Hey everyone. I’m following up on the episode recap topic. I’m considering doing audio recaps for Court of Swords starting at Ep 51 the beginning of the current arc. I’ll continue with these if there is enough interest. Let me know what you think.
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Just finished listening. Great work, good job on combing for relevant sound bites. In that specific regard, the dead air of hanging silence between sentences and phrases is pretty noticeable given the format, and it may serve your aims better if you could edit those bites down by cutting those stretches of dead air out.
As for other things I think you can cut - goals and mechanics. For the first episode back with the original crew, I think this is okay and can stand as is, but going forward I feel like this format is better serviced by only sticking to the story, keeping the recaps lean, focused, and substantial.
Lastly, I think that the run time on this is a bit long for two reasons: 1) listeners/viewers that want to hear recaps for a bunch of episodes because they’re too busy otherwise to catch all the vods or they’re new, and 2) the potential for JP to play your recap before the episode starts.
Speaking to the latter, I imagine people would be really into having your recaps played right before the episode starts (pre-roll music, etc.). I know I would love hearing this at the start of the show. But you’d have to cut down the run-time by at least half (making it 5 minutes or less, ideally 2-3 to squeeze it nicely into the pre-roll). From that angle, I’d say consider how traditional TV shows do recaps (“Previously on Court of Swords”). The way TV does recaps is interesting cause they take what you did with sound bites and manage to compress all the most essential story details into short lines of dialogue. This is also something they do at the start of every episode of Critical Role if you want something else to look up for inspiration (Matt just summarizes previous events live). Ultimately, “speaking fast” might be the best way to cut the run-time down, but I know that’s a pain in the ass to nail perfectly without stumbling over your words or skipping lines, etc.
This is a great opportunity to jump new viewers right into the show and catch up old heads in the audience who just haven’t had the time, and having it play on JP’s channel is the perfect spot to get the most ears on this.
*Oh, and! You should run some CoS music on low in the background of the recap! Really adds flavor/immersion.
But, that’s all just my opinion, I’m sure other users might have their own takes. Overall, this is great stuff, hope you keep it up.
Thanks for the input. I wanted to mention the goals because of the new format but you are right I wouldn’t do it for every episode maybe only completed goals at the end of the episode. I thought of music in the background but I am just learning how to do all this stuff so I didn’t know where to start with that.
I kept the pauses in the characters speech because I wanted to show these great moments in the narrative as they were. It may be that I am better off just taking shorter clips. During conception my idea was 5 minutes long. I’ll try doing some editing and see if can get it shorter but still have some great moments.
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I enjoyed that. Like above, its probably a bit long, and maybe has some superfluous stuff in it (e.g. the meeting between the newbies and berg didn’t need all the bit about “well Kalimat went up to get Sali then they came back and Berg had a side converation that doesn’t go anywhere” imo, it would have worked fine just going straight from the song to the “Berg, correct” scene imo). More strict editing and restriction of the stuff you bother mentioning would help cut the run time down too! The extended audio clips are nice, but for a quick recap I can probably do without the small character moments like the Sali smile thing that you left in at the immortals.
Pretty great overall though, so please don’t take the above as being super critical! 