video and it automatically cuts off at 2 hours… so I would have to do something to handle that smoothly… which is no big deal… just a few extra steps… and to remember to do those steps. That is the real challenge. I sometimes have difficulty remembering why I entered the room. I will figure it out.
And the video editing might not be a problem as I think what chokes the editor is not really the length of the video per se… but rather all the edits. By the time I get to around 20 or 30 minutes of finished video, I have dozens and dozens of cuts, splices, transitions, and all sorts of components for the editor keep track of. My guess is that I can handle very large and long videos if the number of actual edits and effects are kept to a minimum. I guess I will find out if that theory is valid soon enough.
On a very related note, is just how much editing to put into these videos. As I said, my work here will be minimal… but the real question is just how minimal? Some folks have been pretty successful by just releasing the raw footage with almost no editing or staging. Others have added a bit more formality with some titles, a short introduction and similar components to make it feel like they are actually offering something that was made instead of some footage they just had sitting around. To be clear, all of them seem to be doing well, so the audience seems to be happy with either or both approaches. However, with me being me, I will probably but a bit more polish into the beginning and ends of each video because that is just what seems right to me.
A related concern is about whether to add a music track or not. A lot of folks that are making “relaxation” longplays use Minecraft’s built in soundtrack… which is quite popular and pretty chill. Of course, it comes in and goes out on its own… so there are times when there is no music at all. It seems to me that a better solution would be to have some chill music going all through the video… and normally that would be no big deal for me as I have quite a huge collection of chill MP3s but… all of those are copyrighted and would prevent these longplay videos from counting in my channel stats. Therefore, one of the things I have started doing is to gather chill music that I can freely use in these videos… and since I will be putting together 3 hour videos, I will need a lot of it. Luckily, there is a surprising amount of this stuff out there. So I thank all the composers out there sharing their hard work with the rest of us.
The final concern is the release schedule. Do I just dump them out there all at once… or do I release them spaced out… and at what intervals? I think that dumping them all at once is the wrong choice… and as for a cadence of the releases, I think I will go with daily or every other day depending on how much material I have available. I won’t release a longplay on the same day as one of my usual releases, but otherwise this should give a steady stream of content that I hope will keep people interested between mainline videos.
And that’s where my head is at today. I have a special release coming out in a couple of days, and then I will return to the regular rotation. I hope you will stick around and take a look… and better yet… I hope you enjoy it.
Until next time, I hope this finds you and yours in good health, good spirits, and a touch of good fortune. Cheers!