Binary Domain Review

EDIT 5-2-14
Check for the updated version of this video on my channel [Binary Domain (v2.0)]. It's better.

What? Oh. Wait, what? OH SHIT! IT'S FINISHED?!
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!

  

*Note: The audio is mixed wrong in the first minute of the video, it's not all like that.

IT'S DONE

In July of 2012, I got the idea to start making a review video. At first, I wanted to do a video on a game I knew a lot of shit about, like Metal Gear or Resident Evil, but at the time, I couldn't figure out a good angle I'd have on those games by themselves. I mean, they're two of the most popular games ever made, and I'm just some dick making my first 'real' video. It seemed like a set-up to get verbally assaulted at every minor misconception. I was not prepared for that yet.

Then, I thought, "Why don't I do a review of a game that people probably haven't heard of, but should have?"  That game ended up being Binary Domain, a game I happened upon while reading a list of 'The Most Underrated Games of the Year' on some website. A game where you murderlate robots and people make inappropriate jokes and you could hit robots in their respective mechanical dongs with rockets. It was a perfect fit; the choice was natural.

At the time, 1 week into the project, I was adjusting to a new job and had just gone through a break-up. After about 4 weeks of toiling on it, I gave up on it to focus on work and staying sane. The project sat for a long time, until almost a year later.  I had almost 20 hours of footage to edit (which was capped at 1280i due to my choice of capture card), a 10 page script, and a voice over that was about 40 minutes long. Oh, also, the video was originally going to be half on-camera, half voice over. The problem was, I had no experience doing any of those things, so the footage suffered from bad audio, lighting, lack of focus, and general stupidity, while the voice over suffered from all of the exact same things. Well, not the lighting.

I had to redo a lot of the gameplay to be more coherent, I re-recorded all the audio 2 more times and settled on what I have, and created a bunch of little 8-bit tracks I could play on repeat, two of which survived. I shot, edited, scored, animated...everything...ed...the video myself, and it took almost 6 months of off and on work to get it all done and 'good enough'. I moved the ETA date so many times I just stopped having one. I stopped updating this blog, and used any spare time I was on the computer to work on this silly video in one form or another. It was a fucking nightmare.

This video is a sort of maiden voyage into making more complex videos. I had to learn to do all the things you see while doing all of those things. When I started, I didn't even know how to use Adobe Flash, nor did I really know how to edit video with any complexity. This is a big part of the length of time it took to make. I made it all up as I went along, and it turned out OK.

The Binary Domain review was just a silly idea I had, but it turned into a big thing (a stupid-long video about a game nobody played). I really doubted myself the entire time, and I gave up so many times I lost count. What ended up being a so-so video took hundreds of hours and a butt-load of encouragement from my friends to finish. I am thankful to them for their kind words and the not-so-kind ones that pushed me to complete this. It's not perfect, there are parts where I wander, there are parts where I don't explain an opinion very well, but it's done, and parts of it make me laugh. I've spent enough time on it, it's time for other people to see it.

I'll probably make another one sometime this year. Maybe next year, I don't know. But I do know that I'll be able to do it better, more compressed, more coherent, and with more animated floppy dicks.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for watching. I mean it.
-Kris

(CC Music info below)
"Borderline (Fantastic Vamps : 8-Bit Mix)" by Fantastic Vamps 2007 - Licensed under Creative Commons

Fantastic Vamps / CC BY 2.5

"A citizen's welcome to play with the Jimmy Jamming project_Ds_major" by My Free Mickey 2012 - Licensed under Creative Commons this is the cute song for the silly parts of the video

My Free Mickey / CC BY 3.0

"spacetime(whitecube)" by airtone 2009 - Licensed under Creative Commons

airtone / CC BY 3.0

"Ophelia's Song" by grapes 2009 - Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution

grapes / CC BY 2.5

"Intergalactic Journey" by spinmeister no attribution