When I originally started writing these, I thought I’d be finished in this part. Clearly I can’t count: at a rate of two episodes per part, with eleven episodes to talk about, I won’t be finished until part six.

The fact that I can’t do simple division won’t be a surprise to my mother, but it is a continuing source of disappointment to my secondary school maths teacher, Mr Chenery. Sorry, sir.

Episode 9: One More Thing

This was always supposed to be the second-to-last episode, and on the release schedule (believe it or not, I did have one) was supposed to go live on the Monday before Games Convention started. However, due to other episodes taking waaaaay longer than I hoped to finish (I’m looking at YOU, Episode 8!) I realised if I didn’t bump the release of this and Episode 10 up a bit just to fill the gap, there was no way I’d be able to finish Episode 11 and release it pre-GC. Hence, we lost a bit of impact with the central gag.

Said gag being, obviously, “Oh noes, we’ve only gone and forgotten the game we’re demo’ing” (nudge nudge, wink wink). In case you’re wondering, no, Martin wasn’t responsible for making sure Aion was on our demo PCs… that’s IT’s job, amongst others. Nor indeed do we use DVD burners to make installers for the PCs. In fact, it’s all done with magic.

This was a pretty easy shoot, especially considering it has a grand total of two shots in it (Medium two-shot; single close-up). We did it all after work one night, which again meant that Martin had to run around shouting in an empty office, but by this point people were used to it.

Martin’s close-up acting was fun, but was something of a pain to edit – not because of anything he did, but because of background people in the shot during his close-up. I only realised on editing that there were two people standing at the other end of the office behind his head; so to eliminate them from ‘continuity’, short of doing a George Lucas-style digital removal, I had to cut very carefully away from him as he half-exited frame. I really like being able to cut on a frame-to-frame basis, but man, sometimes it’s a pain. Of course you guys never notice it either – it should, rightfully, be seamless if it works.

I should mention how good Jörg was in the ‘unflashy’ role too; he improvised his little “Uh-oh” at the end, which a lot of people enjoyed. A great straight man, which is why of course he was cast in Episode 10…

Episode 10: Subliminal Messaging

The idea for this episode was thrown together fast after Martin and I saw the stand renders, and heard they were supposed to be ‘top secret’ until very close to GC. We immediately decided it’d be cool to do a video where we were lamenting that we couldn’t show fans the renders, but that they were great, and if only we had some way… so the script was practically written right then.

This was shot directly after Episode 9 – we just upped and moved into our staff room, Monkey Ranch, and set up. Shooting it was easy-peasy, except for sound issues – the vending machine you can see in the background, plus the coffee machine that you can’t see, both intermittently decided to make noises that would probably have appeared on the soundtrack. (I have to guess at that myself, because we can’t monitor sound on our camcorder. I know, crappy.)

Anyway, apart from that it was all easy. I loved Martin and Jörg’s ending stuff – especially Martin’s voice after I suggested it should be more “Scooby Doo like” (by which I meant ‘more cheesy’ not ‘more like a cartoon dog’). In fact I liked it so much, I decided to film it right there and then, deliberately framing it to look like it was ‘behind the scenes’. Something I came back to… or will come back to… ah, this timeline stuff confuses me.

Those were two simple episodes, easily shot, easily completed. Editing Episode 10 was a little trickier than I imagined – doing the ‘subliminal’ stuff in particular was fiddly – but it didn’t take too long. The problem that became apparent later was the scheduling.

Originally this would have gone out right after Episode 9, which itself was supposed to debut on the Monday of GC week; so the first gag would have been “Ooops, we almost forgot the Aion demo” followed swiftly by a tease of the stand. Unfortunately, things changed, and our PR department decided to release all the renders before the show began. That meant when Episode 10 debuted, the gag was sort of null and void, as anyone who wanted to could find the renders. Luckily for us, no-one seemed to complain too loud. Not even you, loyal reader, so ta for that.

By the time both of these were shot and in one case edited, Episode 11 was still far off in the future – along with other episodes beyond it. Could I manage to shoot everything I’d scripted?

Kind of a redundant question, now. But hey, read along and find out next time in Part 6.