“NO CGI” is really just INVISIBLE CGI
At some point actors and other people making movies decided that CGI was bad. They tried to convince people that their movies don’t use CGI. But they do. Those movies have CGI in them. Planes can’t do all that stuff for real, Tom. This video goes into how that happened and why. It’s a great reminder that no one in a creative job wants to make bad stuff, and they certainly don’t deserve to have their work hidden by people who have no idea what they do.
how does an indie game get made?
Video game documentaries keep getting better, and this one takes an angle that I have not seen before. I can’t say anything else without spoiling it, but it’s a common thing in game development that doesn’t get talked about very much. It also pulls off the impossible trick of being an interesting video about a bunch of Discord messages.
The Skill Issue, or: How I Learned I Could Learn, and So Can You! (also capitalism is a disease)
This is an incredible story paired with a genuinely motivating pitch about getting better at something. I often struggle to spend time getting better at something I enjoy if it doesn’t make me a better candidate for some theoretical future job. I feel uncomfortable taking time to write this blog post, for example. If you read the title of the video, you may have already guessed the reason for my anxiety. This video reminded me I’m not alone in that feeling, and made me consider a different perspective.
Is Zyn gonna kill me and the boys?
Naming a YouTube video is really hard. You want to hint at what it’s about, ask a question that is implied to be answered by the video, and throw in a little weirdness that makes people stop scrolling. This video nails all that. It nails it so hard that I kept rolling the title around in my head for days. It was my cellar door for making me giggle. It also exposed me to a new…subculture? Type of guy? The Zyn bro. It’s hilarious and bleak and informative. It hits all my YouTube KPIs.
Double Fine PsychOdyssey · EP33: “We Wrote It Down”
The first 32 episodes of DoubleFine PsychOdyssey comprise the best video game documentary ever made. Nothing like it came before and it’s unlikely that anything can come close to replicating it. Episode 33, recorded years after 32, addresses the series itself. They talk to people that were in the documentary but also those who were hired at DoubleFine after seeing the series. You see people coming out of a long, exhausting, stressful process. Some are frustrated, others relieved, and all ready to move on. It’s a brilliant epilogue to a unique, revelatory piece of history.