Burn, baby, burn!

Now that I’ve told you a bit about myself, explained the process for one of my (what I like to call) “comedic shorts” and one of my AMVs, I thought this would be a good time to dive into my Let’s Plays… And where better to start than the beginning?

“Let’s Play! Captain Commando stage 1” was the very first LP (Let’s Play) video I ever did—I hadn’t even done a little team/partner LP episode with a buddy or anything. I was completely new to the world of Let’s Playing, and it was obvious. I had only watched 2 LPers; the perfect and professional Thet, and the great Alexander Frost.

FUN FACT: Thet is a real-life buddy of mine, and is actually the person who got me into Let’s Playing.

I decided on playing Captain Commando for multiple reasons. First, I was good at it, and could actually get to the final boss with the same amount of lives that I start with. Second, I’m a big fan of Captain Commando, but honestly I had never heard of him until the first Marvel Vs Capcom game came out. However, he quickly became one of my favorites, and is actually my best character now. Once I realized he had his own game for the SNES I simply had to play it! Third, there were other LPs of it out there, but it wasn’t as if it had been overdone like some video games (the Mario franchise). So, I fired up the ol’ SNES9X, opened Captain Commando, and started recording using the built-in recorder on SNES9X.

At the time I didn’t even bother making more than one attempt, mainly because I could get through the first few stages without taking much (if any) damage. But, I did notice a little problem with my method of recording… It caused slowdown and cut out the audio while playing. However, the audio was in the recorded video, I simply couldn’t hear it while playing the game. It was weird, and for a while it threw me off a bit, but I eventually got used to it.

FUN FACT 2: Back then I did not own a PC controller, and used my keyboard with WASD for my directional pad.

I decided against doing a “traditional” Let’s Play, and instead sort of copied the style I was most familiar with, which happened to be Thet’s style. This meant I would need to come up with a voice for Captain Commando, a personality, and dialog on the spot. I didn’t want to attempt to impersonate the voice he had in MvC, not only because I’m fairly sure he had a Japanese accent, but also because the little “effort” noises he would make in his original game sounded nothing like that. So, I went with a low gravelly voice, which changed one or two times over the course of the 9 videos until I finally got it just the way I wanted it. Originally, I think I used Audacity to lower my pitch slightly, and then added a bass boost, but I believe I finally ended up getting rid of the bass boost and just naturally lowering my voice a bit more, adding a bit more roughness, and then lowering my pitch a tad in Audacity to make it less recognizable as me. Also, I'm pretty sure this first episode was before I got a mic, and was just using the built-in mic on my little laptop.

Anyways, the first stage was a breeze to beat, but trying to think of things to say as myself and Captain Commando was not. I’m still not satisfied with how it came out, but I do like looking back on it now and then just to see how far I’ve come as a Let’s Player.

This episode of Let's Play Captain Commando has over 200 views. :)

From Japanese to English

Making the “Tales of the Abyss opening w/ English vocals” video was actually very hard. Not so much the video aspect, but doing the song was really difficult. Why? Because the song is originally in Japanese (hence the title of this post).

I got the idea to do this simply because I LOVE Tales of the Abyss. :D It is by far my favorite RPG! Anyhow, I was watching the show online and replaying the video game one day when I thought it would be pretty cool if somebody dubbed over the theme song with English vocals. The opening theme to the show is pretty awesome, and the lyrics are rather good, but unless you feel like going through the trouble of reading the on-screen translation of the lyrics you have no idea what they’re singing. Even if you do, though, I just feel that you can’t totally appreciate it unless it’s in a language you understand. So, I decided I was going to be that someone to dub over it. I didn’t realize at that time, however, that there were others out there who had sung the song in English already and put it on YouTube. But, I have yet to see someone (other than myself) use the opening video from Tales of the Abyss for the video, and not just a video of them singing. Anyways, I went through a painful process of trying to read the grainy subtitles for the song (the video quality I was watching the show in wasn’t too stellar) and typing them into MS Word. After that I jacked in my headphones, brought up Audacity, and plugged in my microphone. I played the song dozens of times and tried singing along in English before I ever recorded. The big problem I kept having was scrolling down in MS Word so I could keep up with the lyrics. But, I eventually managed to memorize them, and kinda got the notes down to where I felt like I could make an attempt at recording. My first several attempts were awful, and I don’t think I even got beyond the first verse. But, after several more tries, some editing of the lyrics to fit the amount of notes a little better, and resting my voice for a few moments, I made a few more attempts and finally realized I had no way of editing out the voice on the original Japanese track. I could have screamed if I wasn’t already going horse.

I brainstormed on ways to get rid of the voice, but came up short. Then I looked to see if somebody had already done the work for me… Nothing. But then I looked at the opening video in the video game. They were the same song! There were some slight differences in the instruments, and no one was singing, but essentially they were the same song, and what’s better is that the guitar was providing me with all of my notes! I was so freaking happy! So, I went through it one more time with the “instrumental track” and then simply put the voice recording into Windows Live Movie Maker along with the opening video to TotA and adjusted the balance a little between the video’s volume and the voice recording’s volume to get an okay blend. Once that was done I saved it as a “wmv”, watched it a few times to check for errors, and then uploaded it to YouTube.

The video was originally uploaded to my “Theatrical Ninja Let’s Plays” channel before it was only LPs, but it is now on my “Theatrical Ninja Videos” channel, and has 30+ views. It had somewhere over 100 when it was first uploaded, but no longer. Oh well! It’s still a nice video, and TotA fans seem to appreciate it.

Making "Spike as Spike"

The process of making “Spike as Spike” was a surprisingly short one, actually—compared to how long it takes me to complete some of my AMVs.

The idea to make the video came to me simply because I’m a big fan of MLP: FiM and BtVS, and had recently been re-watching the Buffy series when I started watching My Little Pony. I kept thinking it would be funny if James Marsters did the voice of Spike, or if the two characters met somehow, and then one night I came up with the idea of switching the audio of a MLP Spike scene with that of a Buffy Spike scene. Originally I was just going to choose a Spike & Buffy scene and use the audio from that on Spike the dragon, and then use that same BtVS scene with the “Spike the Knight” audio; however, when I looked at the finished product it just didn’t work. Buffy didn’t seem happy, and neither did Spike for that matter. So, I searched for a different scene—one where they were happy and seemingly in love. I found just what I needed in one of my favorite episodes! For those of you who know Buffy you probably recognized the scene right away—it’s the one where Willow’s powers are going nuts and everything she says is coming true…just like when she says “Why don’t they just get married?” in regard to Buffy & Spike, who have been spending a lot of time together due to Buffy trying to get information out of him about the mysterious soldiers. So, as a result, Spike proposes and Buffy accepts, and they get all lovey-dovey and weird, and…well, you know the rest.

But, anyways, the actual process went a bit like this:

I got the idea, and then I used my YouTube Downloader to convert a video I had called “Best Moments of Buffy & Spike (part 2)” into an MP3 file. I then went into Audacity (a FREE audio editing/recording program), found the section of audio I needed, copied it, deleted the rest of the audio, made a new track, and pasted my audio into the new track. I saved that and then went into Windows Live Movie Maker (a free movie maker program that comes standard on most computers with a Windows 7 series OS). I put “Spike the Knight” into the editor, put the Buffy audio in, and then went through the annoying process of cutting out useless parts of the video, saving the best parts, slowing down frames to help sync, and making sure expressions matched well with dialogue. Some frames I had to slow down to as low as 0.125x.

After finally getting the Spike & Rarity section done I got to work on the Buffy & Spike part. It was the same process over again, but with less editing in Audacity. I pretty much cued it up to the part where Spike saves her, and saved the file. But, as I mentioned earlier, the original Buffy & Spike scene just didn’t look right with the audio, so I had to find a different one. Once I had found what I needed I went through the process of trimming, deleting, and syncing all over again. It was a lot harder with real people, and I never was completely satisfied with how it looked, but I said “good enough” and got ready to upload it to YouTube. (If I only had some better editing programs I imagine I could sync those types of things at least a little better. But, oh well. J)

The ending to the video with Giles saying “Horribly wrong” was somewhat accidental. I simply hadn’t gotten around to trimming off the end of the video, and then when I was previewing it and the MLP audio faded out and Giles peeked around the corner with his line I just died laughing. Why? Because that’s exactly what was going through my head after making that video. William the Bloody with the voice of Spike the dragon and vice versa…it was just wrong. So, I decided to keep it, and uploaded the video to my newer YouTube account “Theatrical Ninja Videos”.

Currently “Spike as Spike” has over 200 views and is the 3^rd most popular video on my channel.

A bit about me

Good day/night/afternoon/whenever you're reading this. I am the Theatrical Ninja! You might know me as TheHLTNinja from my YouTube channels "Theatrical Ninja Let's Plays" and/or "Theatrical Ninja Videos". As a YouTuber I post mostly AMVs (anime music videos), Let's Play videos, and comedic shorts having to do with video games, anime/cartoons, or My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I live in the great U.S.A. and have for my entire life. I'm into a variety of things, including (but not limited to): anime, manga, Marvel Comics, MLP: FiM, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, martial arts, video games, lots of different music, and acting.

What I'd like to do with this blog is use it to talk about the different things I do on my YouTube channels, that perhaps viewers don't think about. For example, the process of putting together an AMV, or the challenges of Let's Playing. I am far from being an expert in any of these fields, but I do have about 60+ videos under my belt, and am close friends with a very experienced LPer. So, if anybody needs help/advice I would be glad to be of assistance.

I believe the first thing I'll start with is my "Spike as Spike" comedic short, but I'll do that in a separate post tomorrow.


~Theatrical Ninja~