Fanatical Readings Episode 1

Originally uploaded May 21st, 2017. If the jokes (and the image quality) seem outdated, that's why.

Finally, a new edited video from me (as opposed to a stream)! Caitlin joins me for this new series where we read (bad) fan fictions! And yes, this is a series, more coming soon!

In this first episode, we read a story called “okie” by dauntlessxb**ch (their original username wasn’t censored originally) off of fanfiction.net. This video is not sponsored, by them or anyone else.

Please share this around if you liked it and remember to subscribe/follow me on twitter (@PXKMProductions) to stay in the loop on new videos and stuff!

Since we need some more words for this post, I guess I’ll give you a bit of behind the scenes info on this episode. We apparently shot this episode, and a few others, early in May 2017. The files say the 6th, but my memory is very bad, so I can’t confirm. This was before I had my license, so Caitlin had to get a ride from her brother. She would sometimes take the train (walking distance train station in my town ftw), however getting a ride was much more convenient. We filmed four stories in total, one being 3 episodes instead of 1. We planned on this being a one-off video, but after filming for at least one and a half hours, we decided doing multiple episodes would be best. The shots where we were reading were shot with late 2015 iMac’s FaceTime camera. The shots that were used for commentary were shot on my Pentax K-30 DSLR. If you’re a bit video nerd like me, it has an APSC sensor. These two shots were not set up with reading/commentary being the intentions. I believe I was just going for wide shot and close up. However, as I began to edit, I realized a good grammar for the vid would be to use the two different types of shots for two different purposes (reading and commentary). I stuck to that quite religiously, but we’ll delve into the editing details more later. The “scene” was lit with a pretty basic 3 Point Lighting set-up, using LimoStudio Photography lights and some desk lamps I had. Scratch audio was recorded on the camera (this helped with audio sync between the two cameras), but the audio used in the video was from the FaceTime camera. We did all 4 stories in one long go, and were very hungry by the end (we say this on camera several times, in parts that made it into episodes and parts that were cut).

And then we have the editing, oh boy the editing. Caitlin has no real film or video experience, her speciality is with the English language and the memes, so I both directed (whatever that means in this context) and edited this episode (and the other ones, too). This took a good few months, but nowhere near as long as this newer ones are taking me ( my standards went up). This episode was edited in Premiere Pro CC 2017, and I have stuck with Premiere until the present day. My same iMac mentioned above was the machine I executed this stroke of genius on. For some reason, I did not include my logo at the start. I guess I didn’t see this as top tier work at the time. Cutting the video together to get rid of pauses and breaths was the easy part. The hard part was animating all the graphics and making the story text show up in time with the reading. When I say “hard”, what I really mean is annoying and time-consuming. I also decided to take all of the text from a screenshot and crop it to the words I wanted, instead of just retyping it. That was very dumb and I stopped that a few episodes in. Lastly, the music was all grabbed from the Youtube Audio Library and was also kind of a pain to select. This was not a technical issue, but just because it can be hard to determine just the right feeling for a section. Maybe not so much in this one, I can’t remember, but later episodes this was def true.

In conclusion, I am a giant dork. I love making videos, so please share this video around (on this page) and give a tip if you really enjoyed. I’ll make sure Caitlin gets some cut of all the money this video makes. Some people treat their friends like poop, but I only do this sometimes (this is a JOKE).