State of the Skeleton 8/1-8/5: Sacrifice Your Body!

Hello Skele-friends!

How are you? I hope well! This week, Grace was out with family. So for most of the week it was just Derek! It’s been a while since I was flying completely solo, and lemme tell ya it’s nice just to have someone else around to keep you on track (that's why the podcast was so late)! Not quite as productive as I’d hoped but still a productive week.

Monday

Grace was supposed to have been gone with family early in the day. But flight delays pushed that back a little bit. Since she had some extra time and the weather was nice, we decided to start work a little later and take the dogs to the dog park. But then morning pushed on into the afternoon Grace’s family was still stuck waiting for their flight to take off. The big task for the day was the Podcast, we’d already asked our friend Kelsey Lewin to fill in, but when Grace’s family had still not arrived and we thought for a hot minute to have all three of us on. My main production focus was still the Crash Nitro Kart 3D DELISTED, so I was getting footage, pictures, music while all this madness with the podcast was going on.

When Kelsey arrived and Grace finally departed to meet her family at the airport, the podcast finally started. I had a blast chatting with Kelsey! Recording went a little long and then we had a nice long chat with the Discord off the air. Kelsey is someone with just a ton of interesting stories, hope to have her on again! However, it was kind of a weird day so I didn’t get a whole lot of video work done. And I realize now I should’ve gotten a selfie for the blog here, crap!

I finished the day reading Mr. Boop, an absurd and very silly comic about a man married to Betty Boop. It’s both much more complicated than that, and not really much more complicated than that. It’s very weird and very much my kinda thing.

Tuesday

With Grace gone and no big obligations to distract me, I jumped back into prepping the Nitro Kart video. The video spans a good ten years of Crash Bandioot games, and covers the many, MANY, stupid versions of Nitro Kart on portable systems. I basically spent the day rummaging for footage on hard drives and capturing footage. Played a lot of Nitro Kart on PS2, and while I don’t think it stacks up to the original Crash Team Racing on PS1, it’s still really good. The boost mechanic is a lot of fun and I think I like it better than Mario Kart’s stick-waggle method of boosting.

However, and I’m not sure if this is a controversial statement but, Crash Tag Team Racing, Crash’s 3rd mainline Kart game, is not good. But it feels like such a labor of love from the team who made it? There’s SO MUCH in that game, so much VO and story, so many jokes, characters, platforming AND racing segments, but just none of it is particularly good. The driving specifically is kinda weak, and with the extra emphasis on combat, winning races is actually pretty easy. Maybe it gets tougher deeper in, I’ll admit I didn’t play more than two hours, but I don’t know if I’d have the patience to.

Wednesday

The highlight of Wednesday was diving into Crash’s GBA games. Nitro Kart’s first mobile port was technically the GBA game, so it gets a brief mention in the video. Just to do my due diligence, I played a few other GBA Mario Kart clones, of which there are quite a few on the GBA! And WOW lemme tell you some of them are that gooooood garbo. Like, did you know Crazy Frog has a kart racer on GBA? There’s one on PS2 also, but the GBA game is absolutely amazing, one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Got me nostalgic for the GBA. Few things in life are better than swimming in the bottomless trash heap of garbo GBA games, they just hit different. And it’s been a while since we did a video on that!

But with all that out of the way, the main games in the video are Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D and its sequel. We have them on an old iPod touch, which does not do direct screen capture output like an iPad or iPhone does. Or maybe it can, but you’d have to jailbreak it and possibly wipe the system and lose the games. So, we’ll have to film the thing itself! But setting up the camera to get decent footage was tougher than I’d anticipated, since these games both control by tilting the device to steer. I spent the rest of the day messing with some lenses, changing camera position but didn’t get anything I liked. I’ll mess with it more tomorrow.

Thursday

Grace is back! But with all the travel and whatnot, she’s basically MIA today. I went back to work on filming the iPod, and by the afternoon I had what I thought was about as good as I can get it.

And yes, that’s where the light looked best, pointing straight down and away from me. But it was the only way to not have glare on the screen. Here’s what the shot looks like,

Nailed it! Pretty happy with that! But then I had to play both games, moving the device to steer, with my right arm craned all the way around the camera. After about 3 or 4 hours of shooting that, my back was killing me. BUT I got it done! And you gotta sacrifice your body for the love of the game! Thankfully I already had an appointment booked with a chiropractor for tomorrow. I see them once a month, sitting at a keyboard for a living and then lifting heavy things for fun does a number on you, but I’m definitely gonna need someone to fold me in half and pop my spine back into alignment after this shoot.

Friday

But the Crash video is basically ready for VO and live shooting! Wish I’d gotten at least a little VO done this week, but this project is almost out the door! I’ll be glad because we’ve technically been working on this since at least November of last year? Maybe October? But it’s got such an incredibly dumb story in there and I can’t watit to share it with you all! Oh shit, I forgot to edit the podcast…

Anyway, have a great weekend! Thanks as always for the support!