Upcoming BrutalFoods Exclusive Update!!

Warning: This post does include some spoilers.

Here is an audio update on my current video project! Below is a transcript of the audio log (it was generated by Adobe Premiere, so it is imperfect but should suffice.) I recommend listening to the post rather than reading it if you can, just so you can get the full message. 

Also included in this post is a peek at my storyboarding process, as well as a look at a digital set I've been building for the upcoming video! These are detailed/discussed in the audio post as well.

STORYBOARD SAMPLE:

UNITY  SET - DINER:

ROUGH AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, there Patreon pals! I am hard at work over here on the next entry in what I've been internally referring to as the Brutal Foods Adventure series.

And now, before I get started, I have got to acknowledge that I started off the year trying to make a new video game review video, but I have had to shelve it for the time being because it wasn't coming together very well and I needed a break from looking at it.

I still really want to do some video game reviews again, but I'm just not sure how to package it all together just yet. I guess when it comes down to it, I just didn't get enough good ideas to fill out a full video and I really want my next post to be top quality rather than just, okay.

For now, I still feel like the best video game coverage that I provide comes in the form of my Twitch streams. Streaming has been a lot of fun this year and I'm feeling very passionate about it lately. A new season of Friday Night Mario Party is currently underway and a revamped season of my retro game Bingo format is on its way very soon.

So if you're not checking me out on Twitch, give that a look.

I'm really, really itching to post a video though. I imagined myself coming out the gate swinging in 2024 and just smacking home runs with my more relaxed brand deal schedule this year. But instead I've just ended up wallowing in incomplete ideas and failed video attempts. It is a little disheartening, but at the same time I feel like getting some time to try out ideas and experiment a little has helped me decide what I want to do on YouTube next and also how I'm going to do it.

for a couple of years I feel like I haven't had room to experiment, so I really needed a bit of time to do it. But now I'm trying to go all out on this next food video. I really want to make something big and cool and worth watching beyond just someone sitting there and eating foods with some silly edits thrown in.

Food videos on YouTube have exploded since back when I first started doing brutal foods and it occasionally gives me a bit of an identity crisis. Not that there's anything wrong with the wacky food format, but nowadays you can find a lot of videos to watch with people taste testing, foods with crash zooms on their hands, sound effects, etc..

I'm not saying I won't ever just sit there and eat some food for a video. Again, not saying that at all, but right now, in this moment I feel like I have to make something bigger first, even though there's been a gap in uploads for me lately. It's stressing me out. I'm watching my YouTube analytics slowly tank, but at the same time I'm really inspired and passionate about this video and I think you guys are going to love it.

I can't tell you everything about it here, obviously, but I do want to be more open to sharing the process here on Patreon a little more this year. So I'm going to give you guys some details. Do me a favor, though, and don't talk to me about this shit while I'm streaming or anything like that. This is a secret between you and me, so don't you blab it.

I mentioned at the top of this blog, audio blog that this is the third entry in the brutal foods adventure series. the first video in that series would be the Lunchables Snackable video where I became a living sunflower. And the second is the Bass Pro Shop Foods video that came out half a year ago.

these two videos feature chef Ian Brutal foods embarking on a surreal adventure and also taking breaks to eat and review some food along the way. These two videos were probably in my favorite food videos to produce because I got to be super creative off the wall and do a lot of fun effects that I really enjoyed planning and executing.

honestly, I think some of my creative struggles lately have come from the fact that I've been making more vlog style content where I simply go to a place and recap that experience with a voiceover, or I sit down and I eat some food and then I edit that together without much forethought.

It's easier to make that kind of unscripted content, but I think I got a little bit bitter about the process: one day of filming and then weeks of just sitting there and staring at Premiere and making it all come together. It can be grating after a while, and even though the videos are technically "easier to make", I started dragging my feet and getting really distracted from my work because I just didn't enjoy what I was doing.

So with this next video, I'm really trying to push myself. I'm trying some new things. I have storyboarded the full video (aside from the food tasting sections, which will be genuine) and instead of just using the adventure sections as transition scenes between eating the foods, I'm trying to make the video a bit more narratively satisfying by working in a storyline-ish.

I don't want to oversell it, but it's got a story in there.

I don't think I've really done this kind of thing since Televoid, honestly. Like when was the last time I had a video with a real narrative thread? I don't know. So I'm shaking off some rust when it comes to writing, but I think it's going pretty well so far.

As of this Patreon post, the whole story is planned out and I'm in the middle of rounding up costumes and props for filming. Once those come in, I can finally start to film, which is nuts that I haven't done that yet because I've been working on this video pretty hard for about a month now, maybe longer. I actually included a number of concepts that I was going to put in my shelved video game review in this food video so if you include my work there, I've been working on this since December. Ugh.

Anyway, I've included a little picture of some of my storyboards in this post, just to give you an idea of what they look like. They're very simple, not artistically impressive. It's basically just visual note taking. Enough info for me to roughly frame the shot to see where I need to put the camera and what character or costume or props I may need. They look dumb, but they're actually super helpful.

You might wonder why I'm storyboarding instead of just writing a script like I would normally do.

Storyboarding may seem overkill, but it really reduces the amount of time I have to spend filming and editing, which are the huge timesinks of the process.

I can plan out all the shots. I can shoot scenes out of order to be more efficient in regards to costumes and props. And honestly, it's just nice going into a video with a mental picture of how the thing will look. With vlog style videos and even the collab movie reviews that I do, I don't know what it's going to look like until I get to the editing stage and that can be really stressful. So it's nice to go into this huge project knowing I have a concrete start in and everything in between.

One of the things I really wanted to do with this video was to incorporate my Unity knowledge somehow. I've been learning Adventure Creator in Unity off and on for the past million years or so, and I still haven't ever used the knowledge for anything because I haven't had a solid game idea yet.

So I'm using the knowledge now, dammit. Included in this post are shots of the unity scene that I'm working on.

Originally, I was going to have multiple scenes in this video take place inside of a unity build, but since it's my first time doing this, I scaled back to just one unity scene. As you can see, by looking at the images, Part of this video will take place inside this cozy little diner here.

I'm nearly done building it. I just have to add some more props, finish the lighting, and then add some customers in there to give the place some movement. The idea, though, is that I'll use an in-game camera to film different angles of the place and then blue screen myself in there.

I think it will work. Honestly, my biggest concern is my blue screen room. It's a very small room and I'll need to be able to get some pretty wide angles. And then there's walking like me, walking from point A to point B, there's not enough space in the blue screen room to walk. Part of me wants to get a treadmill to use for walking on the blue screen. And then there's another part of me that thinks that's crazy and I should just kind of walk in place and make it look goofy intentionally to save some time and money. That's probably what I'll end up doing, at least for now. Maybe in the future I could get the treadmill. But for now, I should probably just walk in place.

But so that's the unity scene I've been working on. It's far from the only thing I've been up to over here. I've been building even more virtual sets in Premiere, much like the ones seen in the Best Pro in Snackable videos. I don't want to share those today because I don't want you guys to know every location of the video and totally ruin the surprise, But I'm roughly 90-95% done building the other virtual sets. I'm so close to filming, I'm honestly a little bit nervous, but it's all about to come together.

So in the interest of production discussion, why am I making the sets before I actually film the food footage, right? Well, to build these sets in Premiere, a lot of it is just mushed together assets. So I don't really know what the scene will look like until I know what assets are out there for me to smash together.

So I don't want to film a bunch of footage and then get to the editing stage and realize I can't build the set I thought I could build. I need to build the set first and then film the footage for it. Does that make sense?

This has been kind of a wordy post and I hope it doesn't sound pretentious or full of excuses or anything like that, but it probably does a little bit.

I wanted to share some behind the scenes on this upcoming project I'm really excited about, but I also just wanted to explain why the uploads have slowed down lately. I don't want to come off as pretending that I'm unaware that I haven't uploaded for a while because it's on my mind every minute of every day.

This year I reduced the amount of brand obligations I had. I let myself explore and get creative with videos. I tried to write some new scripts and updated formats that I thought I could pull off and they just fell apart. But now I feel like I've finally found the path.

Not to be overdramatic, but I've been struggling with my creative journey since around 2019. I've been struggling about what I want to make, what I want to say, who I want to be, what I want people to remember me for. All that bullshit that I don't even really like talking about. But it's been a struggle to get videos out. And I realize now that the Hellofresh brand obligations were kind of instrumental in me producing content the last couple of years. If I wasn't on the hook for those deals at the time, I likely would have slowed to a halt and just gotten lost in the self-doubt or whatever bullshit. I don't really like talking about this kind of stuff.

Point is: I really do feel ready to dial back in and make some really good stuff. I felt that way at the top of the year. I still feel that way now. I just tried out some ideas that didn't work initially.

I want my best videos ever to be coming out this year. I don't want to put out no bullshit.

I want to put out some good shit. And I know that it's kind of silly to want to elevate the food video genre, but you know, food videos are what I'm good at right now. It's what I'm known for. So as much as I want to review some more games or do some more movie reviews, I also really want to make something that goes beyond just reviewing existing things. But I don't know how to do that with movie or game reviews just yet. I do know how to do that with food videos though. So here we go.

I think I'll always be a reviewer in some form or fashion, but I want my show to have other elements to them. I think it'd be cool if people saw brutal foods as more of an actual show and less of just a random collection of videos.

So I want to make them cool and substantial. I don't always want to just sit there and blab it out. I'll still do that because I love to talk about things and it is nice to do an easy video every now and again. But right now I'm really enjoying making something and I'm grateful to those of you that have stuck by me through the process.

I really, really, really hope this video is something special and that it feels like it was worth the wait.

And honestly, after getting this done, I don't think there will be another huge gap like this. I really was just kind of figuring out creative things, but I think I know what I'm doing now and hopefully I can just, you know, keep churning them out.

If you have any questions about this project or what I'm working on in general or anything like that, please let me know in a comment on this post. I'll try to answer as many as I can. And hey, if there's enough questions, I could do a Q&A post or something. Who knows? if people are interested in that, I would do it.

I'm planning on releasing some more behind the scenes information about this brutal foods in particular after its release. Specifically here on Patreon, I can show off some more storyboards, maybe detail how I worked on the sets and that kind of a thing. So if there's anything you want to know about the process, please let me know.

And thank you guys again so, so much.

If I had to put an ETA on this video, I feel like we're looking at end of the month this month.

I also do have a brand obligation next month. And I'm thinking I may just do a simple food video for that. So hopefully a video this month and also next month. Fingers crossed. Obviously, I can't promise anything, but I'm doing my best.

I'll also post on here and let you know when the new season of Bingo starts over on Twitch because that's a lot of fun. I put a lot of effort into that show and I think those of you that like retro gaming would really get a kick out of it.

Okay, I'm done rambling, done posting here for now. I hope this was an interesting read or listen, I hope I didn't whine or complain or whatever. I just wanted to let you know that I'm working hard on a new video and I'm sorry that it's taken so long. I'm going to go get back to working on this unity set now.

Sorry again for taking so long. So, so sorry. I probably shouldn't apologize for it so much, but it bothers me. I don't regret trying out some new things in January and February. I just really wish that they'd have worked out. But this one's going to work, so I'm going to go work on it.

Goodbye.