Behind-The-Scenes: Fanservice

Here's my thoughts on the Fanservice video!

Phew, what a video. Honestly I need to stop letting these things get so out of hand. I had the idea for a piece on fanservice and Fire Force that I thought wouldn't even make it to 15 minutes because I didn't have much to talk about.

...then I did more research on fanservice and its history. I reflected on other shows I had seen. I found a cool video series on fanservice in Kill la Kill (seriously go check out Study of Swords, that series was great) And I started compiling more and more notes until I had written nearly 8000 words detailing the history of the topic and my whole opinion on it.

I gotta stop doing that.

Script

Surprisingly, the script is one that I still don't think is perfect. Usually I finish a video like my Horror Games essay and feel content with the message, but this one was a little all over the place. Perhaps I haven't seen enough anime to feel like I have an expert opinion on its use of boobs and butts.

I had much more written about the female empowerment of Kill la Kill and how sexuality should be used to empower a character. I also talked more about nudity in media in general, and the ways in which it can be used, but I cut a lot of it in writing and editing, because I didn't feel confident enough in how I presented my arguments (hence the "Important Note: I am not a woman" text that flashes up on screen when I talk about that stuff)

I also went WAY more into the history of fanservice. How it started with cheerleading in the 19th Century, and how fanservice in the west was killed off by the Hays Code, and later the MPAA, which is why America is so strict about nudity in television compared to the rest of the world. That all got cut just because it was an anime video, and starting off with 15 minutes of the entire history of the American television ratings system is probably too big a tangent to keep someone interested. A topic for another time, perhaps.

Recording

Recording the video was a bit different. I'd been playing around with the idea of sitting on a couch or chair on the green screen for a while now. I actually wanted to use it for the Horror Games video before I decided a narrated video essay fit the tone better.

I like the style a lot. I want to tighten up the framing and where I am on the screen, which should also make me look a little better since I'm kind of low resolution for most of the video while I'm cropped in like you can see below. But the general layout did feel right.

I'll keep using this as my style going forward though. It feels nice to record in and kind of works for the casual, semi-informative, semi-humorous style I go for. Also standing for 3 hours straight while talking into a microphone kinda sucks.

Editing

Editing the video was a pain. Cutting up whole episodes of anime and finding clips online to use is always time consuming, especially with a video this long. You can see my timeline is kinda packed for how simple the video turned out to be.

I am glad that I found some nice anime backgrounds to use when I'm not directly referring to a show. Jazz Hop Cafe has some real nice looping wallpapers that I found. I feel like they added a lot, and I'm not sure what I'd put there without them. Though again, background footage is much more of a problem with a 45 minute video, so I could also just stop doing that.

The only major problem that came up with the final edit was just how many times I had to re-edit and re-upload the video. I talked about it in a YouTube post, but it got age-restricted and copyright claimed, then automatically age-restricted 3 more times as I continually edited out "nudity" (none of the shows actually have anything R rated, but the outlines of boobs are still risky I guess)

I was MAJORLY surprised that when I finally appealed the last re-upload, that someone manually greenlit it. I have no idea how that happened. However, I'm thankful they did, because age-restriction would mean this video being dead on arrival. Blurring it as much as I did kinda deflates some of the video, so I'm glad that it was at least worth it to do that.

EDIT: Since this post was originally written, the video has gotten demonetized. So I guess it doesn't matter if they manually reviewed it, because they can still just change their mind and axe the video nearly a million views later. Words cannot describe how much this pissed me off.

But, on a positive note, this sudden demonetization kicked me into gear to make a Patreon so I don't have to rely on YouTube just for them to suddenly kill my channel. So hopefully I can end up making the most of a bad situation.

Thoughts

Overall, this was a fun video. Any time I can stare at anime tiddies for 4 hours and actually call it "research" is a win in my book.  My biggest drive in making it was a complete lack of anyone talking about fanservice in any similar capacity. So I think it filled that niche well. Hopefully some people learned about the history, and got a bit better of an understanding of the medium, while also laughing at that one time Tamaki fell pussy-first onto a guy's face.