https://www.youtube.com/watch?=CACp0TzboOM
Behind the Scenes
Just like the other behind the scene blogs I’ve made, there’s no direction in them. I’m simply just typing out my thoughts as they come into my head. Feels more authentic like that, for some reason.
But man. What even is this video? This has been by far the most stressful video I’ve made, and definitely the most amount of time I’ve put into. Probably 130-145 hours. It’s hard to believe that, considering the runs are like 30+ seconds long. But sometimes, it’s hard to piece everything together. It’s not like people were documenting this run in hopes for a SummoningSalt video, right? …right?
Jokes aside, I don’t even know where to begin. This video has been in the making for almost a year. I still remember reaching out to a few members of the Banned% community about a year ago. October of 2022. It, surprisingly and disappointingly, didn’t gain any traction among the group. I won’t name anyone, but only one person responded back. The others left the group chat entirely.
It was a big difference between this and another speedrun category I’ve done, like Blue Yourself or 48 tracks in Mario Kart 8 DX. Those community members were, and still are, passionate about everything and were a huge help. I’m not saying the Banned% members weren’t, but I think because it’s been six years, that passion has faded away. It was kind of at that point I knew this was going to be an interesting video. None of those seven questions I listed above were answered, unfortunately. I had to come up with them all on my own. Which is fine, it just took a lot longer than I expected. I was bummed about that though because it means I couldn’t have anyone verify my work. The last thing I wanted was to release a video documenting the history of something only to have it be inaccurate. This was by biggest fear for the next year while making the video. I think that was the reason why it took so long for this video to release. I just got scared that I would have screwed something up, or give off some sort of narrative that I’m out to get Camelogical. I’m not, obviously, which is why I tried to have a neutral approach to the video. Camelogical was one of the ones that never responded to me. I was hoping I would at least be able to bounce ideas off him or tell me a side of the story that I haven’t heard of. Oh well.
Anyway, once I had gone through dozens of Reddit threads and YouTube videos, I had a fairly solid list of all the world records. The problem with this, however, was that they were all uploaded within the same day or two lol. I had to pull the metadata from the YouTube videos to find out the exact time it was uploaded. Some of the videos had their system clocked included with the date/time, but you don’t really know what timezone that runner was in. So yeah, the history was based off who uploaded their video the quickest. I think there was a run that Camelogical did that was WR at the time. 2KRN4U had done at the same time too, but 2KRN4U had uploaded the video just a few minutes before Camelogical did lol. It was crazy to see all these runs. I ran across a few videos of Banned% that were cheated/faked. Was something I haven’t seen before, so I guess that was kind of interesting. Well, once I had that list created, it was time to jot down notes on why each run was better than the other. I took notes of the strats, the time saves, and eventually each of the splits of the run. I thought that was a nice addition to the video. Actually, those little green/red/gold split times under the splits were added in the last draft of the video haha. I like to have private viewings of my newest videos with my IRL friends. They’re extremely supportive and I can’t thank them enough. But anyway, one of them suggested to include some sort of indicator if those splits were better or worse than the previous WR. So I implemented that in and it makes a huge different. Oh yeah, in the video, I said you can see a chart of each of the splits. You can find them here: https://skilloz.ca/club-penguin-banned-split-history/
After that, it was time to dig into the history. And my god, I just want to give a huge shout out to ButtonWalls. If you don’t remember, ButtonWalls was the first person to upload a Banned% to YouTube. He singlehandedly brought fresh life into this video. He was super helpful in answering all my questions and generally made me excited to make this video. It’s satisfying knowing the origins of speedruns, and ButtonWalls had no problem remembering everything. ButtonWalls, if you’re reading this, thank you. And from here on out, I was navigating in the dark trying to figure out the reasoning and history for the rest of the runs. Thankfully, this all happened within a couple days so it was easy to search on a timeline for when to look for things. I read through hundreds and hundreds of YouTube and Reddit comments to see if they could provide me any clues or hints into things. It was kinda fun, actually. I felt like an internet archaeologist, if that even makes sense.
As I was gathering the history of the speedrun, I got a little distracted trying to find music for the video. Neon X Game Remixes (now about to rebrand to Neon X Memories, if I’m not mistaken) have been really really good for the videos, but I wanted to try expand that a bit more. That’s when I found Mitch Murder. And oh my god, this artist is music to my ears (no pun intended). There’s just something about synthwave music that hits different. I don’t know what it is, but I ended up buying a Spotify license specifically to listen to more of him and find other artists too. I think about 85% of my liked songs are now synthwave music lol. I said this in my last behind the scenes, but it’s super tempting to use some of the same music that SummoningSalt uses. I really enjoy Wavetable by Patricia Taxxon. I think the last time he’s used that song was episode 37 of 48 (Super Mario 64 16 star). That would be the only song I’d use that SummoningSalt uses. I’ll see if I can get the license to use it in a future video lol. But yeah Mitch Murder’s music was something that I binged-listened to for weeks; and still do to this day. I remember Mitch uploading his Abandonware 3 video (where he posts all of his unfinished songs). The first song in that video blew me away. I knew immediately that I want to use that for the climax of the video. It’s funny. I often need to know what music I’m going to be using before I start making the video. This was already helping shape the video before I even got to the script.
Speaking of, the script took me a long time. I started it at the end of January 2023. I crushed out most of it, until the part where Camelogical’s run came into play. Then that fear came back to me and I just…kinda had paralysis. I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t do anything all together. A month or two would go by and no progress was made. It sucked because I really wanted to make this video but I didn’t want to accuse anyone of anything. But I figured I’m just telling the story of what happened. I’m not here to stir the pot again; which was another fun thing to had to write a script for. Imagine making a video, using yourself in third person, and tell people that your own accusations you made six years ago were flawed and wrong. Not sure how people will react to that part of the video but I figured it would be the right thing to do. Anyway, creating the script was eventually complete…or so I thought.
I won’t name the person or the run, but when I was timing all the splits for each of the runs, I noticed something suspicious of one important run. It had looked like the person had sped up the video, and you could tell based off different things inside the video. But it was so small, I just wasn’t sure. So I brought it up to one of the mods. They agreed that it was sped up. But then I noticed the other half of the video to be…slowed down? Man it was confusing. I also brought that up with the mod and they were honest and said they weren’t qualified to speak on it. I respect that tbh. I wasn’t sure what to do with information…so I just procrastinated the script again. Because if this run was to be confirmed cheated, I would have to rewrite a part of the script. Blagh.
I decided to leave that part be and just finished the damn script already. I finally had it completed on May 31st. 7,000+ words long. I sent off the script to get reviewed and edited and got it returned on July 20th. My IRL friend edits these scripts and honestly makes it 10x better. Shout out to BigBootyBode. It was at this point I had to figure what to do with my microphone. From time to time, I watch my older videos and I realized my microphone sounds like crap. I’m no audio engineer by any means, but I did what I could to make my mic sound more…fulfilling. If you’re reading this blog, let me know how you thought it sounded. But again, I just put everything off to the side. That damn fear came back again. It had become my excuse to procrastinate this video. It’s such a weird feeling of being really excited to release a video about a fun speedrun, but also be scared at the same time. Without anyone able to verify or check the accuracy of the video, it just left me hoping that what I had was good enough.
Finally once I actually got into the actual video editing of the video, I could NOT stop. I was addicted to this video. I spent the next 2 weeks straight, 4+ hours a day, working on the video. I couldn’t be stopped. And then, on Sept 4th 2023, I had the first draft of the video complete. And man, I couldn’t stop watching my own video. The music, the story, the history made me so excited to share it with everyone. I severely regret putting it off for this long. I’ll try not to do this for my next video. I watched the whole video like three times in a row and noted any mistakes or things about the video that needed to be changed. I noticed about 45 of them that needed to be changed lol. And by Sept 10th, the video had gone through it’s “final” draft. I then had a private viewing with my friends and got some really good feedback. Thanks, boys. However, at the same time, I was trying to contact a mod to retime 2KRN4U’s run from 37.370 to 37.100. One of the mods had stopped replying to me so I tried reaching out to another. Randomno. While he didn’t change it right away, he did provide me a link to he Club Penguin Discord server. It provided some useful history in there, especially around the topics of Camelogical’s run. And as it turns out, what I had in the video was pretty much what actually happened. Nobody has really verified Camelogical’s run and didn’t reinstate it on the leaderboards. I also found out that Camelogical didn’t even submit his raw footage as a run. I thought that was kind of interesting.
Anyway, Randomno was generous enough to watch my video and provide some feedback. I’ll be honest, I thought he was going to shred me up for the history accuracy. But to my surprised, he liked it, and though it was well researched. Man, talk about a relief. Any worries I had about the video were immediately gone. I tried to offer him a monetary contribution but he refused lol. What a guy. Randomno, if you’re reading this, thank you so so much for you time on this.
And that’s where things are as of right now. It’s Sept 21st as I type out this blog. The video was supposed to be released by now but some other things are taking a bit longer than expected. I’ve never had a sponsor before and I was approached by one. Why not, hey? (Edit: October 15: Unfortunately, the sponsor stopped replying to me and I decided to continue on without them. I’ve decided to release the video on Club Penguin’s anniversary date, October 24th!)
As for my next video, I already have a plan set in place for video #4. But for video #5, I definitely want to hear the suggestions from the community. I like covering the history of meme or niche speedruns. They often have some really cool history and story behind them that need to be brought to life! That’s one requirement though; it has to have an interesting story to tell! Anyway, we’ll see you in the next video, once I’m done the tutorial. 😃